IDK

My wife wants to get a road bike. She can't keep up with me on her mountain bike with me on my fixed gear. She hates having too many gears and wants to simplify things but she doesn't want a fix gear. I had a thought that I hope will work. My idea is to replace the front crank with a fixed gear crank with a 3/32 chain ring. The only problem I see is getting the gearing right. I'm sure it's been tried/done before but I can't find anything online. The process seems straight forward so I though I would seek some advice from you guys. Let me know if you see any problems with this. Thanks!

rodrigaj

Tandem bike

Hobartlemagne 

Get her a regular road bike and figure out which chainring works best for her.
Then- adjust the FD so that it will never shift.

Iowegian

If she can't keep up now, reducing the number of gears she has probably won't help. If you just want simple, look into getting an internal gear rear hub bike. The Shimano Nexus 8-speed hub is supposed to work pretty well and makes shifting as easy as can be. It looks like a single speed but has 8 gears inside the rear hub.

Floyd

Agree,,, less gears, or easier shifting will not make her faster...you do not say whether or not she is as much of an avid rider as you so here goes...Maybe you could slow down long enough to show her which gear she needs to get the most out of the gears she has, feels comfortable using them and can enjoy the ride as much as you do.
peace

ericbuilds

if you have a rear derailer and therefore slack in the chain, you need some way to keep the chain on the chainring. internal hub and single chainring is what i'm currently dreaming about. No derailers. Tight chain that doesn't fall off (as much), and I'm attracted to a european chain gard I saw that is full coverage, but light. check the commuter forum for this stuff.

IDK

She can't keep up because she's on a suspension mountain bike and I'm on a track bike. She has the gears down but doesn't see the point of having 21 hears when she only uses a few of them. Thanks for the ideas, I'll spend some time on google.

erader

i have a litespeed pisgah that i built up as a 1 x 9. i currently run a 36 in the front and 11 x 28 custom cassette in the back. i'm changing the 36 to a 38 tho.

36 x 11 gives you about 85 gear inches, and you could easily run a 34 and run an 11-32 or 11-34 cassette.

first thing to do is lose the suspension fork....or if the frame if it's FS and get a hardtail. riding a hardtail with rigid fork on the road is soooo much better than anything with suspension, imo.

so ...... i have a titanium hardtail with rigid CF fork (winwood) and i ride 1.25" IRC smoothies pumped up to 100 psi.

this is my old man retirement bike and honestly i love riding this bike and a big part of that is because i got rid of the front derailleur. i have 9 fully usable gears and my 50 miles a week are fairly flat .

ed rader

IDK

Thats exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks for the help!