Not a particularly compelling reason to buy another Shimano dynamo hub
Three months and about 2500 miles ago, the front hub on my bicycle went to hell in a handbasket and needed to be taken apart and repacked. This week (starting ~200 miles ago) it jumped back into the handbasket and went clanking and popping off down the line (at least I’m pretty certain that’s what’s clanking and popping, because today I could feel some of the clanks through the handlebars, and when I spun it by hand this evening after returning from work I could feel, once again, the irritatingly abrasive feel of the wheel spinning, then catching, then spinning, then catching.
I’ve gotten pretty spoiled with my other wheels; none of them have made even the slightest motion towards running in that sort of annoyingly rough manner than demands a repack. But having to pry apart and repack the non-electrical side of the front hub on the mlcm twice (so far) in a year is not exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to get another shimano dynamo hub when this one finally dies the true death of drive-side lubrication breaking down (that’s the side the you can’t disassemble thanks to the wires leading from the commutator out to the power leads) or something simply disintegrating in the bearing race.
I’d love to have a dynamo hub with a grease gun attachment point. It would make it much easier to repack if I could just connect up a grease hub and blast the old dirty grease away. But failing that I’ll have to look back at the hideously expensive (but allegedly super-reliable) Schmidt dynohubs, and calculate whether it’s feasable to buy one with the money I’m earning from this contract programming I’m doing.