I think the "crank-contained gearbox system that can be mounted on any bike" is the holy grail. Emphasis on the "mounted on any bike." If you could squeeze a cassette's worth of range into a package that you can take with you from bike to bike, oh man...
I'm a structural engineer, but I think I've burned through the most lead sketching ideas for this very concept. I think it's possible.
If you finally got it figured out and had a functioning prototype, the hard part would be deciding whether to actually manufacture it for the good of the MTB community, or deciding how many zeroes the big S would write on a check for the patent!
Oct. 23, 2019, 10:44 a.m. - MTBrent
I think the "crank-contained gearbox system that can be mounted on any bike" is the holy grail. Emphasis on the "mounted on any bike." If you could squeeze a cassette's worth of range into a package that you can take with you from bike to bike, oh man... I'm a structural engineer, but I think I've burned through the most lead sketching ideas for this very concept. I think it's possible. If you finally got it figured out and had a functioning prototype, the hard part would be deciding whether to actually manufacture it for the good of the MTB community, or deciding how many zeroes the big S would write on a check for the patent!