veganbikes

So I have kind of been toying with the idea of going from a 3x9 drop bar set up to a 2x11 crazy bar set up after testing out some crazy bars and reading reviews and just generally being curious like a cat.

So here is my current gearing which has been great (and don't really need a huge change) and my planned gearing (which seems pretty close and maybe gives a little more bottom end):
Bicycle Gear Calculator
I think it should be a pretty good range that is similar enough to what I have so I don't lose much.

The plan is to run a White Industries GR30 crank with 46-30 chainrings and an 11-42 11 speed cassette at the rear with an Ultegra FD-R8000 Front mech and an XT RD-M8000-SGS rear mech using Microshift SL-M11 thumbies. I think this should all be compatible looking at the data but I could be wrong as I have generally not gone with such a large cassette paired with more of a road front set up using flat bar shifters.

Does this all sound reasonable like it would work well together in a potential touring set up?

52telecaster

Would work for me. I am sure i would never need the 46-11 but i am an old man.

mstateglfr 

Looks like a good potential setup. There are a bunch of redundant gear options, which to me really isnt bad- i just want relatively small jumps in the back and to shift up front rarely. It looks like your 2x11 setup would allow for good riding on one ring or the other for most of the time.
I doubt you will miss the loss of 48x11 and instead you gain a little bit of granny just in case you really need it.

Tandem Tom

I have Velo Orange Crazy Bars on my bike with a 3x9 set up. I have stayed with this setup for 2 reason. Chains are considerably less expensive,and I work in a LBS, and I believe they are stronger. Those 2 reasons are compelling when touring. Plus 11 speed chains may not be as readily available in certain areas if the need arises.

Tandem Tom

Forgot to mention the cost of cassette replacement.

djb

seems like a fair amount of money to spend.
With that 48/36/26, its super easy to change to a 24 or 22

the main thing for me is that over the years I realize that for a given bike+load weight combined with terrain type (ie how hilly) you ideally want a range of gearing where the mid ring is for the majority of the time, without crosschaining, the small ring is for all climbing past a certain grade, and the large ring for when you get to that point of being able to hold higher speeds (touring speeds, so slight downhills, tailwinds, larger downhills)

a 46/30 to me is clear--the 46 is a pretty tall ring to be in for most of the time, and the 30 starts to be on the low side pretty quickly.

On my heavy loaded touring bike, 44/32/22 I'm in the 32 a lot, and then up to the 44 when I can hold "higher touring speeds", ie 25kph and higher.
In terms of gear inches, my 32 ring has 55 g.i. in the 15t cog, 63 in the 13t cog, and 75 g.i. in the 11t cog.
I personally dont like riding for a long time in the 13 or especially the 11t, and on flatter terrain or with a lighter load, a 34 or 36 mid ring like you have would be great.

another issue is the 16t jump between shifts. I rode a touring bike a lot with this exact jump, in my case 40/24 and the 16 tooth jumps require a lot of up or down rear shifting, 2 and sometimes 3 shifts, to have smoother transitions cadence wise between the chainrings.

I guess the main issue here is crosschaining, which if you ride cross chained a lot, you wear stuff out faster, and 11 speed chains and cassettes are more expensive and probably have less longevity than lower speed systems--although perhaps with a double, cross chaining has less of an effect due to less chain angle.

I dunno, it all comes down to cost/weight savings/actual riding benefit comparisons and evaluations doesnt it?

last thing, dont know if you have ridden with thumbies, but I personally find the shifting slow, and would prefer trigger shifters, even from the angle of not having to remove your hands from bars, especially if you will be on dirt and stuff, to me it would be a pain in the keester using thumbies on dirt and whatnot.

Tourist in MSN

With that double, looking at the chart if you avoided the three most cross chained gears on each chainring (used the 8 biggest sprockets with the small ring, 8 smallest sprockets with the big ring), that you would not really lose any gears and might extend your chain life.

I consider an average speed for loaded touring to be in the 12 to 14 mph range on the flat and level without much wind and I am usually in that range at about 72 to 75 cadence. And on that chart, you are spinning with a cadence of 90. That puts the 12 to 14 mph range right in that transition zone between the big and small rings. If you tour at about the same speed as me but average that high a cadence, you might find you are shifting the front more than you anticipate.

I am perfectly content with a triple and eight speed. I hope you are pleased with your final result. It looks like an expensive modification.

BigAura

I agree very much with you, and your take. Plus my preferences align very closely yours.

