D1andonlyDman

Once you start approaching 20 teeth on the cog, single-tooth jumps don't buy you much. Most studies show that people want gear changes approaching 10% increments. you could get there with 7 single tooth spaced cogs and 6 two-tooth jumps. 14 speeds could give you 11-30 or 12-32 with as narrow spacing as most folks would ever want. But that's still less than a 3 to 1 gearing range. A good triple setup tends to provide a 4-1 gearing range, which is far more useful for real mountain climbing.

merlinextraligh

Does Grant Peterson have a sock puppet? SIS (indexed shifting) was a conspiracy to render friction shifting obsolete. STI (integrated shifting) was a conspiracy to render SIS obsolete. 6 speed was a conspiracy to render 5 speed obsolete, 7 speed was a consipiracy to render 6 speed obsolete, etc. Di2 is a conspiracy to render mechanical obsolete. Discs are a conspiracy to render calipers obsolete.

They make this stuff because people buy it. If people din't find value in it they wouldn't buy it, and Shimano wouldn't make it.

And the fact that you are able to still source a full 9 speed groupset at a cheap price disproves your point. As current standards have changed, and improvements made, older stuff is still available. As you point out 9 speed is available and cheap, and this is 10 plus years after the advent of 10 speed, and the arrival of at least 4 subsequent generations of 10 and 11 speed groups.

Heck you can still buy a new 5 speed 14-28 freewheel if you want to.

So if Shimano's grand conspiracy was render all this old stuff obsolete, and banish it, they're failing miserably.

69chevy

You may very well be right, if my understanding of masher is correct.

I am also a minimalist when it comes to gizmos. I don't have a cadence meter or a genuine cycling computer. I mount my phone to my bars and an app does my speed/distance. I figure if I need my phone anyhow, I may as well use it as a computer.

I don't care so much about my cadence as I maybe should, but as I teach my kids to road bike, I have stressed that keeping cadence and climbing slower will keep you riding longer than trying to mash it up the hill fast.

Regardless of all of that. I have climbed a hill so steep, every pedal stroke in granny/granny lifted the front tire. I made it up, but also made my peace with my creator just in case.

Even after that, I felt like the gears I have covered every scenario. What I didn't think of was towing, riding loaded, or looooong moderate grades.

RPK79

Some pretty far out ideas on how economics and manufacturing work in this thread. Very entertaining.

banerjek

I'm not a fan of solving range problems with pie plates. Anything over 28 is a pie plate and anything over 32 is getting pretty insane.

I suspect the reason that triples have largely disappeared is that in practice, you only need two rings for any ride. If you're in hilly terrain, the middle is useless, if you're on flats, the little one is useless, and if you're working against significant wind, the big ring is useless. If you have only two rings, you can have the right gears for any ride if you just choose the right cassette. Most people aren't that picky, so they're happy enough with a wide cassette on a compact.

Triples and doubles have similar ranges, but triples give you great selectivity across the entire range without swapping cassettes. This allows less shifting between rings. I personally believe that 9 speed provides the best balance of function, durability, and price, and that's what I run on my 'bents. I would run it on my road bikes, but I like the ergonomics of the 10 speed too much better. For all the racket people make about adding cogs, the only thing 10 speed has over 9 is that one of the 2 tooth gaps is changed to 1 tooth. 11 speed shrinks one more of those gaps or gives you some sort of bail out. It's hardly make or break stuff and it's not much to get excited about when you consider the tradeoffs.

patrickgm60

I have two road bikes: one with a triple (52/39/30), the other with compact (50/34.) Most of the time, I have a tight (11-23) cassette on the triple, so the lower end is no lower than the compact. But, a triple's advantages are not just about range. On rolling terrain (and I ride lots of it), I find myself making far fewer shifts on the triple than the compact. I can often keep the chain somewhere near the middle of the cassette and shift among the 3 rings. Meanwhile, with the compact, frequent/multiple shifts, front and rear, are necessary. Multiplied over a 3- or 4-hour ride, the difference is significant.

Now, if you ride in, say, Florida, the requirements are drastically reduced.

