Originally Posted by
zze86
I need a new wheel because I want more gears. I want more gears because I NEED a short crankset.
I've always felt that conventional crank lengths were too long for my short legs. 170mm cranks induces cramping in my quads fairly quickly. 165 is doable, although these are hard to find AND I still get cramping (just not as fast). I took to cutting up cheap cranks, drilling and tapping the pedal, trying out a few different lengths until I got to something that I felt comfortable with. I've tried 160mm, gone down to 150mm but settled on 155mm.
This short length requires that I keep the legs spinning as I don't have as much leverage. It's amazing how much 1" of crank length does to your FELT power.
To keep the cadence right requires lots of shifting, up and down the gears. Sections where I would have just cranked through before in one or two gears now requires multiple shifts, sometimes across a whole 11-28 10-cog. I can see changing the gearing to something like a 46/42/26 half-step or 46/38/26 setup with a 36t cog in the back for those really tough hills, I don't know, I'm just finally starting to get comfortable with spinning like this but on my 10-mi commute I shift in and out between a 42t and 30t chainring pretty often. I just don't think 6 cogs in the back is going to cut it, especially with the gearing choices available in 6-speed.
I'm gravitating towards an 8-cog so I can use friction shifters but have weighed just moving up to a 10 speed indexed/friction capable bar ends as well. Either course necessitates the switch to a new wheel.
My Expo is no longer all original so I have less qualms on keeping this period correct. I have a set of torn up Sugino AT cranks heading my way to see if I can drill and tap those satisfactorily. I would like to keep those even if chopped up.
I'm confused. If you want lower gears why build a different wheelset? Why not just change the gearing. An 11-34 cassette would significantly lower your gearing for a lot less money.
Originally Posted by
zze86
[left]
I've looked at the LHT and honestly am not too impressed. If you look at the geometry and specs of the LHT, its basically an early 90's hardtail MTB. May as well start with those which are much more ubiquitous (and cheaper). But, the top tube geometry of those is much too long for me when combined with drop bars (and yes, my wrists much prefer drop bars over everything else including flat bars, butterfly bars, Jones H-bar, and other high sweep bars). I've done drop bar conversions on early 90s MTB before. The frame does nothing to fix the crank length and subsequent gearing problem.
You've got this backwards.
80s mountain bikes had a similar geometry to the LHT but only slightly similar. They had a much shallower head angle and were based more on the Schwinn Excelsior that Marin riders used for their first mountain bikes. But by the 1990s, mountain bikes were shortening up and getting the steeper angles frame angles that they needed for centering the rider for better climbing and descending. They also started stretching the top tube as part of the same efforts to better center the rider.
The LHT, however, has a classic touring bike geometry and is similar to Cannondale's touring bikes which predate the Surly by a couple of decades
The touring bike came first, however and Surly is truly a classic touring bike geometry.
Originally Posted by
Happy Feet
More like a mid 80's atb which was the precursor to the "all in" mtb of the 90's. At first manufacturers were mixing off road/road concepts to try and fill the gap that boomed into the mtb genre, so you see plenty of heavy frame, horizontal top tube, caliper brakes and 2x cranks. The LHT looks a lot like those but the material used now is way better. Many of the older bikes were Hi Ten at best and it was really the early 90's when high performance rigid mtb's in Chromo came around but a lot of them started to have more sloping TT's.
Sloping top tubes are only a part of the changes that mountain bike frames went through but sloping top tubes didn't really start to show up until the mid to late 90s when the front ends of mountain bikes started to rise due to suspension systems.