Bike Touring Gear Inches

Gear inches understanding your gear ratios.

Bike touring gear inches.

The higher the gear inch number the farther your bike can travel on one revolution of the crank. Gear inch comparisons across drivetrains. I do my calculations with sheldon brown s gear calculator. On a touring bike 18 is a great low gear and 113 is a good high gear.

That isn t quite right since the 700cx42 tires are more like 28 in diameter. Can a 1x. A mix of shimano alivio and sora the 520 has 48 36 26t chainrings mated to an 11 36t cassette. So if for example our straight gear ratio is 44 16 and the rear wheel has a standard overall diameter of 26 then the calculation would be.

Gear inches is one of several relative measures of bicycle gearing. That is a whopping 133 of the goal. 26 x 44 16 giving us 71 5 gear inches. It s basically derived from a formula and provides an indication of the mechanical advantage of different gears.

As in a car low gearing is for going up hills and high gearing is for going fast. The sturmey archer brompton bwr takes two sprockets but other models are included in the list for the benefit of tinkerers see discussion. Riding the gdmbr and even on the northern stretch of the natchez trace parkway i got down to 3 5mph on steeper climbs using 17 1 gear inches. Here is the most technical aspect i am going hit you with about touring bicycle gearing.

The higher the gear inches then the harder it will be to pedal. The touring bike gearing has a greater range than that of a road set up as it includes a much lower set of gears to cope with the variety of terrain on a tour. 80 is green 50ish 80 blue and below 50 red. So we get 26 3 gear inches.

What are gear inches. You don t want to miss anything. Gear inches is gear ratio times the diameter of the rear wheel. When you are using one of your front chainrings and shift to one of your rear cogs you are changing the gear inches of your rear wheel.

Too high tech for you. The lowest that bike will go is 25 3 gear inches. Values for gear inches typically range from 18 very low gearing via 70 medium gearing to 125 very high gearing. It has disc brakes an aluminum fork and yes a triple.

Given that touring triple cranksets 48 36 24. The trek 520 updated for 2019 is about as modern as a classic touring bike can get. We ve also been in that situation and yes we made the mistake of buying too many things. Colors group similar values.

There are many great resources out there explaining every piece of gear that is useful when traveling on your bicycle but not so many.