For the Gearheads - Gear Math
176
Member
329 days
Nutty posted 44 weeks ago.
Im no whiz on this but if its any help, i cant remember the last time i used the little guy up front it could be missing teeth for all i know.
-Alan
My fancy new blogitty blog.
http://therunningfridge.blogspot.com/
252
Member
314 days
Leroy Bonkers posted 44 weeks ago.
Check out this link page on Sheldon Brown's webstie. It is a handy "rollout calculator". Perhaps that would help.
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gears/
Gear ratios aside, I think you would probably get crisper shifting if you changed chainrings before your find yourself in the lowest or highest cog.
252
Member
309 days
cjhoffmn posted 43 weeks ago.
That gear calculator is exactly what I was thinking of.
Then after your comments and talking to several friends, its probably that I may just be able to crank the big ring with little need to drop to the little ring.
I appreciate the replies a lot.
-c
252
Member
314 days
Leroy Bonkers posted 43 weeks ago.
Ya'll must either live in the flatlands or have thighs the size of trashcans. Either way, congratulations!:)
33
Member
393 days
TriFatBoy posted 42 weeks ago.
Leroy Bonkers;78924 wrote:
Ya'll must either live in the flatlands or have thighs the size of trashcans. Either way, congratulations!:)
They don't call me el gringo thighs for nothing. :)
~fatBoy
http://trifatboy.com
I'm running my first tri in Sept and have been training for the last several months. When it comes to the biking, I was a former BMXer with many years of experience, but I'm relatively new to road riding. I'm trying to get used to the gearing and am curious about the actual math related to the gears.
In particular, if I'm on the small ring on the front, and run all the way to the smallest gear in the back, at first, I expected to the big ring with the largest gear in the back would be the "next" up in turns of leverage.
However, it seems that's not the case from the way it feels when I ride. Has anyone done the math on the gears so that the power and leverage can be understood in simple terms? For example, if I applied X amount of power to the stroke with a big ring of Y size and on the small gear of z size, what's the output on a 700 wheel?
I may be thinking of this wrong, but I'm looking for some sort of standard to understand the real effects of when I change gears.
So far, in my riding, aside from seriously steep hills, I never seem to want to come off the big ring. I just move up and down on the gears in the back. While it seems intuitive that I should just change the gear to the comfortable one, I want to understand if there's a more "optimal" way to shift.
Any feedback would be welcome.
-C