Originally Posted by
Smaug1
To be fair, the Dahon Mariner is corrosion resistant, so the ZiZZO Marino is the competing model, and it’s $700. Dahon must figure their brand reputation is worth the $200.
i disagree. If you don’t have a low enough low gear to climb what you want to climb, tighter gear spacing is irrelevant. It’s also less important on a folding bike than a road bike because we’re not racing. Just pick the lower gear and go a bit slower.
That’s not on offer though, so it’s irrelevant too. We’re talking about factory made bikes here, not “Jipe’s Special Customs”. ;-)
There are 3 parameters to take into account, the gear inch range defined by the min-max cog sizes of the cassette, the spacing between gears defined by the combination of the gear inch range and the number of cogs and the shortest and biggest gear inch defined by the min-max cogs sizes of the cassette and chainring size.
if the shortest gear inch isn't short enough, its possible (to a certain level defined by the crankset) to reduce the size of the chainring. This is an easy and most of the time cheap modification.
So, concerning the short enough gear inch you shouldn't mix up short gear inch and cassette size. And it was not the topic on which I answered, I answered about a manufacturer moving from a 8s to a 10s transmission supposedly for commercial/marketing reasons and the fact that 10s doesn't bring any benefit vs. 8s for a 11-32t cassette.
About having the transmission parameters that fits, its often necessary to modify what the manufacturer mounted on a bike.