Originally Posted by
nhorton
It's a question I've searched for but having a problem finding a simple answer for. Is a 34/50 on a double crankset with a 12-36 cassette going to be low enough for loaded up touring ?
I think the 50 is going to help prevent me from spinning out, but trying to get some local expert advice.
Gearing is something of a touchy subject. Racer dudes fall into the camp of anything less than a 53/42 with an 11-15 10 speed cassette is too Fredish for them. Freds/tourist/retro grouches will tell you that you only need a 34/30/18 crank with a 28-36 4 speed cassette and anything else is just too macho racer dude for them to associate with you.
Mountain bikers (and wise tourists who have functioning knees) fall into a group that realize the utility of very low...perhaps stupidly low...gears. If you have to pedal your bike to the top of a hill that you probably shouldn't be
walking up, you need low gears to do it. Once on top of the hill, you probably don't want to spend all your time coasting back down it so you need gears that you can actually pedal.
While I ride everything, I have a slight edge in mountain biking experience and tend to err on the side of the mountain bikers. I also live in an area that is uphill from everywhere. I have triple cranks on every single bike I own and everyone of them but the go fast bike have 11-34 rear cassettes. My touring bike has my lowest gears...46/34/20 crank...and I've used the lowest and highest on several tours. Sometimes within yards of each other
That's a 50 mph downhill across the way and a 4 mph uphill.
If you are new to touring, I'd say to get as low a low as you can and a reasonable high. (about 100 gear inches is a reasonable high). If you find that you aren't using the low or the high, you can always change the gearing later.