Brian Ratliff

The steady progress from 5 to 6 to 7 also allowed shops to do this. And let me assure you: they did. Salesmen can turn anything into a hard sell pitch, which is what makes them successful salesmen. Engineers have it in their blood to make steady improvements to existing parts; part manufacturers pay these engineers for implementing those improvements; salesmen go and sell. This is basically how we got all the cool stuff we have now. Look around you. Everything you touch that was made by human hands was created by an engineer and sold by a salesman to replace the former solution to the problem. Staples are ubiquitous now, but there was a time before staplers and the problem of holding papers together was solved some other way and some engineer invented a stapler and some salesman put a hard sell to an office manager to replace whatever they were using with the new fangled stapler, probably with a service contract for the stapler and staple supplies, and some retrogrouch grouched each and every time the stapler jammed.

What the retrogrouch does is draw an arbitrary line at some point of progress and says "this is where progress should have stopped" (you've drawn it at 7 speed) and then starts yammering on and on about it, apparently not realizing that this line he has drawn is totally arbitrary. But, deep down, the retrogrouch knows the line is arbitrary, which is why he has to cherry pick attributes that one side of the line has and the other side doesn't and weave a complicated web of logic to support his position. Some (and Rivendell is a great example of this) have made this position into a business so they can sell for $2,000 what you can pick up from an asian manufacturer for less than $200 including the cost of the fancy paint job.

LesterOfPuppets

11 is a pretty big jump, upgrade-wise, what with freehub requirements, etc.

Seems like further cog count increases will have to involve a rear spacing greater than 130mm at some point. That will be a pretty big jump, another line in the sand.

grolby

And that's the other side of the coin. Maybe I just go to the wrong (or right) shops. I know that have been told it wasn't worth the cost of work on a bike and I should just buy a new one, but I was in high school and riding a big box "mountain bike," so it was basically true. I do not think people with 9-speed bikes being chided to replace them happens near as often as Dave Mayer makes it out to happen, but to the extent that it does, it's not a practice that started with the invention of 10-speed cassettes.

Brian Ratliff

I think we are simply not hearing the rest of the story where the customer is curious about the shops' new bikes, expressed some frustration with his old rig and the salesman, with a smile, says he can offer $200 trade-in value for his old bike if he wants the new model that just-so-happens to be on end-of-season closeout right now. Through a retrogrouches eyes, everything is a sinister play for money. But with a little benefit of the doubt, most of these sales interactions are much more a suggestive presentation of possibilities than a manipulative hard sell.

Leinster

We should all still be using Treasury Tags!



The British Empire was built on these things! If it's good enough for Queen Victoria's admin bods, it's good enough for you!

Dave Mayer

Absolutely. Increasing beyond 11 cog cassettes on road bikes is very challenging. Cassettes are already so wide that wheels have a high amount of dish. There is more than double the spoke tension on the drive side compared to the non-drive side. Rear hub flanges are now only 2" apart so that rear wheels are increasingly flexy and unstable.

In order to prepare for 12 speeds and beyond (plan on an extra cog every 7 years), rear stay dimensions must be increased. Start with 135mm. This has the double benefit of allowing another couple cogs on the cassette, plus it will render a whole generation of older frames obsolete. Outstanding sales potential. Of course heels striking chainstays will be an issue, so this will require wider cranksets. This is biomechanically much less efficient, but sales trump efficiency.

The next transition will be 140-145mm rear stays, like tandems. This will allow another couple of cogs to be added. Riding a bike will increasingly feel like riding a horse.

The significant technical innovation of adding another cog every 7 years will ensure the health of the bike industry for another generation.

Sullalto

Well I hope you got a discount on the 10s vs 11s P2.

kbarch

Right - it's not that there are so many hard sell salesmen out there, but there are a lot of soft touch cyclists!

OldsCOOL

And whatever is raced at TdF will fly out the doors of a LBS near you.

Sullalto

Shimergo. Can get Athena triples new, too.

Brian Ratliff

Alternatively, after 10 years at 11 speed and another decade at 12 speeds, we move to 3/16" pitch chains and a 5/64" chain width standard and we cram 13+ cogs into 135mm dropout spacing and start the progression over again (I do think we will move to the 135mm standard and a unification of the mtb and road drivetrain standards). Maybe the cassette wars stop and predictive shifting algorithms take over. Maybe the widespread adoption of electronic shifting means single trigger shifting and the end of overlapping gear ranges which renders the cassette wars moot. Or maybe something completely different comes along that upsets the whole state of the art...

The above post, tongue-in-cheek as it is (I hope nobody is that cynical), is a perfect example of the dangers of extrapolating trends. Progress as a technology matures is not linear and nobody wants to ride a tank for the sake another cog on the cluster. Believe it or not, but there is a clear feedback loop between customer and manufacturer and there are three players in the drivetrain market.

