So when I originally got my bike in November I built it with a gigantic range of gears so that I could "go anywhere". I'm a very heavy uber-clyde, so the crank is a Deore 26/36/48, and the cassette is 11-34.

There's only been one hill I couldn't climb with that gearing, and eventually I was able to do it after enough practice. I still need the 26/34 gear to do it, but I think eventually I'll be at a point where I don't need the lowest gear anymore. It took me from May to June to move from 26/34 to 26/30 on some "mega hills" as I refer to them, so I know I'm making progress.

I'd say around 66% of the time I find myself staying in the 36 ring. Initially I almost never made it up to the 11 cog, but over the past few rides I've found I'm finally regularly hitting that gear. The next most used ring is the 26 for climbing big hills.

The least used ring is of course the 48, which I save exclusively for "long" descents. This does not happen very often. First off I'm usually so tired from climbing the hill in the first place that many times I'll simply just coast down, and second, the descents take so much less time than the corresponding ascents that I simply don't spend much time in this ring at all.


Now I'm looking towards the future, and I can see two things. First, I won't need my 34 cog anymore. I used to have a 12-27 cassette on my old bike and I loved the tight spacing on it, but I never did any hills on that bike so when I started getting serious with climbing the 34 was necessary. But now that I'm getting better at hills and losing weight, I think when I'm down a few more pounds I'll try out a 12-30 cassette, which has much nicer spacing in my opinion.

Second, I love the fact that I can stay in my 36 ring for entire flat rides, but I know I'm going to "outgrow" it soon. I suppose one option would be to simply start using the big ring more often now, but the big problem with that is that I would have to switch back down to the middle ring for any type of mild ascent, and since the terrain around here is more rolling than anything else, I have a hunch that this is going to happen more often than I would like, and it will begin to annoy me. Additionally if I change from 11-34 to 12-30, I'm losing the 11 cog, and would need to make up for the lower gear somehow. I'm wondering if I could replace my middle 36 ring with a 40 or 42? The crank I have has specially shaped teeth and metal peg "ramps" on it, and most aftermarket rings I see don't appear to be shaped the same way, so I'm wondering how easy of a change this would be? Would shifting suddenly degrade in performance if I were to use a non-shimano ring on a shimano crank?

I guess another option would be to replace the outer ring, and end up with something like 26/36/42 or 26/36/44, but I think in both of those cases I would probably end up just running the big ring entirely unless I'm climbing, thus making the middle ring somewhat useless. I also thought about perhaps upgrading to a road crank (I already use road shifters so it's not a huge cost); perhaps go with a road triple, 30/39/50, and replace the 30 with a 26? But again I have to worry about using an aftermarket ring and it's compatibility.

Anyone have any experience in fine-tuning their drivetrains like this?

Thanks!