At my last bike race, Shimano had a little booth set up, complete with
impressive metal foam-lined case for storing and displaying a complete
Ultegra component group (ooh, shiny).
(Full Disclosure: my race bike runs Dura-Ace cranks, Ultegra BB,
cassette and fder, and Veloce rder and brifters. In other words, it is
fully Shimangnoloed, and it works great.)
More importantly, they had their 2005 bike components brochure, a
91-page tome full of bits and pieces I had never imagined.
Okay, so you already know about Ultegra 10, Hone, Hollowtech II LX, and
the Octalink Tiagra and Sora upgrades.
But did you know about Capreo, Cyber Nexus, or Nexave Intego?
Capreo:
http://cycle.shimano-eu.com/catalog/cycle/products/group.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3E
folder_id=2534374302034908&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=1408474395181175&bmUID=
1120364187058
A 9-speed flat-bar group for small-wheel bikes. Aside from the nifty
double chain guard on the front, it offers a very unusual feature: a
9-26 9v rear cassette.
Yes. 9 tooth rear cog. Shimano claims the cassette works only on the
matching Capreo rear hub, and vice versa.
I can't be sure, but the tech PDF seems to indicate the trick is done by
having the last two cogs mesh with splines on the next-largest cog in
succession, not the hub itself. The works is held together with a
super-special lockring which is engaged from the outside. The special
tool is the TL-HG09 wrench from Shimano.
http://cycle.shimano-eu.com/media/cycling/techdocs/en/bikecomponents/CS/E
V-CS-HG70-S_v2_m56577569830556415.pdf
Shimano really doesn't want you to use this setup on anything with
wheels larger than 20". A better question might be why you don't just
use a bigger front ring and a 11-x cassette, but I guess sometimes
compactness matters. Maybe they should look into Shelbroco's Nanodrive.
Cyber Nexus:
http://cycle.shimano-eu.com/catalog/cycle/products/group.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3E
folder_id=2534374302034895&PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524441762509&ASSORTMENT
%3C%3East_id=1408474395181175&bmUID=1120366322976
Seems to be an all-electronic comfort/utility bike group with some
features ranging from wacky to wild.
www.smover.com
Short precis? electronic (possibly automatic) shifting of a Nexus-8 hub.
Computer-controlled (?) suspension fork. All power is generated by a
front generator hub, so onboard power storage is just a thingy that is
either a small battery or a large capacitor bank. It makes my head spin.
Nexave Intego:
http://cycle.shimano-eu.com/catalog/cycle/products/group.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3E
folder_id=2534374302029733&PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524441762509&ASSORTMENT
%3C%3East_id=1408474395181175&bmUID=1120366992731
Fortunately, modern medicine and physiotherapy offer many effective
treatments for intego, and it is no longer the--whoops, that's lumbago.
Intego is Shimano's duplication of the SRAM DualDrive: the inefficiency
of a 3-speed hub combined with the maintenance and fussiness of an
8-speed derailer drivetrain. I kid, of course. The market for
Intego/Dualdrive seems to be bikes with full front chainguards. The
proper treatment for Impetigo is wound cleaning and antibiotics. If I'm
reading the brochure right, there's an electronically auto-shifted
version, too.
Yadda yadda yadda. Among the other odd bits and pieces, Shimano is now
selling a "2200" flat-bar road group. Nothing special, but it might
start showing up on some of those very cheap road bikes that have been
sighted recently. There's also an interesting odd bit, the Shimano
ST-R500. This is a "high-quality" 8-speed brifter, by which you may read
that it uses the control levers seen on everything except Sora. It looks
to me a lot like the old RSX levers, and I assume they mean it as a
service replacement for orphaned 8v bikes (except Dura-Ace 8, which is
super-orphaned). As Sheldon Brown frequently points out, this probably
isn't the best call, since the shift levers are the expensive part of an
8-to-9 (or even 8-to-10) upgrade; chain and cogs are wear items, so
you're not losing much by replacing them if you're already committed to
shifters.
Finally, there's something in the comfort groups they're calling
"LinkGlide" (Shimano suffers from the same internal capitalisation
disease which has afflicted so many other companies; there is no known
cure), which seems to be an extra-clever HyperGlide-style tooth
profiling aimed at reducing "shifting shock." They have a little
dimensionless HG-vs.-LinkGlide graph in the brochure which is TOTALLY
CONVINCING and claims shock is reduced by 70%.
So, that's just what I found in Shimano's catalog. A lot of this stuff
is Euro-oriented, some of it is deeply confusing, and a few bits were
even informative. I hope this interested you as well.
Share & Enjoy,
--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos