It was frustration with duplicate gears that drove me to riding fixed drivetrains.
Seriously, I used to spend a great deal of time calculating gear charts (good way to while away boring staff meetings). Even with close-ratio crossover triples there were always annoying (conceptually annoying if not so horrible in practice) gaps, in the middle or at either end, together with duplication; you can see why people liked half steps. In fact, half stepping provided more useful gears out of a 5, 6, even 7 speed cassette than crossovers did; the downside was the need of a triple/granny for very low gears. Funny how front derailleurs go from devil to flee to angel to love between crossovers and half-steps. I used a hybrid 2X crossover/half stepped 7 sp (half-stepped the middle 5, 13 outer with 48/92" for downhills, 32 inner with 45/35" for climbing) for a while that worked very well (Kelly Take-Offs were the perfect shifter), but there was a big jump to the 35" low gear. Riv content: 1995 Riv custom downgraded to daily commuting duty. On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 6:16 PM Piaw Na(藍俊彪) <p...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you go way back to the 5-6 speed freewheel cassette days, the typical > bike was a 10 speed (really 8 speed since you can't go big/big or > small/small). It stands to reason once cassettes got to 11s, you didn't > really need the front derailleur/shifter any more as long as your low > gears/high gears were of sufficient range. Many people also point out that > a lot of the gears on the typical 2x drivetrain are duplicates, so you > don't really have 22 different gears anyway. > > -- 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/CALuTfgtcg29GsRZPD0TAbPh7KaEHDPQQT7Fv3UCsNPgVuFotEg%40mail.gmail.com.
