So when I originally got my bike in November I built it with a gigantic range of gears so that I could "go anywhere". I'm a very heavy uber-clyde, so the crank is a Deore 26/36/48, and the cassette is 11-34.

There's only been one hill I couldn't climb with that gearing, and eventually I was able to do it after enough practice. I still need the 26/34 gear to do it, but I think eventually I'll be at a point where I don't need the lowest gear anymore. It took me from May to June to move from 26/34 to 26/30 on some "mega hills" as I refer to them, so I know I'm making progress.

I'd say around 66% of the time I find myself staying in the 36 ring. Initially I almost never made it up to the 11 cog, but over the past few rides I've found I'm finally regularly hitting that gear. The next most used ring is the 26 for climbing big hills.

The least used ring is of course the 48, which I save exclusively for "long" descents. This does not happen very often. First off I'm usually so tired from climbing the hill in the first place that many times I'll simply just coast down, and second, the descents take so much less time than the corresponding ascents that I simply don't spend much time in this ring at all.


Now I'm looking towards the future, and I can see two things. First, I won't need my 34 cog anymore. I used to have a 12-27 cassette on my old bike and I loved the tight spacing on it, but I never did any hills on that bike so when I started getting serious with climbing the 34 was necessary. But now that I'm getting better at hills and losing weight, I think when I'm down a few more pounds I'll try out a 12-30 cassette, which has much nicer spacing in my opinion.

Second, I love the fact that I can stay in my 36 ring for entire flat rides, but I know I'm going to "outgrow" it soon. I suppose one option would be to simply start using the big ring more often now, but the big problem with that is that I would have to switch back down to the middle ring for any type of mild ascent, and since the terrain around here is more rolling than anything else, I have a hunch that this is going to happen more often than I would like, and it will begin to annoy me. Additionally if I change from 11-34 to 12-30, I'm losing the 11 cog, and would need to make up for the lower gear somehow. I'm wondering if I could replace my middle 36 ring with a 40 or 42? The crank I have has specially shaped teeth and metal peg "ramps" on it, and most aftermarket rings I see don't appear to be shaped the same way, so I'm wondering how easy of a change this would be? Would shifting suddenly degrade in performance if I were to use a non-shimano ring on a shimano crank?

I guess another option would be to replace the outer ring, and end up with something like 26/36/42 or 26/36/44, but I think in both of those cases I would probably end up just running the big ring entirely unless I'm climbing, thus making the middle ring somewhat useless. I also thought about perhaps upgrading to a road crank (I already use road shifters so it's not a huge cost); perhaps go with a road triple, 30/39/50, and replace the 30 with a 26? But again I have to worry about using an aftermarket ring and it's compatibility.

Anyone have any experience in fine-tuning their drivetrains like this?

Thanks!

Personally, I'd keep riding it as-is until you get to the point where the 48 big ring isn't big enough (or you wear out the chainrings), then switch over to a road crankset. If you're not out of gears top or bottom, there's no need to change anything. Of course, I ride (among others) a bike with a 1x5 drivetrain in the undulating terrain around here, so maybe I'm not the best one to speak about fine-tuning gearing.

What are you using? a 4 bolt MTB crankset . Or a 5 Bolt ? and what is the bolt circle diameter.

do you care if you outer ring is pinned and ramped and all that hyperglide stuff..

Friction shifting?

Yeah 4-bolt Deore. 10 speed indexed shifting. I will care about the ramps if it makes shifting harder to do.

That is indeed also a possibility. I guess the problem I'm running into is that the 48 may have been just a bit too tall for me, but as you said there's still room to grow into it.


I just don't want to run into the situation where I have to constantly switch between mid and big rings because my legs have now increased into an overlapping range. I used to do that a lot on my old MTB and it didn't annoy me then, but these past 8 months being stuck in mostly 1 ring has opened my eyes to how much easier it is to ride in one ring.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I set up that 1x5 arrangement. It's nice not having to worry about shifting the front. That said, you've got a very wide range to play with on that cassette. I'll bet you'll be able to transition to riding the big ring much the same way you ride the middle ring without too much cross-chaining or other difficulty. The only issue would be if you're really bent on having very close spacing; I'm not, so I can't really comment on that aspect.

The ramps and other enhancements on your chainrings make shifting easier, not harder. They guide the chain onto the next chainring you select and all that "hyperglide stuff" is very helpful. Unless you are using a single chainring crank, you want them.

