Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
It takes a while to figure it out. But it becomes second nature.
I have a triple and 8 speed cassette on three of my bikes. I have gotten into the habit of avoiding the two most cross chained gears for each chainring, so for example when I am on the smallest chainring I avoid the two smallest sprockets. And when on the middle chainring I avoid the outermost and innermost sprockets. Thus I regularly use 18 of the possible 24 gears. You however were suggesting you may try to only use 10 gears on a regular basis.
Some people do not like triples, I think they find it hard to shift to the middle chainring or something like that, but I prefer a triple to give me a much broader range from top gear to bottom. But I am an engineer, I calculated out the gear ratios, given any gear I know how to get to the next higher or next lower gear, but I think most of the population find that a bit too complicated to remember.
If you put your right hand on the rear shifter, after a while you can tell by feel of the lever position approximately where you are on the cassette. That I find to be a big advantage to bar end shifters, as I can more easily avoid cross chaining without looking at where the chain is on the cassette or which chainring I am on.
JL, all of what tourist wrote is spot on, and especially the underlined part about roughly how many gears to use in each chainring.
it's ask about not overly angling your chain, known as crosschaining...crosschaining is less efficient and wears the chain faster, why it's not recommended.
and yes, using these shifters and triple will quickly become natural. It's fairly basic.
some people however have problems driving a standard car, and forget to shift or have car in wrong gear. I know a few drivers like this and they've been driving for 40 years, so for that type of person there's not much hope.
I'm not Ann engineer, but early in my teens I had motorcycles, with sequential gearboxes and no gear indicator, so you had to keep in mind what gear you were in, so to me shifting is completely natural as is keeping track where I am in the shift pattern.
just keep at it, follow the simple gear suggestions tmsn suggested, and that's it.