Force 5 Robert wrote:I heard somewhere that SRAM was going to offer an 11-36. That seems a bit extreme - and would have big gaps between shifts - but it seems its going that direction.
Pardon a lapse for gear-heads, but this is what half steppers have been waiting for in a nine cog cassette.
With an 8% jump between rear cogs, which used to be pretty normal in a previous century, and with 42-39-26 tooth granny you could work out a very reasonable range of gears with such a range. High is 103 and next in line is 96 gear inches. Step down in easy increments until it's time to wake up granny when you bottom out on the middle cog, and then you have three more walking speed gears to get you and the truck hauling your duffle to the top of the hill.
Just to interject retro-opinion on this forum, making the small gap between gears happen at the rear rather than between front rings seems to have followed the introduction of indexed shifting on the rear cogs. Since the late 70's it seems gears were set up to work your way down for a while on the big ring, and then it was time to move to the small ring for a while and then if you had one to go to the tiny ring. Tourists before indexing had the option of the half-step model with alternating shifting front and rear if you wanted to use every combination, with that bailout gear waiting way down there for the truly fearsome hill.
It remains a viable option into the age of double digit cassettes. My Rivendell debuted on CO 9 with a six-cog freewheel half-step and granny setup. I went to an eight speed cassette in 2008 mostly because 13-28 freewheels were getting hard to find, but I don't feel that I gained anything by adding more gear options. It's still half-step and granny, but the granny is sooooo low that I rarely bottom out anymore, despite my advancing age.
I had considered dredging up some of my old 13-32 six speeds and changing the front to 52-48-30, more from nostalgia than anything else. Maybe if I do CO in 2011.
Sorry, sometimes old cyclists just can't resist a spin down a pretty geeky lane.