A mountain bike or mountain bicycle is a bicycle designed for off-road cycling. Mountain bikes share similarities with other bicycles, but incorporate features designed to enhance durability and performance in rough terrain. These typically include a front or full suspension, large knobby tires, more durable wheels, more powerful brakes, straight handlebars, and lower gear ratios for climbing steep grades.
A hub gear, internal-gear hub, or just gear hub is a gear ratio changing system commonly used on bicycles that is implemented with planetary or epicyclic gears. The gears and lubricants are sealed within the shell of the hub gear, in contrast with derailleur gears where the gears and mechanism are exposed to the elements. Changing the gear ratio was traditionally accomplished by a shift lever connected to the hub with a Bowden cable, and twist-grip style shifters have become common.
Campagnolo is an Italian manufacturer of bicycle components with headquarters in Vicenza, Italy. The components are organised as groupsets (gruppi), and are a near-complete collection of a bicycle's mechanical parts. Campagnolo's flagship components are the Super Record, Record, and Chorus groupsets that represent their recent shift to 11-speed drivetrains. Record and Super Record are the top groupsets, followed by Chorus, Potenza, Centaur and Veloce. Campagnolo also produces aluminum and carbon wheels, as well as other components.
An automatic transmission, also called auto, self-shifting transmission, n-speed automatic, or AT, is a type of motor vehicle transmission that can automatically change gear ratios as the vehicle moves, freeing the driver from having to shift gears manually. Like other transmission systems on vehicles, it allows an internal combustion engine, best suited to run at a relatively high rotational speed, to provide a range of speed and torque outputs necessary for vehicular travel. The number of forward gear ratios is often expressed for manual transmissions as well.
A groupset or gruppo is a bicycle component manufacturer's organized collection of mechanical parts. It generally refers to all of the components that make up a bicycle excluding the bicycle frame, fork, stem, wheels, tires, and rider contact points, such as the saddle and handlebars.
Sturmey-Archer is a manufacturing company originally from Nottingham, England. It primarily produces bicycle hub gears, brakes and a great many other sundry bicycle components, most prominently during their heyday as a subsidiary of the Raleigh Bicycle Company. In the past, it also manufactured motorcycle hubs, gearboxes and engines.
Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD) is the brand name of Toyota Motor Corporation for the hybrid car drive train technology used in vehicles with the Toyota and Lexus marques. First introduced on the Prius, the technology is an option on several other Toyota and Lexus vehicles and has been adapted for the electric drive system of the hydrogen-powered Mirai, and for a plug-in hybrid version of the Prius. Previously, Toyota also licensed its HSD technology to Nissan for use in its Nissan Altima Hybrid. Its parts supplier Aisin Seiki Co. offers similar hybrid transmissions to other car companies.
The Rohloff Speedhub is an epicyclic internal hub gear for bicycles, developed and patented by Rohloff AG. It has been manufactured and marketed by that company since 1998. The Speedhub 500/14 has 14 equally spaced sequential non-overlapping gear ratios operated by a single twistgrip. The overall gear range is 526%, meaning the highest gear is 5.26 times as high as the lowest gear. Individual gear shifts when shifting up give an increase of about 13.6%.
Zipp is an American company that is best known for designing, manufacturing, and marketing carbon-composite bicycle wheels for road cycling, triathlons, and track racing. The company's product range also includes handlebars, stems, seat posts, tires, inner tubes, handlebar tape, and bags.
Bicycle gearing is the aspect of a bicycle drivetrain that determines the relation between the cadence, the rate at which the rider pedals, and the rate at which the drive wheel turns.
Rohloff AG is a German company from Fuldatal near Kassel that manufactures hub gears, bicycle chains and tools that are known for their durability and high performance. The company’s logo is a black silhouette of a raven on a yellow background.
The McLaren MP4-12C, later known simply as the McLaren 12C, is a sports car designed and manufactured by McLaren Automotive. It is the first ever production car wholly designed and built by McLaren, and their first production road car produced since the McLaren F1, which ended production in 1998. The car's final design was unveiled in September 2009, and was launched in mid-2011.
An electronic gear-shifting system is a method of changing gears on a bicycle, which enables riders to shift with electronic switches instead of using conventional control levers and mechanical cables. The switches are connected by wire or wirelessly to a battery pack and to a small electric motor that drives the derailleur, switching the chain from cog to cog. An electronic system can switch gears faster, and because the system does not use Bowden cables and can calibrate itself, it may require less maintenance.
Bicycle drivetrain systems are used to transmit power on bicycles, tricycles, quadracycles, unicycles, or other human-powered vehicles from the riders to the drive wheels. Most also include some type of a mechanism to convert speed and torque via gear ratios.
The Sachs Elan was an epicyclic internal hub gear for bicycles, developed and manufactured by the bicycle division of the German company Fichtel & Sachs. It was considered heavy and production units were plagued with quality issues. The gear hub was discontinued before the turn of the 2000 millennium.
Shimano Nexus is a brand of bicycle components which includes products such as epicyclical gear hubs, cranksets, shifters, brake levers, hub brakes, hub dynamos, and a CPU for automatically changing gears. The series is primarily aimed at the "comfort" market such as urban commuters and tourers, and as such is not made to withstand the rigours of off-road or mountain biking. The free-wheeling Nexus internal gear hubs are compatible with Shimano's "roller brake", its version of a drum brake, but not with the Shimano disc brakes used with the higher-end Shimano Alfine internal gear hubs.
