slowmotion
Quite dreadful
- Location
- lost somewhere
@bonsaibilly You're missing something: an appreciation that describing shifting may be easy but what's easy for some to understand is harder for others, and that the OP is more than satisfied with the advice given from @HLaB @GravityFighter (25 days ago).
A friend wanted some advice on using the gears on his new road bike. I'm fairly familiar with them, but I wasn't when I first got a road bike about six years ago. I find it quite hard to explain something that is completely second nature to me now. At the beginning, I would have been grateful to have some more advice than the two minutes that the LBS gave me. My friend's bike has Shimano, the one I have access to right now is Campag. I figured that using a Campag to demonstrate use of a Shimano would just be confusing, hence my request for links.Yebbut, the post was not about the "customer" understanding how to shift, it was about the "service provider" being able to describe or explain it. Which don't need a video. I do appreciate that S-M is on Campag so that is a different technique but surely it doesn't need a video to tell someone "this lever does this, and that lever does that - go on, try it out"? BB
I don't understand what the problem is. Could you elaborate?A request for a written explanation would have been perfectly sufficient. BB
+1Given your descriptions of what your friend's after, this may well not be much use, but the best piece of adviv I ever got about gears was to think about them in a completely different way. It's not that the lower gears make it easier to go up hills, and the high ones are for when you want to go faster. The gears are there to maintain your ideal cadence. So, find out the speed you're comfortable with your legs going round, then use the gears to keep them going round at that speed whatever speed you're doing. So you'll need lower gears to do that when you're going up a hill, because you go slowly up a hill, because it's hard; but then you'll want to shift up to go down the other side, because gravity will make you go fast and you don't want your legs going like windmills.
Once I'd got that in my head, the rest was just mechanical practice-till-familiar.
That's very good! I'll pass it down the line.+1
And how I got my kids' heads around gears?
- coupla days (flexible - as long as it took!) riding using the middle ring only, and getting used to the effects of the right hand shifting the cogs;
- then add the left hand shifting the rings.