Originally Posted by
OregonHepcat
Thanks, Tyrion. I bought a used recumbent about a year ago because they looked like fun to ride and I needed someway to get some exercise. I have a good friend that I go motorcycle touring with who is also an avid bicycle tourer. We have some pretty good hills locally and I was *****ing about how hard it was to push the recumbent up a long grade. He dug around in his garage and came up with a 24t inner ring that bolted right on to my bike to replace a 30t ring. It made a nice difference in combination with the biggest 34t rear cog.
I'm not at all knowledgeable about gear ratios as many here seem to be. I considered getting a smaller inner ring but it didn't seem to me that it would make as big a difference as getting a bigger cog in the back. However, considering your input and the replies from DJB, I decided to try the 22t ring. It will be a cheap experiment and I will be overjoyed if that's all it takes to make it possible to haul me and my gear over the mountains on my Troll.
here are two neat gearing calculators you can play with, putting in all the proper info to get the "gear inches" of all of the gears on your bike. Change one of the settings to "gear inches" to get the actual number for each speed. Its fun to see exactly what your bike has for gearing, and a black and white, comparable number of your lowest gear.
Your bike as is, where I put 2inch/50mm tires, has a low gear of 18.8, which is pretty good. You'll see in the screen shot I attached of the comparison of the 48/36/26 and 48/36/22, you can see that with the 22t, your low gear is now 15.9
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/gear-calc.html
Bicycle Gear Calculator
I hope you can do some loaded riding tests, because 70lbs of stuff is a heck of a lot of stuff, too much in my opinion, but no matter, you will want a 16 gear inch low, my bike with 16.7 g.i was great having that low gear.
If you havent toured before, reducing the load weight makes a big diff in enjoyment.
Changing the granny ring has traditionally been the easiest and cheapest way to lower gearing. I did it on my first touring bike after I realized I had taken wwwwwaaaay too much stuff , so I reduced my load by a good amount, AND I learned about gearing, and changed the 28t inner granny ring to a 24t, and the two factors made all the difference in the world on my next two trips, where I was very glad of these changes.
