Getting it right

Depending on where you are riding, how far you want to ride and who you are, your bike needs to be set up with proper gearing.

This is accomplished by daydreaming a little about everywhere you want to ride. Do you want to go into the mountain for all day excursions? Do you want to race on the bike path and pass everyone at light speed?

After you decide where you are riding, move on to how far you will ride at a given time. Do you want to complete a century? Do you only have 30 minutes to ride at any given time?

And the hardest part is to examine what kind of shape you are in (or hope to be very soon). Are you fresh off of the college track team? Is you husband talking you into your first bike in 25 years?

This tells us how to set up your bike. The two factors are chainrings and cassette.

CHAINRINGS

53/39 – The chainrings can be set up as the normal road ratio of 53 big ring and 39 small ring. This is going to be ideal for people who have the intention of going fast, not doing a great deal of long uphill and/or who are in great shape.

50/34 - The next step down is called a compact chainring setup. That is typically around 50 teeth for the big ring and 34 for the small. This allows for a much easier climbing gear, but not quite as fast of a true downhill gear. These need to be high quality because of the large difference in the number of teeth.

50/39/30 – This is called a triple chainring setup. It offers the widest variety of gearing. This is going to allow for a good climbing, flat and modest downhill gear.

CASSETTE

The range for a cassette is described by their smallest, then biggest gear. So an 11-23 has a tiny 11 tooth cog for going fast and a much bigger (while not that big) 23 tooth climbing cog.
There are a huge variety of cassettes on the market. SRAM in particular has a huge variety of 9 and 10 speed cassettes.

Within the chainrings listed above and the choices of cassettes, you can make a bike that does damn near everything that you would like.

Just like everything else on a bike, as you spend more you get better performance and everything gets lighter.

Salvagetti Also Recommends Some Other Stuff For You:

Wheel Building Classes?

Annual Bicycle Swappy Swap!

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This entry was posted on Feb, 21, 2009 at 6:37 pm