beng1

Sheldon Brown is wrong. He states that the crank length changes the gear ratio, which is nonsense. No matter what the crank length of a bike is, it will still go the same distance with one revolution of the crank. All that changes with a longer or shorter crank arm is the torque that the rider's weight produces in foot/pounds. With his thinking if you put shorter cranks on a bike with sprocket ratios that have greater mechanical advantage it is equal to having longer cranks with a gear ratio that has less mechanical advantage, which is absolutely wrong because the rider will have to pedal the bike with the "shorter" gears, the ones with more mechanical advantage, at a higher rpm than they would the bike with the longer cranks to achieve the same top speed, but because any rider has a maximum cadence, with the one setup they will not be able to go as fast, so his theory is garbage and misleading.

There is a lot of useful information in the Sheldon Brown pages and he did a lot of thinking, but I have found instances where his information is bad and this is one of those. Just because something is popular or old does not make it right, and this is why it is better to be able to think for yourself, critically and independently than to rely completely on a "smart" phone or on others for information.