Originally Posted by
chinarider
I'll be curious for our report. I have a 12-28 on a triple crank. I mostly use the middle ring up front & find my cadence often jumps 10-12 rpm when I shift in back. I'll probably need a new cassette in about 1000 miles and am thinking of getting a tighter group. My only concern is that while I don't often use the granny gear with the big cog, I do on occasion and am glad I have it when I do.
There is a fairly easy way to deal with this -- just keep multiple cassettes.
Swapping cassettes only takes a couple minutes if you have a cheap tool called a chain whip. In practice, you'll want the tighter cassette the vast majority of the time, but on the rare occasions when you expect to to need some seriously low gears, you can just mount the big cassette.
Incidentally, owning multiple cassettes is one of the reasons why you want a chain with a removable link since the correct chain length will be different for different cassettes.