What is your lowest gear and how low is too low. Are new bikes geared too high?

[Dogtrousers]

Development is definitely used in continental Europe, as you would expect, inches don't mean much outside of the UK and US. However the most common use is to say how many "developments" you have, ie, how many distinct gear combinations.

Cheers. My exposure to French cycling terminology is nil.

I did bone up on my bike parts French last year when I was hiring a bike. I got there, primed with all my newly learned vocab, only to find that the bike hire place was run by a couple from Yorkshire. (Ardiden Vélos in Luz St Sauver btw. Highly recommended)

 

[freiston]

. . . and whilst I'm here

I find the best way to work out my gear inches is to just input the tooth counts and tyre size into this website:

https://www.gear-calculator.com/

Then you can see different speeds for different gears at different cadences, you can easily see what difference an new cassette will make, you can see where your overlaps and gaps are etc. etc..

 

[Sharky]

Ironically, with U16 racing, there is a maximum gear restriction, measured not by inches, but by the distance covered by one pedal revolution, when in the highest gear. The distance being 6.93 metres (I think).

 

[Dogtrousers]

. . . and whilst I'm here

I find the best way to work out my gear inches is to just input the tooth counts and tyre size into this website:

https://www.gear-calculator.com/

Then you can see different speeds for different gears at different cadences, you can easily see what difference an new cassette will make, you can see where your overlaps and gaps are etc. etc..

What is really cool about that website is the ability to create a link to the currently selected setup. It's actually better than the spreadsheet I wrote (which has a similar facility and gives similar numbers) but I'm never going to admit that.

Ironically, with U16 racing, there is a maximum gear restriction, measured not by inches, but by the distance covered by one pedal revolution, when in the highest gear. The distance being 6.93 metres (I think).

Presumably that's something that's unified across countries? In which case the UCI or whoever is doing the governing is showing their continental roots and using développement

 

[Sharky]

Presumably that's something that's unified across countries? In which case the UCI or whoever is doing the governing is showing their continental roots.

I believe it is a UCI standard, adopted by the UK .
But rolling a bike along a measured length of road is probably the quickest and easiest method of checking gear sizes. Counting teeth and measuring wheel diameters to calculate a gear size, would not be very practical at the start of a race with say 40 riders.

 

[Dogtrousers]

I believe it is a UCI standard, adopted by the UK .
But rolling a bike along a measured length of road is probably the quickest and easiest method of checking gear sizes. Counting teeth and measuring wheel diameters to calculate a gear size, would not be very practical at the start of a race with say 40 riders.

Suddenly développement is beginning to sound like the more sensible and practical option. I may recalibrate my brain to use it.

In your example 6.93m would be the circumference of the notional penny farthing wheel. Circumference is πd so that is 6.93/π or 2.21m or 86.8" Does that sound about right?

 

[Sharky]

And thinking about the question "Are new bikes geared too high?"

In a "medium gear event", that's a maximum of 72", the late Zak Carr recorded a sub 54 minute 25.

Don't know if this is still the record.

 

[avecReynolds531]

Sheldon Brown's gear calculator has options for wheel, tyre, and cranks, cassettes, and hub gears.

The results are given in gain ratio, gear inches, meters development (the website spelling), and a variety of mph or kph at certain rpm intervals.

For me, it's been very useful - particularly for single speed & Sturmey Archer. https://sheldonbrown.com/gear-calc.html

FWIW, I'm used to the lowest gear of 22T chainring & 32T sprocket on 700C, 35mm tyres, and 170mm cranks working out at 18.7"

 

[Dogtrousers]

. . . and whilst I'm here

I find the best way to work out my gear inches is to just input the tooth counts and tyre size into this website:

https://www.gear-calculator.com/

Then you can see different speeds for different gears at different cadences, you can easily see what difference an new cassette will make, you can see where your overlaps and gaps are etc. etc..

Thanks for this @freiston I had played with this site before but found it a bit confusing. This time I rolled up my sleeves, mastered it, and it's great. I'm a convert!

Here's a link to my existing and soon-to-be setups side by side, using my new favourite website, and expressing gearing in metres of development, my new favourite way of measuring gearing. (It's just so much more intuitive than imagining a penny farthing with a really big or really small wheel. I'm a convert!)
https://www.gear-calculator.com/?GR...Z2=11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25,27,30,34&UF2=2150#

Multiply gear inches by 8 to get development in cm. Or near enough, it's to within 0.25%. 7.9796 exactly, (That's pi x 2.54, the inch->cm factor) And divide to go in the other direction

 

[Punkawallah]

I am already in my later years... I need to worry whether there is enough money to cover the cost of my funeral!

In fairness, I suspect that’s something you won’t have to worry about :-)

 

[oldandslow]

What's an "inch"?

Sorry, just kidding: I'm at the wrong end of my 50s, and grew up knowing my height was just under 6'3" and also 190cm (Australia switched from imperial to metric when I was very young). I must admit I've never become familiar with gear-inches, though.

Others have explained the mechanics. The process by which we came to use inches to measure gears was brought home to me when I visited the transport museum in Coventry. They had on display both an ordinary and an early safety of the type that supplanted the ordinary, as well as an advertising poster. The promotion for the safety included the number of inches on its (single) gear, because it was being compared directly with the ordinary, for which that was a basic measurement.

If you were considering replacing your ordinary with a safety, you'd definitely want to know how fast you'd be able to pedal it.

 

[oldandslow]

Gearing seems such a personal thing. Like others, I started when bikes came with a standard 52-40*14-24, so a pretty high low gear by modern standards. On the other hand, my 6-speed Brompton has 100"-33" and this is the standard configuration. That seems a pretty good range to me for most areas of the UK except maybe the hillier, but I'm always seeing people who want to swap to smaller chainrings.

There again, when I joined my first club as a teenager, the story was that the club timekeeper, who was retired, had brazed a 13 sprocket to his cranks to get a proper low gear. That would have been in the mid-20-inches I'd think.

 

[Shut Up Legs]

Just to clarify: my previous post re: what is an inch, it was actually a joke, not serious.

 

[Sharky]

Just to clarify: my previous post re: what is an inch, it was actually a joke, not serious.

I don't know..... Give you an inch and you'll want a mile next.

 

[Bristolian]

I love the fact that since the 1970's we've been going metric inch by inch