Shimano Nexus hub

Take a gander at this Salsa Casseroll build. For years I have been a fan of taking a Sturmey Archer three speed hub and building it into a 700c rim. I had a beat, old, Italian Basso road frame built this way and it was one of the best riding ugly bikes ever. Alas, it was stolen. The inspiration for this style of bike comes from a Raleigh Record Ace from the late 1930's. It was one of the nicest touring bikes you could get at the time.

I was looking to replace this bike with some modern stuff while maintaining it's essence. The main goal of this project was to create a lightweight steel road bike with an internal hub and drop handlebars. The difficulty I encountered was with the available shifter options. Nothing available for a modern internal hub could accommodate drops. I would not be deterred.

One of the possible solutions is an extention to the end of your bar that will bring the diameter down to 7/8". This is the standard diameter for the control area of an upright handlebar, obviously the target market for internal hubs. The problem here is how most of the shifters are integrated with an upright brake lever. If you can find one of the older non-integrated shifters and you don't mind having a gripshifter on the end of your drops, this could work for you. It didn't work for me, so I forged ahead.

With a little experimentation, I discovered the amount of cable pulled per click is longer than other Shimano shift systems. The other system with longer pull is the Sram ESP system. I tried it and, in short, it didn't work. No big surprise there, but it was worth a shot. After that experiment, Mike suggested trying a Travel Agent, commonly used to increase the pull when using a linear pull brake with a shorter pull brake lever. To my surprise, it works great and I was able to use an eight speed bar end style shifter, my favorite kind. This set up will probably void your hubs warranty but it could work for you. I've been using it this way for quite a while and have had no trouble other than cable stretch.

I also went with the Schmidt dyno hub and Lumotec 3 watt halogen. More about that on another post.