Originally Posted by William Karsten
This post (Mine) is about half poking fun at gear inch geeks, and half wondering the appeal is out of an honest desire to understand why people talk it up so much.
Anybody who seriously rides the road or the track is very sensitive to gearing. Gear inches is a way to quantify and experiment with gearing, to find the best gear for you and for different situations.
Now you seem to be of the mindset that "I don't need no
stinking gear inches to know whether I'm riding fast or slow, I go by how it feels" but eventually riders will get to the point where a 48/14 is too big because it "feels" too big and a 48/15 is too small because it feels too spinny. Only one tooth difference, right? Well the gear inches are 92 and 86 respectively. A huge difference in gear.
To get a slightly bigger gear, you have to go to a gear chart (or much easier, just calculate it) to find the right CR/cog combination.
53/18 doesn't mean a whole lot to me because I don't have gear charts memorized. But I know that a 92 inch gear, no matter what CR/cog combination achieves that, is way too big for me now.