Correct. I should have stated "I will care about the lack of ramps", as almost all after market rings I can find do not have them. It's just the shimano ones, and they come in very standard and limited sizes.


That being said, it seems to me like it would be easier to go to a 30/39/50 and replace the granny, since, if I'm understanding this correctly, that doesn't need any ramps.

Your rolling terrain in Buffalo is very similar to Erie, so I think I understand where you are at. I also played around with my gearing quite a bit and I am still tweaking it as I gain strength much as you are talking about doing. When getting back into riding all our thoughts are about being able to have a low enough gear to be able to spin up the steepest hill we are faced with. At some point the light came on for me that sure I need that range but I also am only doing that a really small percentage of the total time on the bike and it’s not worth sacrificing everything else just for the tough climb. For me that is the beauty of the triple crank once I figured it’s like having two bikes in one if I got the gearing worked out right. I ride my bike like it was a double after all kinds of crank and ring changes I went back to what it came with for the middle and largest rings 42,52 that 10 tooth jump is an easy shift to make and the 42,52 combination allows for a pretty good half step pattern when I feel the need and that allows for a wider spaced cassette. I personally have a 12-36 (9 speed) and off the center 42 don’t think any of the steps shifting sequentially are that unpleasant. Maybe my tolerance for adjusting cadence slightly is the reason because I only really tweak into the half steps when I’m confronted with a long stretch where I don’t see myself shifting for a while and I need just a little more or less spin. Then it’s a single shift in the front and a double in the back. What I did with the granny then was just the opposite of what you are thinking and I took it to the absolute extreme I could for when I get a heavy load or into the mountains or both. I found out with the ramps and pins on the center ring I could (soft shift) up from a 24t granny to a 42t center without much effort and 6 of the 9 cogs on the cassette were usable gears and being wider spaced I didn’t need to jump up and down much between the granny and the center, and like you on rolling terrain after a hard climb just coast the down part getting some speed to start the next climb with. For me I lose more momentum on the “rollers” making the front shift up and back down than just staying on the granny and shifting a few on the cassette.

The center / center gear should be the starting point and then determine the width (closeness) of the cassette to suit your desire for a cadence range best for you. When you plug the numbers into a calculator program you find the big ring doesn’t buy you much maybe one or two higher gears is all and for a while I was wondering what I even needed it for. When I started seeing how the overlap could would fill in the gaps and that the double shifts were not that much trouble I started liking having all that range.

It depends so much on where you ride and when I took my bike on vacation down south where it was really flat I would have liked a nice tight spaced cassette with just a single ring in the front. I would say it’s hard for anyone to recommend gears but we can relate our process and others can adapt from that. Having watched a lot of people riding it seems that the higher speed spinners favor tighter spacing and shift more. The mashers seem to be fine with bigger steps and most of us are someplace in the middle.

Looked at SRAM/Truvativ?

Yeah there is, the horrible gaps between gears. Hence cassettes with a 'bailout' first - one huge gap instead of a bunch of big ones.

It's precisely for this reason that I abandoned my triple crankset and installed a wide-range double. I'm currently running 26/45 up front. I spend 99 percent of my time in the 45t ring, with the 26t as a bailout option that I seldom use. I suppose you could call it a 1x9 plus granny. What enabled me to do this was a wide-range 11-36 cassette. Of course, the spacing between gears is relatively large, which I know is not what you're looking for. But I live in a really hilly area, and you might be able to get away with a more closely-spaced cassette. If the 48t ring is a little too tall at the moment, why not replace it with something a little smaller and then put it back on when you get stronger?

My opinion is that the 48 tooth should be fine for quite a while. What you should consider is that if you have a narrower range freewheel you may have more choices with the 48 that are in the range you like. There is almost a 3 cog overlap betwee the 36 and the 48 in the upper range with a 12-30, so many of the higher gears (smaller cogs) you use with the 36 are there with the 48, with usually better chainline and less wear. Try Mike Sherman's calculator to see how things lay out.

Heavier riders in my experience also tend toward lower cadence. As you lose weight you will likely find a higher cadence more efficient, so at the high end you will be very unlikely to ever outrun the 48-12. In rolling country pedalling downhill just wastes the energy you need for the next uphill anyway.

I applaud you for getting stronger and losing weight, but there's no shame in keeping some ultra-low gears around in case of emergencies. Seriously.