I've had a Giant MTB for about 18months now and i'm considering buying a road bike for when i'm sticking to the tarmac. I know little about bikes and nothing at all about road bikes - i've never owned one before - so i'm looking for some advice.
I live in a hilly area with some serious hills, so my main query is on the gearing. I'm quite taken by the idea of having just one 'gear' on the front and have seen a 9-speed bike with just the rear derailleur - my thoughts here just being the simplicity of having just one shifter to use whilst cycling and this will lose the front derailleur meaning less maintenance and less weight/wind resistance - albeit not much saving there.... Is this sensible? Or to tackle bigger hills am I going to need the extra ratios a 14-speed bike will give me?
My MTB has 27 gears, but having got myself fitter and stronger, I never use the lowest few gears now - not on tarmac anyway...and of course, the road bike will give me a weight saving and tyre resistance saving over the MTB anyway...
Any advice on this, or anything else I should think about would be much appreciated!!
Hi guys, I've had a Giant MTB for about 18months now and i'm considering buying a road bike for when i'm sticking to the tarmac. I know little about bikes and nothing at all about road bikes - i've never owned one before - so i'm looking for some advice. I live in a hilly area with some serious hills, so my main query is on the gearing. I'm quite taken by the idea of having just one 'gear' on the front and have seen a 9-speed bike with just the rear derailleur - my thoughts here just being the simplicity of having just one shifter to use whilst cycling and this will lose the front derailleur meaning less maintenance and less weight/wind resistance - albeit not much saving there.... Is this sensible? no it is not, you really need all of your gears on a road bike, and there is no advantage on uninstalling the front derailleur  Or to tackle bigger hills am I going to need the extra ratios a 14-speed bike will give me? My MTB has 27 gears, but having got myself fitter and stronger, I never use the lowest few gears now - not on tarmac anyway...and of course, the road bike will give me a weight saving and tyre resistance saving over the MTB anyway... Any advice on this, or anything else I should think about would be much appreciated!!
I wasn't saying i was going to remove the front derailleur - I've been looking at a bike that only has one gear at the front and a 9-gear changer at the back. The others i've been looking at tend to have 2 at the front and 7 at the back, giving 14 gears (although if road bikes are the same as MTBs, I assume in practice you don't actually get 14 different ratios to use..?).
I didn't mean buying a bike with 2 or more gears at the front and removing the derailleur so i only use one gear at the front, I meant buying a bike that is set up with no front derraileur as it only has one gear at the front...?
Basically, I guess the question is, is there a huge advantage in a 14-gear bike over a 9-gear bike? Especially if the 14-gear option doesn't actually give 14 different useable gears and the 9-gear bike does give 9 differnt ratios?
there is some true there because generally speaking there are two forbidden combinations ( because of mechanical reasons), they are known as the Big-Big (biggest chainring + biggest sprocket) and the small-small (smallest chainring + smallest sprocket), so lets say you still have in that situation 12 usable ratios, 3 more than 9. If you look at it as sole numbers it won't sound like too much of a difference but what you really get is a big difference because shifting from the small chainring to the big chainring means a very big shift of ratios for two main situations; climbing a steep hill or going fast in a group ride, descending a false flat, time trialling or for sprinting for example. Finally even if you have one single chainring in front and nine sprockets in the back you will affect the chain line making for more stress on your chain leading into eventual mechanical problems,
Thank you, What you said makes a lot of sense. Hadn't considered that the two chainrings make a bigger difference than the smaller changes at the back, so 2 x 7 will give a bigger range of ratios than 1 x 9. And I think for the hills i have to tackle, i might need that extra range!!
And I see what you mean about the extra wear - with the single chainring the same problem will exist to some extent as the big-big, small-small problem I was talking about (and you expained better) in the first place.
Going to my local shop tomorrow to have a look at a few bikes 'in the flesh' so I can now go armed with a bit more idea of what I need!!
OK, so had a look at some bikes over the weekend and now i've still got a problem over the gears... Seen two Giant bikes, both very similar and they're both the same price, but one has 16gears (2x8) and the other has 24 (3x8). As they're the same price, should I definitely go for more gears? Or is 16gears likely to be enough anyway and I shouldn't base my decision on that?
Hi guys, My MTB has 27 gears, but having got myself fitter and stronger, I never use the lowest few gears now - not on tarmac anyway...and of course, the road bike will give me a weight saving and tyre resistance saving over the MTB anyway... Any advice on this, or anything else I should think about would be much appreciated!!
if you don't use all of your gears in your former bike then you don't need them on your new road bike, i personally own both of those options on road bikes (double crankset and triple crankset), i have been using lately the double crankset mainly but it is a compact crankset (50/34 chainrings) as opposed to a 53/39 for example, coupled with a 26 or 27 in the cassette it gives you a good configuration for climbing,
Thank you! The 16 gear bikes comes with the compact chainring - 50/34 you mention, the 24 gear bike with a 52/42/30 chainring set - both with the same rear cassette. I think from what you've said that I shouldn't put too much weight on the gears when making my decision and worry about other features of the bikes instead as it seems i'll probably have enough gears with the 16 and if i go for the 24 for other reasons, the extra gears will just be a bonus.