In fact, the 10 speed standard was around so long that I thought it would be the end of the cog number progression. Campy went 11 speed in 2008 with their Record and Chorus groups and Shimano didn't immediately follow for, really, 5 years (they had DA 11 speed in 2012 but Ultegra didn't happen until 2013). I started racing around 2008 and I clearly remember you could get away with riding any 10 speed wheel out of the neutral wheel car if you got a flat; if you crossed Campy and Shimano drivetrains, it'd shift fine more or less but it would be rough; but if you had Campy 11 speed, you were SOL unless you brought your own wheel and the wheel car knew about you.

I do believe the only reason Shimano went to 11 speed is to offer a 27 tooth to the standard 12-25 cassette and close the gearing gap between compact doubles and triples so they could eliminate triples from the product catalogue (34/27 is right in between 30/23 and 30/25, which is about as low as racing triples have ever gone). One of my friends has 11-speed which has a 32 tooth low gear. With the compact, he has almost a 1:1 gear ratio, which being a track sprinter allergic to hills, he appreciates.

colnago62

One of my friends, who was quite the sprinter in his day, (won some state medals and was a Pan Am alternate) heart rate would spike going up anything that wasn't a short bump. He could sit in all day long, his legs would spin at 120-150 rpm. He was lethal on a short flat and wide criterium course.

Brian Ratliff

Just had an awesome idea for single trigger DI2...

50-47 front ring

11-32 11 speed rear cassette

electronic, single trigger, half-step gearing to give you nearly perfect 22-speeds with no overlap between 50/11 and 47/32 (which is basically the same as 39/27). Anyone own DI2 and know how to program it? I would love a bike with this system on it.

kbarch

Would you really want it going back and forth between the big and little chain wheel every time you shifted? You'd have a chain catcher, of course.... And you'd want to be able to make whole step or bigger switches without going through all the intermediate steps, too.

Brian Ratliff

It's only 3 teeth difference, so a small jump, and DI2 is apparently very good at front shifting under load to the point where you can shift during a full on sprint. Because it's electronic, if you go multiple shifts inside a second or two, you can simply program the shifting system to ignore the front derailleur until the last shift. This should not be hard. It's the electronics that make this scheme possible for a racing setup.

Carbonfiberboy 

Heck, I had half step gearing in 1962 with downtube shifters. What I liked about it was the ability to make big jumps with one lever, then tune with the other. I wouldn't like to have to make 22 jumps. I have bar ends on one of my bikes and it's great to be able to slam the chain all the way over. Every system has it's strengths and weaknesses. It's good to have choices.

DinoShepherd

Still trying to figure out why road bikes didn't go to 135 a while ago.

Same reason my Shimano road and mtb shifters/derailleurs are no longer compatible.

ITS A CONSPIRACY, MAN!!!!

BoSoxYacht

Some CX & touring bikes are being built 135mm, it's just a matter of time before they all go that way.

LesterOfPuppets

CXers should just go 142x12

Brian Ratliff

I think the hub manufacturers are thinking of consumers in this regard. Before, when the standard was 126mm and road bikes were transitioning to 130mm, during the transition time hubs had sort of rounded shoulder nuts to help spread the dropouts of 126mm bikes. This was when all bikes were metal and most were steel. Now, we have super stiff carbon frames with carbon dropouts; it's not so easy to persuade customers to just spread the spacing an extra 5mm (even though it probably won't hurt the frame at all).

Who knows, the transition might be five years away with a significant overlap (say 5 years) between 130mm hubs and 11 speed cassettes and 135mm hubs and 12 speed. That is kind of what is happening with integrated bearings in the bottom bracket. With electronic shifting, it's pretty easy to switch between 11 speed and 12 speed, to the point where moving from 11 to 12 speed might be a simple change of cassette and reprogramming of the shifter when you get the new frame and wheel that can accommodate the 12 speeds.

Dave Mayer

Ha ha. Seriously?

I have a 9 speed 12-27 cassette. It works great. All the gear range and increments that I need. Plus I a number of 12-28 10-speed cassettes. They work great too. But no better than the 9-speed cassette.

Shimano went to 11 speed is that Campagnolo had it. And it was a marketing benefit in terms of rendering previous vintages of bicycles 'obsolete'.

Second: Shimano could have easily adopted the exact Campagnolo 11-speed cog spacing. But the engineers at Shimano must have realized that this would have been a blindingly stupid career decision. Maintaining incompatibility, however trivial, keeps customers locked-in.

BoSoxYacht

Ha ha. Seriously?

Shimano, SRAM, and Campagnolo 11 speed are cross compatable.

Brian Ratliff

Good for you, man. Good for you. So, we are up to 9 speed now?

Brian Ratliff

Cool.

Source.

It was more or less the case with 10 speed as well. The cog spacing difference between 10 speed Campy and 10 speed Shimano/SRAM was pretty negligible. I can tell you from experience this was not the case with 9 speed. I tried, and while it kinda sorta worked, it was not great.

DinoShepherd

Totally with you.

For me the whole, CX, Gravel bike, 29r and road disc plays in as well.

CX, Gravel bikes and 29 MTBs have generally (not all) moved to 135 MTB hubs and decided it was "a good thing". I don't have a ton of experience with road discs, but many I have seen are 135 as well.

That leaves race bikes (caliper brakes) as the outliers here.

Good times...