BoSoxYacht

not personally, but after another discussion here I researched the question deeper an now accept it as truth. I've seen 7,8,9 mountain derailleurs work with 10 speed Shimano road shifters, but have never used it on one of my bikes.

SRAM 10speed is interchangeable(mountain/road).

krobinson103

I think SRAM 8/9/10 speed RDs should also work with dynasys shifters as the ratio is 1:1. Ideally I think the best combo would be the SRAM X9 v2 RD as it has a clutch and would work with some Shimano shifters as long as the ratio is right. You won't get more chain wrap than that will give you. I'd bet you could get away with a 36 at the back.

UnfilteredDregs

Hmmmm.....Timely thread. My bike came with 46/36 and 11-32 in the rear.

I put a 48/32 up front and I have improved rather dramatically over the year. Enjoying group rides and such, I'm 203# so I'm not a fast climber, I'm more concerned with joint stress there but my endurance has increased considerably. I never use the 32 anymore and I have been feeling the gaps when riding flats. I average in the 90s on flats, I really like the feel of 100-110...I get a bit bouncy beyond that.

I've been seriously considering tightening up the rear and going with a 13-28 cassette. Miche Primato Light: 13-14-15-16-17-18-19-21-23-25-28. that would cover 99.9% of my riding..I do like descending and am mildly concerned with what I may lose there dropping the 11-12, if I discover that I've overcompensated I'll go up to a normal compact crank.

So...Using Mike's Tool the charts:

Current:



Proposed:

TGT1

This is timely! My bike also came with a 46/36 11-32. (10 sp). I swapped out the 36 for a 34 after a few months for mountain fire road gravel grinding and 34X32 seems to be about as low as CX/road geometry and 42mm tires will work on loose surfaces anyway.

There were still annoying jumps on the road in the 14-18 mph sweet spot. last Saturday I made some major upgrades. 48 T large ring, 12-32 cassette and swapped out the FD from Rival to Red. Did 70 miles Sunday with 3000 ft of climbing and I didn't waste my money! Much easier to maintain a 80-85 cadence and the Red makes all 10 gears usable.. The Rival would clatter pretty bad on the 34X12 and even 13 combination and was finicky about adjustment and where the chain had to be on the cassette to get the front to shift up sometimes.

I only lost about 5 gear inches from the 36X11 and at 90 rpm I'm still going over 30 on the 48X12. If I only rode on pavement I think I'd go for a 12-28 and add either a 16T or 18T somehow.

A couple of general thoughts:

The gear calculator seems to be the most useful if you select a very narrow cadence range (5 rpm?) that you actually prefer to ride at most of the time to identify the gaps that will bother you.

Possibly what drives a lot of the reluctance to shift off the front ring is that manufacturers, mechanics and riders see it as an auxiliary range device and don't build it to, set it up or ride it the way it can be.

Cafe

I felt very fast on the 11-32 but I think it has more to do with the skinnier tires. I think I will be staying with the 11-32 for a very long time. I just need to try some decent hills and see how that goes. My speed seems to be around 20mph right now which is really fast for me considering I haven't been cycling for quite some time. The light frame and the aero drop bar position I set up must also be a factor, along with the initial first day excitement. I'm sure I will go back to the 15-17 norm in a bit.

UnfilteredDregs

6800 makes this a non-issue. My front shifts effortlessly, love it.

Cafe

Same with the 5800. The transition is so smooth it's almost as if I didn't shift. I don't know if it's like this on the 5700 and 6700, but maybe shimano has fine tuned the FD shifting...must have something to do with the converter settings...because that was something that you didn't adjust for the 5700 and 6700 from my understanding...

Bandera

You need a new mechanic, modern drivetrains shift between rings and cross-chain with decision.


-Bandera

dtrain

Supposedly the front shifting was a major focus of the 9000/6800/5800 redesign over previous generations (like 6700 and 5700).

Campagnono

Is obscene that six pages of text, analysis, charts and graphs have been produced when a single response of "not at all" would have been infinitely sufficient.

krobinson103

Go to bike mechanics and you get more.

UnfilteredDregs

Actually it's quite limited considering the gaps and all the low cogs are a waste.

achoo

Welcome to Bike Forums.

You must be new here.

Campagnono

Been around just stalking for years. Quite aware of the endless assaults of unrelated anecdotes/accomplishments, thread derails, and unsolicited personal cycling histories rife with ego and idiocy that get regurgitated upon every single question.

