Classic & Vintage - removing front derailer and large ring? hmmm.

so i've seen a few pictures in this sub-forum of folks who have removed the front derailer and large ring, and leave only the rear setup. what's the reasoning behind this? aesthetics (i does look good)? simplicity? did you hardly ever run on the large ring, thereby making in unnecessary? enlighten me!

and for those that have downtube shifters, what did you do? leave a dummy shifter on the left side? leave the exposed boss? cap the boss somehow?

I stripped the front derailleur and large ring off the front. I crashed and bent the front derailleur, and then realized that the new front derailleur-less setup was actually perfect for riding around Chicago, where it's incredibly flat. Even a relatively small range in the cassette will do to get me up and down the hills here. So it's not really that there's a benefit, except some saved weight, it's more that having a front shifting system is useless for me.

I had this setup on two bikes. On the one that crashed, I had barends, and I just disconnected the cable but left both shifters on the bars. On the other, which had downtubes, I just didn't cable one of the shifters. You can get some clamp-on downtubes that have just one shifter, though. I think campy made one. And I thought I saw one at loosescrews.

Talk to the cyclocross guys, that's a common mod for them...

for some reason i was thinking it would be a CX thing.

I did that with a few of my bikes: On my wife's bike, I made it a 6-speed mostly so I could install a chain guard; she has double stem shifters, but the left one is just an ornament. I also have a single Campy downtube shifter along with a Campy single cable guide. That would be a setup used with a front rod-operated derailleur. And on my Bridgestone CB-1, I have a single right-side thumb shifter operating the 6-speed setup.

Neal

have you ever had any problems with the chain coming off?

have you ever had any problems with the chain coming off?

As long as you line up the single front chainring with the center ring of the rear gear cluster, you should be fine.

Neal

Without at least 2 chainrings, I simply cannot get enough gear ratios to cover a decent range with a small step size. My UO-8 has what I consider great cyclocross or commuting gearing: 45-42 / 13-15-17-20-23-26. Even though I often shift just the rear when accelerating through the gears, I greatly appreciate having that half-step in front when I want to fine-tune my cadence.