Originally Posted by
Maelochs
The "Overlap" horse has been pounded to jelly .....
As for number of gears---have any of you been either carrying a load, climbing a hill, or fighting a fierce wind--or any two or three of those at once---and wished for a gear a tiny bit lower than the one you were using after having tired the next step down---not in order but in ratio---and found it too big by the tiniest of margins?
I remember a day coming out of Colorado into Kansas where we had nonstop hills and a 20-25 mph headwind ... I would have loved a CVT or a 3x33 on that day -- quarter-tooth margins?
Anyway ... at some point this approaches the Rydabent Theorem--"if I don't need it it doesn't need to exist." Indyfabz likes that set-up, and that is all the justification he needs, and the rest of us are just audience members talking during the performance.
I kind of agree if hunting across chainrings to find a specific half gear within the overlap is your thing. I've learnt something new here as I never realised people even did that! I use the overlap on double chainrings all the time to save shifting the front more often, but I can't ever remember shifting the front to find a slightly different overlap gear on the other ring. But then it's been a long time since I had less than 11 gears on the cassette and I'm not overly fussy about cadence.
But I was just responding to the claim that there was very little overlap. Not suggesting overlap is a bad thing, just that it exists.
To get to Rydabent's level I would need to state that something I don't use or properly understand is useless and some sort of sales/marketing scam.