MileHighMark

I'm waiting for an integrated cassette and disc rotor for the ultimate climbing and descending combo.

banerjek

Go Bionx. Motor assist on the way up, regenerative braking on the way down....

modelmartin

Quick drying paint was only available in black at the time. Before then you could actually get Model Ts in a variety of bright colors.

Think for yourself and get what you want!

D1andonlyDman

I never said that index shifting was a conspiracy - it's a very useful feature. Whereas moving to 11 speeds and simultaneously ceasing to support triples is not - it's a step backwards on functionality. You lose gearing range and/or tight spacing in doing so. It's very simple - 23-24 useable gears is going to give you better gearing options than 20-21 useable gears will. You either lose range or lose spacing, and you don't improve the shifting in the process.

And actually people buy what the stores stock, and the stores stock what the manufacturers make. Obviously, nobody is buying 11x3 gearing, because you can't.

Do you think there would be a market for a 12 pound bike that had continuous gearing across a 5-1 range and cost $1000? Of course there would be. But nobody produces such a bike. It's not due to lack of demand, it's due to lack of supply.

And the only reason Shimano is failing to obsolete older stuff is that plenty of folks recognize that a lot of used gear is very functional. But drivetrain components wear out, and New Old Stock stuff in many of these situations is not easy to find, and scarce.. Right now- 9-speed drivetrain components are cheap and plentiful and highly functional, but 8-speed stuff is quite scarce and sells at a premium. And while it's easy to buy an old freewheel - it's NOT so easy to buy an old wheel that has a really good rim and hub to put it on. The fact is, the window for buying 9-speed and getting it for a bargain price is a finite window in time, that will likely close in a few years - unless someone like Microshift forces it to stay open by taking low to midrange market share from Shimano.

If you don't think that someone with the dominant market presence of Shimano can force the market to largely buy what they wish to sell, you don't understand marketing. A perfect analogy, which I lived through professionally in the mid 1990s, was Intel forcing the bottom tier of the PC market from lower cost faster-clocked 386 and 486 architectures to Pentiums, by bypassing the branding of the PC vendors themselves and branding chips to the end-user, and simply withholding supply of leading edge chips to PC manufacturers who wouldn't play ball with them.

merlinextraligh

Whatever Intel and Microsoft we're doing in the 90's isn't instructive of today cycling market. Campy and Shimano have been fighting tooth and nail to one up each other for at least 30 years. With first Suntour, and now SRAM offerrimg a third option.

If triples offered a better option for a significant segment, and Shimano was conspiring to withhold that option, there would be every incentive for campy, sram, microshift, sugino, fsa, strong light, etc. to swoop in and take the profit.

Or perhaps the answer is that with changing technology, triples just don't make that much sense anymore for most people.

RISKDR1

For me (age 70) it helps me spin on very steep grades keeping me out of the anaerobic zone thereby extending my endurance by keeping the lactate at bay and conserving muscle fuel (glycogen). It makes a BIG difference.

StanSeven

This pretty much says everything I planned on saying.

In a marketplace like cycling, a company like Shimano can't dictate anything. Rather companies make what customers want. In this case, it's not triples.

What's funny in this and other threads is the constant posting that marketing takes a new product and makes customers believe they want it. Anybody that truly believes that how companies operate need to enroll in a freshman marketing course in their local community college.

Soody

That's what Microsoft does with every second generation of their OS. Are you saying everyone who bought Windows Millennium edition, Vista, or 8 weren't conned by a marketing department?

They've been clever this time, and gone from Win 8 to Win 10 so the inbetween quality OS has been skipped.

Soody

Why have a triple? Why not lol. It's cool riding different kids of tech.

D1andonlyDman

That's simply not accurate. Shimano's bicycle component market share is an order of magnitude greater than Campagnolo's. The only segment Campy competes effectively with with Shimano in is the high end, and particularly racing where they have a major presence. SRAM is barely alive outside of Pro racing, and Microshift DOES compete with triples, but they don't really have any presence in 11-speed yet. They are also resource limited, and they are grappling with whether to focus on lower cost options in segments that Shimano is vacating such as 9 and 10 speed, or to develop a competitive offering in 11-speed. They don't have sufficient resources to do both well at this time.