If I were to post a seemingly innocuous, simple question such as "What do you guys think about titanium bottle cage bolts?", the first response would be something grandiose, rambling, full of pointless product placement and circuitous along the lines of:

"When I was in Tierra del Fuego after five months of cycling non-stop from the Panamanian/Colombian border on my fixed gear (46 x 15, sometimes I was really wishing I brought the 17 tooth cog since I did have around 80.000m of climbing, but I really wanted a daily average speed of 32kmh, so you have to make trade-offs) I crashed my bike into a donkey loaded with scrap metal and ended up destroying the fork and headset. I did remember back to high school shop class, and obviously I knew what needed to be done, so I set up camp with some gauchos, and while sipping mate over the next few hours, we constructed a forge and smelt and I proceeded to craft a new fork from the smelted scrap (heavy!! but very good quality Pittsburgh iron, probably from 1900 or 1910, it had very few of the structural cavities found in similar types of Ohio Valley iron, and you could tell it was great quality from a good factory, not some coke oven camp on the end of a quickly built short rail line in West Virginia like I had to deal with when hand-crafting drop-outs to rebuild that frame under that bridge in Valdez, Alaska when I did the Fireweed 400 on my unicycle (that cheap iron sucks!! I was only able to complete the Fireweed, then ride back through the Yukon, and by the time I was on the Saskatchewan/Montana border, that sucker finally gave out and I had to rebuild the drop-outs with the calcified pancreas of a Grizzly Bear (stalked for two days and then killed it by hand), and that allowed me to unicycle back to Chicago for my flight to Italy for a retro fondo where I was able to wear my wool jersey which my wife hand-loomed using her teeth and feet (she is amazing!!) made from the wool of our Kazakh sheep, Gideon and Diego, and the feeling of the wool is really without rival) so once the fork was forged and all ready to go, I realized I had lost all my headset bearings, and ended up smelting down some more metal and then I put on some Assos liner gloves and was able to take the slightly cooled yet still molten metal and hand roll a few dozen bearings. It sounds painful but I've actually had to do this about a half dozen times in the last two years so I've got the technique down pretty good, my fingertips have toughened up, and Assos really does make a tremendous product (Klaus Binter, who I call direct in Switzerland, is the Swiss CSR frontman for Assos, and he speaks with a Bavarian accent, even though he grew up in Davos, weird!! anyhow, klaus says the gloves were made with hand-rolling molten metal into bearings, and that's why they cost 40€, but you really get what you pay for). I think to avoid some off these problems you should definitely go titanium for those cage bolts, YMMV."

Please, keep bleeding out your unsolicited ego and anecdotes for me, BikeForumers. It's like art for my soul.

BoSoxYacht

and a wrong answer.

Campagnono

You know I just looked through a great many of your posts, and it's without a doubt that you are a pompous, self-righteous, always-correct blowhard, keen on negative and combative interaction with other posters.

It's shocking that you're from Boston.

You enjoy that 55 x 10, it's the only gear that can pull your freight train of an ego.

BoSoxYacht

Have you ever heard the expression "the pot calling the kettle black"?

Oh, you're French. That explains everything.

BTW, I see you still haven't figured out how to use the forum's ignore feature. PM me if you need help. I enjoy helping the mentally disabled.

colnago62

I think the Dura Ace 11 speed allows you to sweep the gears by holding down the shift lever so you can go from big to small without multiple clicks. I Never found it much of a problem. I tend to like to spin it up on the descents before shifting.

UnfilteredDregs

I went from 6700 to 6800...quite the world of difference. I had to get used to how effortless it is because I was convinced my front hadn't shifted when I swung the lever, and anyone who complains about shifting a compact...doesn't know how to shift.

BoSoxYacht

or their bike is poorly tuned/adusted.

I went from 7800 to 6800 this past Spring and there was a slight improvement in front shifting, but I never had any problems with the shifting of 7800.

UnfilteredDregs

Poorly tuned/adjusted = Operator error.

I never had problems shifting 6700 (not sure how similiar to 7800...) but what I would say is that deciding to do so was more of a forward thought than 6800. Definitely a big difference in the feel and confidence of things. I had also switched up to compressionless housing, yada,yada,yada...Some kinks involved there with the Nokon stuff but once figured out it's been quite sweet. The whacky thing with the Nokon stuff is the coils that go under the bar tape can bind up the cable- they're not compressionless, the trick is to run the beads all the way to the STI and forget the coils.

BoSoxYacht

5700/6700/7900 never really worked very well, and wasn't an improvement over 7800/6600(IMO).

Once SRAM released their road components, Shimano was forced to release a hidden cable shifter, and they didn't take the time to iron out the wrinkles.

It's funny that you mentioned the problem you had with Nokon cables. I used them go a while with 7800 shifters, but used the coils for the brake cables because it would be hidden under handlebar tape, and brake housing should have some compressibility(shift housing shouldn't).

UnfilteredDregs

Same here...brakes are fine, my bars route internally...

Cafe

My carbon bars have internal routing but I chose not to route the cable internally.

Back on topic:

I hit 26mph on the flats with no tail wind FYI with the 11-32 cassette. FYI this is on a bike that was originally a carbon flat bar converted to a drop bar.

FYI 11-32 has zero limitations on the flats thus far. I can see why people run 1x9, 1x10, and 1x11 set ups and get away with it.

It's all about adapting to the wide spacing. If I went to 12-25 for example I might appreciate the tighter spacing more because it gets me into that optimal zone a bit more quickly. The key is to start with an 11-32 off the bat like I did, that way you won't be spoiled with a cassette with tighter spacing, and you can enjoy the utility of the 32 if you find steep hills.

Alberto Contador, a TDF pro rider has been known to use an 11-32 believe it or not. Quick google search will reveal that.

RJM

Classic, funny.....I like you.