Originally Posted by
Tabor
Yea, but it also means you get to tune your setup by changing the chainring until you are usually in the middle (or close to it). I spend most of my time in gears 5 and 6.
absolutely. I love my 1x9 and do spend most of the time in the middle gears but just a warning about the effect of the extreme gears on the drivetrain. There is also the theory of "why have the gears if you don't use them" IOW, you could tune your set up so that you have a pretty tight cluster and use all the gears rather than just 5 and 6.
For me the lower gears are "winter" gears. Since I use the bike all season long and find myself in some pretty gnarly ice and slush I like having a pretty low gear available for those times. Once the snow melts I don't use those lower cogs except when I'm going walking speed.
I could easily get by on my commute with an 11-19 cassette or 12-21 and make full use of all the gears but I wouldn't have a granny that one time I needed it.
here it is in use:
