dantolen

12 chain rings on the back and an identical 12 on the front. Is this somehow possible? Wonder how it would ride.

fietsbob

Had a 3 cubed 27 speed bike in 1962, 3 speed hub, 3 cog cluster, triple crank.

Tuc

I have a 30 speed now, 10 on the back, three in the front - but 144 would require two rear derailleurs to be used. sounds like an accident in the machine shop to put my feet anywhere near that much metal.

nrowensby

HillRider

Well, a 14-speed Rohloff IGH used with a triple crank and a 7-speed cassette will give 294 possible combinations if you are enthralled by large numbers. But, as asked above "Why"?

AEO

SRAM dual drive, 10sp cassette and 3 to 5 chainrings. 90~150 gear combinations possible.

UnsafeAlpine

Anything's possible.

GeoKrpan

Nuvinci, unlimited gear ratios.

davidad

https://www.canosoarus.com/08LSRbicycle/LSR%20Bike02.htm if ya wanna go fast!

ThermionicScott 

Think of trying to pedal a bike that has 9 more chainrings between your legs. It's easy enough to buy or build a bike that has unusable/unnecessary gears at each end of the range.

Sixty Fiver

This.

One could build it but the redundancy and overlap would make shifting a nightmare and the effective range of gearing that a human being can turn is very small.

Flying Merkel

Why? Sheldon Brown's 63 speed bike.

It's an interesting project. Impractical, but fun to think about.

AEO

Hey, if you have to haul 1t of cargo on a bike, then 144sp could be quite desirable.

Dan Burkhart 

My Quetzal recumbent came with 105 combinations. Triple crank, 5 speed mid drive, 7 speed cluster on the back. I converted it to a Rohloff with a single chain ring. Still have 5 cogs on the mid drive, but no means to shift them other than by hand. All but one of the mid drive cogs put the input ratio lower than that stipulated by Rohloff, so they are just there to take up space on the freewheel.
Guess you could say it is technically a 70 speed though.

Myosmith

I'm still a believer that properly spaced 10x2 or 7x3 gives you all the gear combinations that the vast majority of riders will ever need. Heck, I remember when 12 and 15 speeds began replacing 10 speeds (5x2) and people were wondering what you needed all those gears for. There is a point where more adding gears for the sake of having more gears will produce one or more of three results: Gears so absurdly high or low as to be unusable, multiple redundant gear ratios, or gears with steps so small as to be insignificant and of no real benefit.

fietsbob

A friends dad same early 60's fixed up 2_3 speeds, one had 2 sprockets,
one on the hubshell . 2 chain loops..

clever machining could run 2 CV nuVinci hubs 1 driving the other, to widen the range..

RaleighSport

That's what came to mind for me to.

Edit: Just remembered.. do it old school. 63 speed yo. https://sheldonbrown.com/org/otb.html

IthaDan 

More ratios does not mean more range. It would be interesting to see how many of the gear combinations overlap and how many are truly unique.

rm -rf

Just convert to a 1/4 inch pitch chain, instead of the current 1/2 inch chain.

Then you can put 20 cogs on the back.

Sheldon Brown's Nanodrive system.

(Sheldon seems to have all the answers in this thread!)

paulkal

Don't forget to add a Schlumpf bottom bracket gear to double number of the gears

byte_speed

Why?

The cross-chaining possibilities would be endless.

But, the trim mechanism might need some thought.

bluefoxicy

The Megarange jump in the back is useful for those ridiculous hills that you're not going to climb on normal gears. You don't need to handle the range of crap nobody is going to climb with 5 or 6 mostly worthless cogs; put one big one there.

You know what would be even more interesting is a bike CVT. It's doable....

LarDasse74

It would be gross.

ThermionicScott 

Heh, for some reason, I thought you were younger than that.

For what it's worth, I think Schwinn's 5-speeds gave enough range for most people (39-90 GI, roughly). But the jumps between gears would be hard to sell these days.

HillRider

Well, we have a lot of bikes with absurdly high top gears. How many non-pro riders can make any real use of a 53x11 (or even a 50x12) high gear yet they are so common as to be nearly unavoidable on a newer road bike. "Absurdly low" low gears (<25 gear-inches) are another case as they do have their place on loaded touring and true off-road MTB riding.

From a historical perspective, every time an additional cog was added, there were those who loudly proclaimed it wasn't needed, the wheels would collapse, the chains would break, durability had gone out the window, etc. until they got used to N+1 only to repeat themselves the next time it happened. I've ridden 5,6,7,8,9 and 10-speed freewheels/cassettes and double and triple cranks over the past nearly 30 years and each increase brough some advantages and very few problems. There has to be a limit but I'm not ready to say where it is.