OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

OK so I've got my mountain bike (Reebok Solo) fitted out for road use and working pretty well but I'm running out of gears. Obviously being a mountain bike it isn't designed for speed. I'm informed I need a larger chainring on the front which sounds logical but given the el cheapo nature of the bike I'm not entirely sure what it has on it and what I'd be best upgrading to.

My current thought process is almost go as big as possible on the front and change gears on the rear as I shouldn't need many, I prefer to work on torque anyway rather than dropping down many cogs.

As usual any thoughts and suggestions much appreciated. :thumbsup:
(sorry for starting yet another thread but my other thread was about which bike and that is settled now and I didn't want to pollute the cycling thread)

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Oooh, some googling revealed the following:
so that'd be 42t on there currently, it has 4 holes that I now realise I should've measured the distance between but I'll do that later if I'm still unsure.

Full details are on P83 of this PDF: http://www.livingsport.dk/Files/Livi...ccessories.pdf

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Changing the gearing at the front could be more trouble than it's worth as there could be issues with compatibility with cranks/spider, derailleur, etc.

Far easier and cheaper to change the rear cogs.

Most folks these days seem to run compact road chain sets, i.e. a twin setup with 50/34 rings. A common range of rear cogs would run from 28-11 teeth. I'm common!

With that front chainring range I's see about an 11-tooth smallest rear cog and see what's available online. A lot will depend upon how many rear gears you have and the type of free hub. Take the bike to a local bike shop and they will be able to help/advise better than I can with the info you've given.

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Ah darn, I was hoping the front would be easier as I was assuming it was just changing the outer cog of the 3 which has 4 simple bolts. nothing is ever easy eh?
I don't imagine getting MUCH smaller of a rear one but maybe it doesn't need to be much smaller.
I'll drop by the bike factory with it sometime and ask their opinion, thanks for the advice Jabba :)

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Perhaps try to get used to spinning faster, it takes a bit of practice and while to get used to but is the way forward if you want to get quicker.

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Clipless pedals and a good shoes help make this better.

With modern compact drive chainsets, swapping to a larger outer ring can lead to issues when changing up from the middle ring to the outer ring. Shimano used to allow a twelve tooth difference, but we always used to be able to bodge something (she says while running an old Suntour XC Pro MD chainset with eight speed Shimano XT cassette and 9 speed deraileurs, all worked by seven speed thumb shifters). However with compact drive the front deraileur has a smaller throw and shorter cage.

A 42 front to 11 tooth rear sprocket should give you a fairly good gear. If you are running disk brakes you can swap the rims for 700c road bike rims and narrow tyres which improves speed a little.

Spinning is your answer though or finding a Touring bike set up that you can put on the bike, which will give you 28-38-50 tooth chainset and deraileur. A high cadence though is far better for your knees than a big chainring. :thumbsup:

Re: OMO: Cycle gearing, help!
 

Plus one on spinning out the gears as already stated. Leg speed is all you need really. Try to get you legs going up to 100 rpm before changing up, listening to music that has a 100 bpm drum track helps a lot. Takes a while, but you should be OK up to about 30 mph with your set up and 100 rpm cadence. :smt040