Originally Posted by
yashinon
Colonel can you explain this in a little more detail: "The 7.4 FX with its triple crankset is better for climbing hills"..
What is a triple crankset and how can you tell the difference?
For ease of climbing hills, you want the lowest ratio you can get from your front crank teeth and rear cassette teeth, by dividing the front tooth number by the rear tooth number.
On a Triple Crankset, because you have 3 chainrings to play with, you can readily find a setup with the biggest chainring on the front being 48 teeth, the next biggest chainring being 36 teeth and the smallest chainring being say 26 teeth.
So on that kind of triple crankset, you have 26 teeth as your smallest chainring on your front crankset.
If the biggest chainring on your rear cassette is say 34 teeth, then you get a ration of 0.76 (26/34).
On a Double Crankset, the smallest front chainring will probably be 34 or 36, so if you have the same rear cassette where the biggest chainring on the cassette is 34 teeth, the lowest ratio you can get for that is 1.0 (34/34)