One of the first things I noticed about riding my 3 speed
Dahon Vitesse was that the standard gearing was WAY too low for normal
riding. I’ve blogged about gear inchery
a couple of times (technophobes look away now) here and here.
A little over 18 months ago, after much deliberation I pimped
my ride a bit, splashing out on a new
front crank, 46t chainring, chain (as the original one was completely
shot) and 16t rear sprocket. This
resulted in a pretty useable set of gears and has been the configuration in
which I’ve ridden the subsequent 5,000(!) miles. The crank, being a proper one, rather than
the cheap thing fitted by Dahon, also offered the benefit of enabling me change
the chainring on its own in future.
Inevitably though:
- Drive components wear out
- Being an engineer, the urge to fiddle with gear ratios once
again becomes too much to bear
The former circumstance probably reached the point where new parts were required quite some time ago. My chain is now stretched so severely that getting it to a consistent tension is impossible and as a result, both the chainring (to a lesser degree) and rear sprocket (to an almost comedy degree) are now hooked. I’ll post up some pictures in due course and you’ll see what I mean.
SheldonBrown’s outstanding
website has a far more detailed explanation of why this happens than I’m going
to offer here. Suffice to say that it’s
a combination of lengthy metal on metal wear (which is governed by miles ridden
and the laws of physics) and half-arsed maintenance (which is governed by my
inherent idleness).
And so I’ve had to part with some hard-ebayed cash in
order to buy a new chain and sprockets.
The straight swap choice of a 16t rear was pretty simple
but I’ve elected (after an amount of consideration that marks me out as a
deeply sad individual) to up the chainring size to 48t. The main reason for this is that I tend to
spend quite a lot of time in second gear and it now has a tendency to feel slightly
too low. The new gearing will raise
second from 57.5 to 60 gear inches.
Inevitably, with only 3 gears on tap, gear choice is a
bit of a compromise. However, 60 inches
is also the gearing which I had my single speed MTB for a good while and I
always found it to be a nice, multi-purpose ratio. I know there will be times (tired hills and
headwinds) when I’ll be fondly remembering the slightly lower gear two, but
it’ll be just that bit better as a gear to spin along in most other times. Furthermore, first gear has always been way
too low – used only for severely steep or tired climbing. Hopefully, rather than a two-speed bike with
a bail out gear (which, effectively, is what I have now) I’ll have three usable
gear ratios.
I told you I was sad.
Best of all though, I’m having some shiny new bike parts
and that means a couple of hours spent in grimy-fingered, cycle maintenance
heaven! The Royal Mail is (I hope)
bringing the components with haste to my letterbox and so I’ll post up a load
of pictures when they all arrive and I swap everything over.
