Poppaspoke

Ran across this proposed CVT design. Christopher Yonge
claims his design solves some of the major problems
associated with past designs. Anybody heard of this?

https://www.yonge-cvt.com/index.html
https://www.yonge-cvt.com/how-it-works-bike.html

n4zou

It looks good but I wonder how reliable it would be considering all the moving parts and the associated service like cleaning, lubrication, and worn part replacement that would be required. I think I would want it configured as an internal sealed hub and possibly use a standard crank and derailleur up front if you wanted a mega range off road and loaded touring setup. In any case it's going to be very hard to convince most people to move away from a relatively cheap and reliable derailleur system to what is obviously going to be a very costly and complex CVT system. I could be wrong of course. If you can build it cheap enough that big box retailer's use them on cheap consumer quality X-Mart bikes the high-end bicycle manufactures will soon follow the trend. I would love to have one to try out.

mlts22 

My concern is how that thing will stand everyday use, mud, milage, lubrication (or lack therof), hits, etc. There are also a number of CVT designs out there. One that is internal to a hub is the Fallbrook Technologies NuVinci hub used by some Ellsworth bikes.

Barring CVT, if you want a number of gears and not worry about a derailleur, there is always the tried, true (and expensive) Rohloff hub.

So far, no CVT design except possibly the NuVinci hub, has cut it long-term on the trails or on the road.

As for X-Mart bikes, I rather not see a good design made cheap and crappy to fit on them. I would be scared to think of something like a Rohloff hub made out of cheap pot metal on "mountain style" bikes, and have the hub strip its gears after a less than a hundred miles of road riding. For low-end bikes, its hard to beat a low-end Shimano system for price and reliability. Even Shimano's cheap stuff is at least durable enough for day to day use, while some CVT is unproven at best on good quality bikes.

I'm not knocking this innovation, but just wary about stuff fresh out of the lab. If this CVT stands the test of time, I'm all for it.

Beatsalad

i saw a nuvinci hub and wheel for sale for a few hundred on the newest sbs sale sheet... crazy... id like to see one.