My bike's a compact so no granny gear. Is this a deal breaker? Would I be better off on a borrowed aluminium commuter that cost £160 new but came with a granny gear? Bearing in mind how much weight I'll have to carry? I'm kind of hoping it's doable
Rather than change the bike, if you don't like the gearing - why not change the gearing?
I think that bike has 50/34 chainset and 11-25 cassette and a Sora short cage rear mech. The linked (
Wiggle) site didn't have details, but
Evans has details for the same bike, so I used that.
That gives you about a 35.5" bottom gear by my reckoning (other results are available). You could probably put a bigger big sprocket at the back, but to do so you would probably need to replace the rear mech.
A bit of searching suggests that the Sora short cage has a capacity of 31T. As your current setup (50/34, 11-25) uses 30T, there's not much room for manoevre. But a quick search reveals that the long cage Sora can handle 37T and sprockets of 11-32.
Source.
So by my reckoning you could put an 11-32 cassette on the back if you moved to a long cage RD-3500, at a cost of about £25 for the mech £15 for the cassette and £10 for a new chain. (Less if you shop around).
This would give you a bottom gear of 28" as against your current 35", which is a big difference.
Using a Shimano road mech means no faffing about and worrying about cable pulls and so on. It should be fine with the existing shifters.
But don't take my word for it, as I'm an eejit. If you do decide to do this, get some proper advice. Also check out
this thread if you're thinking of doing this. There are people there who actually know what they are on about.
) by bodging on a down-tube shifter to shift the front (if that's possible), and the ordinary brifter to operate the back, saving the need to replace the left shifter.
