Originally Posted by
jim p
I have been riding for 6 or more years and my strength and endurance have improved but probably will only improve very slightly from this point if any.
I put a triple on my bike so that I could have the granny ring for climbing if needed. Well now I hardly ever use the big ring and I hardly ever use the small ring. I do 99% of my riding in the middle ring and the middle of the back cogs.
So I am wondering if anyone makes a crank with fairly tight spaced gears. I have this idea that the ideal front rings for me would be 36 30 and 24 in a tripple or just 36 24 in a double.
I am using down tube friction on the chain rings so a double would make it very easy to do full movement shifting.
Have any of you considered such a gear setup?
Is it quite flat where you ride?
36-30-24 and 12-25 in the back has a lot of overlap between the 30 and 36.
Here's that setup in
Mike Sherman's gear calculator (Just click OK at the popup, it's only telling you that you can bookmark the settings for later loading.)
Since you have a downtube shifter, you don't have 10 gears in the back. But the rear cogs will cover about the same range.
Look at the Speed over RPM Range chart. The 36 chainring is blue, the 30 is black, and the 24 is red. You can see the speeds for each combination at a typical 80-100 rpm pedaling speed.
Go to the top and make changes in the gears, front or back. The tables and charts update on the fly.
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Some
touring bikes that carry heavy loads up hills on tours use smaller chainrings. For instance,
46-36-24