Originally Posted by
Moisture
Thought this might make for some interesting conversation.. lets say you can spec your bike with any sort of ratios you want. What are you picking?
1. What sort of terrain do you ride on?
2. What sort of bike is it?
3. How hilly is the area you ride in
4. Whats your current ratio spread and how does it suit your needs?
5. How would you change it?
- Mostly pavement, some gravel and dirt paths
- Road bike
- Mostly flat, some long hills, nothing crazy steep
- 40/52t front, 14-34t rear (2x5)
- 36/52t, 11-34t (2x8)
While my current gearing is totally sufficient for my needs and actually quite useful, I find myself being in top gear (52/14) all the time on flat terrain in non windy conditions. I'd like for slightly lower and slightly higher gearing on both ends of the spectrum. Something like 2x7 or 2x8 would offer some ideal spacing in terms of snatching through the gears while accelerating from a stand still.
Interestingly enough, I found a Biopace Mountain LX crankset made by shimano (28/38/48) . Never seen that sort of spacing before. Typically lower end mountain bikes come with 22/32/44. Woukd be interesting to give this unique ratio spread a try.
my terrain is gently rolling - the biggest local climb is ~1/4 mile @ 5%. I run 51/39 front and 12/23 10sp at the back. This gives me a straight 12-19, plus 21 & 23. There’s nothing local that can’t be climbed on a 39/23. There’s a fair amount of overlap between the big ring- and small ring ranges, and I treat them like that high and low ranges, spending most time in the 51 and only dropping to the 39 for the more rolling stuff, but I could probably spend the day in the 39 without too much bother. I have a 13/29 cassette if I anticipate an outing with a lot of climbing, like over in Western NC. There’s a new compact (50/34) crankset in the parts box, but I’m not inclined to install it until I routinely need the extra climbing capacity. In the meantime, I ensure that my 10sp future is secure - I have a couple of new 10sp cassettes that’ll keep me going for at least the next 5 years. After that, I’ll look at EPS , but I likely won’t upgrade to electronic until Campagnolo come out with wireless shifting, so I don’t have to drill holes in my Litespeed.