Originally Posted by
eddy m
You can do that but more gears is a slippery slope. If you think you want 7 soon you'll want 8 then 9 then12. All that gets you into fancy cogs with shaped teeth that put sideway stretch on ultranarrow chains, and if you have close gears you're gonna want to shift more often so you'll want Ergo shifters. That's all racing stuff but for touring it's better to keep it simple with 6s old school downtube friction shifters and wide chains, especially if reliability and simplicity are your main concerns. It seems like the OP is over the more-gears-is-more-better syndrome anyway.
FWIW Jobst Brandt thought 7s was the optimum, even for his death march tours in the mountains.
em
Nope. No slippery slope for me.
My point was if you can bury a freehub body by setting it deeper in the hub you can reduce the OLD a bit, or at least reduce the DS hub to lock nut distance for less severe dish. As it is, the OP will probably have to spread the rear dropouts to fit any freehub.
Using a UG/HG lets someone pick between a lockring or threaded 1st position cog and use HG cogs for the remaining three. I’m guessing running a 13-17or18-24-34 centered on the freehub body might give a good range over both chainrings.
I’d opt for bar ends or Gevenalle over downtube. I’m not touring, but I’m using Kelly TakeOffs on my road bike. Took a while to get used to the hand gyrations, but now it is second nature. Hard to find these days.
John