Originally Posted by
Phamilton
My Raleigh frankenbike (attached photo from last week) is geared 52/42 and 14-28 7 sp FW. We have had some extremely windy days the last week that have made me start thinking about my gearing. I ride this bike 26 miles RT daily as my commuter (we are car-free).
The gearing is a little tall for me. I'm still relatively new to cycling, and there is way too much drivetrain info out there for me to make any sense of it. When I first started commuting 3 months ago I thought there may be a chance that over time my increased fitness level would overcome the gearing, but I also have an injury on my left leg that limits how much I can push/grind.
It's a factory Sakae crankset, 110mm BCD. Has anyone done a similar chain ring swap to lower their gears? I thought about a megarange freewheel and that would get me the granny 34T low gear but what I'd really like is to lower the entire gear range a little. As it stands I can only use the big chain ring on flats without a headwind or downhill.
It seems like 50/34 is a pretty standard road setup and after crunching the numbers into Sheldon's gear calc, looks like it would offer me the additional low end that I'd be looking for, but searching for chain rings it looks like most of them say for 10-11 speed, and I have no idea what the implications would be using those on my 5-6-7 speed drivetrain.
50/34 would be an improvement. Sugino standard chain rings (not ramped or pinned) such as these
Sugino Standard Chainring | Jenson USA
would be just fine.
Of course, the question is how low do you need to go, and how much of a high gear do you need. If your current setup comes fairly close but you could do with two more downshifts, 50x34 and your current cassette would do the trick.