Originally Posted by bigvegan

Marrzipan,

You live in Los Angeles, so this is a relatively easy one.

Bring your bike in to the Bike Oven, Bike Kitchen, or Bikerowave, and have them help you out with this. (You may need to order your parts elsewhere, but they've got all the tools and stands and make this a pretty easy process.)

For a singlespeed, basically you need to remove the cogset and add a freewheel, remove a chainring and put the chainring you keep on the side of the spider that makes the chainline straight, and maybe add a new chain. It's pretty cheap and easy.

For a fixed gear, you'll need a new track rear wheel, and maybe a wheelset, and since a straight chainline is really important, you'll probably need a new crank and bottom bracket. It's a lot more expensive than building a singlespeed, and it may be cheaper just to buy a fixie from BD.


Your gearing should be slightly less than 3:1 (Chairning teeth: cog teeth) for most L.A. riding (46:16, 48:17, etc.), but if you're going to the velodrome, you'll want a gearing that's slightly more than 3:1. You can find gear inch charts pretty easily via google.