Senior Member
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Sin City, Nevada
Posts: 2,886
Bikes: Catrike 700, Greenspeed GTO trike, , Linear LWB recumbent, Haluzak Horizon SWB recumbent, Balance 450 MTB, Cannondale SM800 Beast of the East
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I have a trike that has the SRAM dual-drive 3 speed internal hub and an 8 speed cassette coupled to a single chainring and Schlumpf Mountain Drive. The SRAM DD is no longer available. Mine was pretty robust. I replaced it once in 29K miles. The Schlumpf drive had one failure in that time. The major problem I see with internal drives is that few bike shops will repair them. In both cases I did the repair myself but these are complex devices and many owners would not even try. If you are on a tour and have a failure, your tour is probably over. I did check with one bike shop that would repair hubs but I would need to ship the wheel and the cost was so high it was just as cheap to buy a new wheel with the hub in it after I added up the cost of the repair and shipping costs both ways. Ditto with the Schlump drive. Florian Schlumpf suggested shipping the drive to Europe but instead I had him send the part and I installed it myself.