On my mountain bike I have 27 gears and a big wide ratio of gears, making climbing steep hills a lot easier than on my road bike which has only 16 gears.
Now I realise it is not about number of gears, it is about the gearing ratio, but I was finding that climbing hills on my road bike was a lot tougher.
The picture below shows my standard gear set up.
After speaking with my friends and other riders I'd meet, their opinions, views and advice was wide ranging!
So I decided to ask an expert and emailed Dave from Bike fixed.com and got all of the information, advice and guidance I was after.
Dave asked me to take a picture of my current gearing set up on my bike and send it to him. Where he advised me that I had the correct 'long' cage already on my bike so there were upgrade options to get me better gearing.
In short without spending a small fortune on upgrading lots of my current bikes components (cassette, dérailleur, shifters, chain etc.) a simple change of rear cassette would suffice.
I would still have 8 gears on my rear cassette, but the gearing ratio would change from its 'compact' 11-28T to 11-32T. Giving me lower gears to ride uphill.
Simple, great advice and at a fraction of the costs of a gearing upgrade.
With Dave being the expert 'mobile' mechanic I booked a time and date for him to come to my home in his mobile workshop (to read more about Dave and Bike Fixed click here)
After a quick catch up chat, Dave quickly and expertly fitted the new cassette, a new chain as my existing chain was worn, flipped my stem to help my handlebar position and realigned my front wheel after my recent crash (read crash blog here!). Job done! Thanks Dave.
So I am now looking forward to making some time for a test training ride really soon to see how the extra gears feel.
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