You'll definitely feel the change in one cog tooth. I'd suggest staying with the 72" gear, though, and working on techniques to maximize your flow in traffic Get out of the saddle and use your upper body to rock the bike to get up to speed faster. Practice track-standing, so you can jump as soon as the light changes. A fixed gear makes it much easier for me to manage pedestrian traffic and speed changes than a singlespeed.
Philip (two speed fixed Quickbeam) Santa Rosa, CA On Monday, August 6, 2018 at 3:30:41 PM UTC-7, Dave Small wrote: > > Hi all. One of the bikes I brought with me to Boston when I moved was a > Quickbeam with 38mm tires, 42 teeth in front and 16 in back. Sheldon puts > it that 71.7 inches. That worked well on the long, straight, and > relatively uninterrupted roads north of Indianapolis, but I now find it too > high because of the traffic and the congestion on paths. I have to stop > and go much more often and don't go as fast even when I am riding, and I > want to lower the gearing to adjust for these new limitations. Mainly I > want to be able to get up to speed faster and easier when taking off from a > red light, but also my overall cruising speed is slower because of the > vehicular and pedestrian traffic. > > If I go from 16 to 17 teeth in back then the gear goes from 71.7 to 67.5 > inches, a 6.3% reduction. Going from 16 to 18 teeth sends me down to 63.7 > inches, an 11.2% reduction. I know I'll feel the change from 16 to 18, but > in your experience would I notice a 6% reduction from 16 to 17, or is that > too small a jump to make any practical difference? Any recommendations > from the single-speeders out there? > > Thanks. > > Dave > Boston/Indy > -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