That is EXACTLY what marketing does in any industry that is not purely competitive. And bicycling most assuredly is not - Shimano simply has too much of a controlling position, and too much market share to operate the way you think they have to operate. And sorry, I have a marketing and economics MBA from a top tier B-school and 25 years as a marketing professional where I used that education. And I've TAUGHT marketing courses in my local community college in the past.

What do you mean by "a market like bicycling? Shimano is BY FAR the dominant presence in the industry. They are every bit as dominant as Intel was in PC components, and Microsoft was in System software. All of their competition is individual niche producers. Good luck finding a sub $1500 new road bike with Campy or SRAM on it. Good luck finding a $3000 + high end racing bike with Microshift on it.

fried bake

i dunno, thought they sell a lot in europe? correct me if i'm wrong on that.

merlinextraligh

Beautiful bike, but it illustrates my point. 7 speed cassette, triple works nicely to get a low gear, and tight spacing.

2x11 with a compact crank will get you a wider range than the setup pictured while maintaining tight spacing.

And none of this is meant to denigrate your 3x7 setup, or other's 3x9 setup. They obviously work for you.

My only point over the last 4 pages is that with 11 cogs in the back, there's a whole lot less need for triples than there used to be.

Drew Eckhardt 

Two rings with 11 cogs are not enough to allow wide range with tight spacing.

Tight spacing with one tooth jumps through the 19 limits you to 11-23 or 12-25.

If you want to match the range on 53-39-26 x 13-14-15-16-17-18-19-21-23 9 cogs (with the drop to the 26 bail-out gear about like shifting from 50 to 34) you need 50-34 x 12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-21-23-25-27-30 13 cogs;

Accepting a more limited range like you'd have with the factory 30 small ring you still have a lot more front shifting, where the 13 cog on the double has the same chainline as a triple starting cog but works like 39x15 when paired with the 34 so there's a lot more front shifting. The next gear is also 5 cogs away not 3-4when you change rings, although electronic shifting could be programmed to make the right compensating shift when you hit buttons on both sides simultaneously.

With no middle age spread and decent training plan two rings are fine, although that was the case once we hit 10 cogs with 39x26 low enough to get over the Colorado Rockies and eschewing small-small 39x14 OK for cruising at over 21 MPH on flat ground with 30 MPH small-ring sprints. 50-34x13-23 9 cogs had good range an spacing, but 10X more double shifts that were tiresome.

In a world where 20-40 pounds over a good racing weight is normal for recreational cyclists we really need 13 or 14 in back, although with 9 years between 10 and 11 cogs I won't be holding my breath until 2026 or 2035.

Bandera

Agree.
"Back when" we fitted out experienced club riders w/ triples as a matter of course for century riding in hilly terrain.
The Schwinn Deluxe Paramount P-15 w/ a Campag 54/45/36 and a 5 cog 14-30 is a famous example, and quite useful today.
A low/low of 32GI is the same as today's 34/28 and quite adequate for fit riders at pace going long distances in varied terrain.

Bicycle gearing is highly personal and varies w/ fitness, wind conditions and terrain.
Our rough, narrow, rolling and quite steep Hill Country roads put a premium on fast solid chainring shifts and minimum but positive rear shifting in the company I keep.
My compact 50/34 lacks the crispness/speed of 53/39 and the post chainring change three cog shifting w/ the compact is fiddly, fussy and annoying.
Not what I'm looking for going onto Chain Drop Hill at 35mph with the lads on my wheel.

Electronic shifting may be making perfect shifts on double/11 cog reliably but I'm going 52/39/30 12-25/27/28 10 cog with the benefit of a bailout for when I feel my age in Vanderpool.

-Bandera

Bike Gremlin

3x8 with gearing:

28-39-50
with
13-14-15-17-19-21-24-28

will cover the needs of steepest climbs and fastest straights with the wind at one's back. With tight enough gearing.