Originally Posted by
njkayaker
My touring bike came with an 11-32 with a 30/42/52 triple. Creating a gear chart indicated that there was a 6% difference between the gears for most of the range. You have to work a bit (eg, double shift) to get to some of those closer jumps but they are there. In my case, the rule is fairly simple.
The only "problem" I see with this gearing is the absurdly high top couple of gears for a touring bike, particularly for a rider of modest ability. The 52x11 is 128 gear-inches! That's a time trial gear for a Pro-level rider. So, the top two or so gears are wasted.
Unfortunately 13 x XX cassettes are getting hard to find and are pretty much non-existant in MTB-range cassettes since most MTB's have 42 or 44T big chainrings and the 42 or 44 x 11 top gear is reasonable.