ME: 8 speed + triple. Loaded touring 11-13 mph flat, no wind. I don't like constant shifting so I rather vary my cadence (70-90). I like a nice chain-line on my middle ring (middle of cassette). My granny gear is just that. I'll use the big-ring for tail winds or when the rare-mood strikes me to go fast. So I'm mostly 1x8

Tourist in MSN

My eight speed and triple is completely different from yours, mine is half step plus granny. So, I am using both my big ring and middle ring on the flat quite a bit which means shifting the front more often than most others. Then the granny gear is just for the small number of gears that I need for hill climbing. I like a cadence in the 72 to 78 range on my derailleur touring bikes. But I widen my cadence preference out to about 72 to 80 on my Rohloff bike because of the big jumps between gears.

BigAura

Ahh! Too much shift-work for me

Rick

I put the Crazy Bar on my touring bicycle several months ago. I also changed the stem to a Ritchey Adjustable 25.4 MTB Stem. I replaced the drop bars with this. I have a 17 to a 91 gear inch range with my Rohloff hub.

veganbikes

So I am not concerned with the money aspect. Really more interested in gearing. The 3x9 isn't bad at all but I am kind of curious to try the crazy bars on a bike that is of my size and also had other ideas for the bar set up and what I wanted to mount. I couldn't practically convert my drop bar set up without spending some money anyway so why not go whole pineapple and just do it all.

I do think about availability sometimes but I also look at my current job situation and the amount of times I go touring or have time to tour and I really don't get much time these days and I also kind of want to do a funkier off roady kind of set up. What I have been thinking about would be perfect and a good chance to try some parts I haven't yet gotten to try for whatever reasons. So 11 speed while not super easy to find it isn't super hard to find and since all of my touring has been in the U.S., rather short and I work at a shop and know people around the country I can probably do OK getting parts reasonably. I also tend to replace parts as needed because I have no interest in wearing stuff out prematurely and if I used an 11-speed e-bike chain I would probably have a little added durability if wanted or needed.

Thanks to all for the help!

GAJett

Ah, a classic missunderstanding of the half-step (plus/minus granny).
Like Tourist in MSN, I'm an inveterate half-stepper (and it's getting harder with so few mfg making odd-toothed chainwheels).

Comments above indicate that, with your set-up, there is an overlap between your large chainwheels. When in that area do you try to hit every possible gear in that range? Of course not. Most will stay on one ring or the other until it makes sense to switch to the other, then continue with only rear gear changes.

Think of a half-step (esp. with a granny) like that. You stay on one large chainwheel or the other, making most of your sifts in the back. However, the half-step gets you a great advantage. Say the hill rises just a bit, not enough that you want to shift in the back, but just a little tougher than you really like. If on the smaller (middle) chainwheel, just front shift and you are there. If on the larger, it's one downshift on the front and one upshift on the back -- and you are there.

With the granny think of the setup as an ultra-compact double, but with the ability to "fine tune" the big ring. Easy-peasy!
Cheers!

stardognine

stardognine

Tourist in MSN

The short description is that with half step gearing, when you shift the front shifter, that is equivalent to one half of a shift on the rear.

Half step was popular decades ago when you did not have 8 or 9 or 10 or more sprockets in back, you only had 5 or 6. Thus there was a much bigger jump between shifts. And that was before indexed shifting, so each shift took more time to get the shift lever in exactly the right spot.

If you had bar end shifters, you could shift both the front and back simultaneously, sometimes upshifting one while down shifting the other, and at other times up shifting both, etc. And back in the 1980s, I was using half step on one of my bikes with bar end shifters so I learned how to shift that way decades ago.

I have two derailleur touring bikes with half step shifting, 8 speed cassete in back and a triple in front where the middle and large ring are half step plus a small granny gear for steep hills.

When I rode Pacific Coast I found the half step to not be worth having because I was changing grade so much that each shift was usually a couple steps as I was going up and down a lot. But a couple years ago when I did a two week tour in southern Florida where the only hills are the approaches to bridges, the half step was great. It was flat as a pancake, so when there was a slight change of wind I could easily make a very small adjustment in gearing to compensate for the change in wind

Photo is my Lynskey drive train, eight speed cassette, triple is 46/42/24. I built up that bike two years ago.

