Half-stepping actually makes sense for rolling terrain where you shift at least a couple of rear cogs at a time -- terrain with sharp elevation changes, and use the chainrings to fine tune on flatter portions. But it made more sense with few rear cogs; I worked it out once long ago and it works well with up to 5 or 6 cogs; beyond that number and you end up with too many high gears or too-small gaps at the low end. But I did "pseudo half step" a 7 speed cassette, half-stepping the middle 5 and using the big (IIRC, 4 t jump) as a bailout with inner ring only, and the small as a downhill gear with the big ring only; with 48/45 or 47/44 rings, this gave a very useful commuting setup, with the 2 most-used cruising gears in the middle 17 t cog, and "indexed" shifting between the 2 rings (IIRC, the cruising gears were roughly 70" and 65"). Front shifts are very fast and precise: just slam the lever back and forth against the stops, at least, if you don't have a granny ring (my granny was the 32 t big #7 cog).
Of course, 9+ speeds make all of this more or less academic. On Sun, May 8, 2022 at 10:59 AM Drew Saunders <drew.saund...@gmail.com> wrote: > "A half step triple would work, like a 44/40/28 for example. The numbers > are off the top of my head, not a suggestion. Having the half step would > help split some of the large jumps in the cassette." > > You guessed pretty well. The jumps in the 13-42 average about 18%, and a > 44-40 is about a 9% change, so that's a near perfect half step. A 28-42 is > a pretty low gear, so if anyone really wanted to live through the glory > years of half-step gearing again, the 13-42 would work. I don't know why > anyone would want to shift so much if they didn't have to, but you could. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfgvBrhUJ4JcL4kEFog3vsEqW4MO%2BzNuo3pQGfaqXHwOLgg%40mail.gmail.com.
