Originally Posted by
Pop N Wood
And by my guess different people are making different assumptions leading to arguments about different numbers
It’s okay to make educated guesses. The size of the wheel has an impact but it easily fixed.
Arguments about gearing are also usually of the “no one needs gears that low” nature. I’m a firm believer in having the lowest gears I can engineer with the equipment I have. If that means modifying the crank or adding a derailer extender, I’m willing to go that far. I’ve never found myself saying “my gear is too low”.
Gear inches can be hard to translate into real world. One way around that is to keep an excel spreadsheet with all of your bikes in it. Most people know what gears they like to ride on each of their bikes and which ones they never use. When it comes time to upgrade gearing the spread sheet helps you select the best set of rings.
Most people
don’t know what gear they ride in. I doubt most people know which cog number they are riding in most of the time, much less what the ratio is. I think of gearing and gear ranges a lot but while I’m riding I can’t tell you which specific gear I’m riding at any particular point. The closest I can get is along the lines of “big chainring and something in the middle of the cassette” because that’s what I use most of the time.
One of the things I do is to provide a link to
gear-calculator.com whenever I post about gearing on here so that people can look at what their gearing is. If I made an incorrect assumption, it’s easily corrected in the calculator. But, honestly, I only use the gear-calculator for planning gearing. I don’t use it while I ride nor is there any need to do so.