I can see where a lot of people see no advantage to half step gearing, but I was using it on a bike in the 1980s with a double in front and a five speed cluster in back, thus I have a lot of experience with it.

stardognine

stardognine

djb

Yesterday I thought I responded similarly to Tourist and added a screenshot, but must have made an error as it disappeared.
Here is a new screenshot of your gearing, I redid this chart with your gearing, yesterday I just made up an example.
unfortunately , your gearing of 50 and 44 doesn't really give a good half step, as you can see that the 50 and 40 numbers are rather close to each other.
I hope this chart helps a bit, oh and I took a guess and put in a 11-28 7 speed as a cassette, don't know what you have.

Tourist in MSN

Yeah, the numbers that DJB produced shows that it is not really half step, it is almost exactly one step with lots of nearly redundant gears.

I looked at the numbers before I tried to figure out exactly how to set up my gearing years ago, set up a few of my own spreadsheets to do it. I try to avoid using the two most cross chained gears for each chainring, for example on the middle chainring I do not use the innermost and outermost sprocket, on the big chainring I do not use the two biggest sprockets, etc. Thus, my 3 X 8 system is an 18 speed system instead of 24.

As I mentioned above, it is a 46/42/24 triple, the eight speed cassette is a Sram 11/12/14/16/18/21/26/32. That plots up like this when I do not count the cross chainged gears that I avoid. The color coding for the data points identifies chainring size. What I like about this is that it gives me a lot of gears in that 50 to 90 gear inch range where I spend a lot of time on reasonably flat ground, and a small number of really low gears for serious hill climbing. And every gear is useful, no duplicates. My other derailleur touring bike has the same gearing but with a 26 inch wheel has slightly lower gear ratios, so I did not plot it as the curve has an identical shape, just slightly lower on the graph.



The plot below is my rando bike, that has the same cassette but it has a more conventional road triple gearing of 52/42/30. That is almost exactly one and a half step gearing. This also assumes that I am avoiding the two most cross chained gears for each chainring. Again, no duplicates. Lowest gear is a bit higher, but on this bike I never carry a heavy load up hills, so a higher low gear is perfectly adequate. And a couple really high gears if I want to speed up on a downhill to carry momentum up the other side of the valley.



And on the plot below I have my road bike, a compact double (50/34) and a 10 speed Miche cassette that is 12/29. In this case when I am on the small chainring, I am only using the seven largest sprockets and when on the big chainring only using the seven smallest sprockets. No duplicates. What I don't like about this gearing is that if the riding conditions cause me to want a gear about 60 gear inches, I sometimes finding that I am going way up or way down the cassette hunting for the best gear as I try to figure out which chainring I want to be on. Also, I am only getting 14 gears out of this combination. (Hmmm, same number of gears as a Rohloff, but smaller range.) I can use the other gears that I avoid, but they do not really add anything, thus when I realized they do not add anything I decided to avoid them. And of course with the compact double instead of a triple I am giving up some lower gearing that I have on other bikes, making this bike a bit worse on hills.




Bottom line, I am quite happy with what I get for gearing out of an eight speed cassette and a triple, have minimal desire to go to something else. My road bike with a 10 speed cassette, that bike was such a fantastic price that I could not pass it up, but otherwise I would not go out of my way to get something other than a 3 X 8 system.

A friend of mine volunteers time as a bike mechanic for a bike charity. So, he knows the hardware pretty good. And he tours on a 3 X 7 system. So, I am not alone in appreciating the smaller old tech cassettes.

geoffs

The 46/30 with the 11-42 cassette is exactly what we'll be using on our tandem with sram eTap. We've found the shifting much better than the triple we've always used in the past. The biggest and best change is that the clunk to the granny ring is avoided when a hill kicks up and you've run out of gears on the cassette. It's just a smooth progression along the cassette until you get to the 42. We toured in Tasmania in February with a 50/34 on the front but we are going to be spending 7 weeks touring in Italy starting in May and I think we'll need lower gears

djb

I always laugh at these detailed discussions that some of us find fascinating----because you know, we could make big money if we did a blog on this gearing talk, but market it to people who cannot go to sleep.....bingo, sleepy time and gives us some money to buy new bikes and install all kinds of different gearing setups!

cool charts btw.

veganbikes

That's good to hear! I guess because I haven't ridden my touring bike in a while due to Dynamo issues I haven't had the time to resolve and haven't had much time for touring anyway I kind of want something new. Maybe it is silly but now I think I am at a point where I have things pretty well dialed in what I want in a bike and components that I like and trust and where my head is on certain things I used to hold dear and don't anymore. We shall see what happens though I plan on getting the current touring bike back up and running soon.