Back to the question of what gearing for my new Circle A bike. As a standard gearing, which will be fine for the relatively flat terrain around Providence and still allow me to make it up some of the biggest climbs in New England, I’m still convinced that the compact (50-34) and 11-25 is the way to go (see my previous post about that setup).
As a secondary setup, I’d like to be able to swap out the 50-34 for a 52-36, in case I’m doing some flat crit (where I’d almost certainly ride my old bike to avoid crashing the new one anyway) or become a sprinter in the next year.
But my two year plan also includes doing some of the more ridiculous hill climbs in New England. Specifically, I’m planning on doing Whiteface and Ascutney next year, and Mount Washington the following year. From what I’ve read, my compact setup should be ok for Whiteface. But that gearing seems to be no where near low enough for Washington (and probably Ascutney). After much googling and perusing of the Mount Washington forums, I still can’t say that I’m sure what I’d need or how to best setup my bike to accomdate it, but here is what I think might work:
for very difficult hill climbs and training rides with lots of climbing (say, for example, the Vermont Six Gap, or the Georgia Six Gap, or if I manage to bring my bike to Seattle or Colorado), it would be nice to have a setup that would get me some lower gears. So for those rides, I slap on a 13-29. However, that is likely to exceed the capacity of a short cage rear derailleur, and I’m vain and want to keep my short cage on there, so instead I would drop the big ring down to 44 or 46 (maybe even bumping the small ring up to 36). There’s a chance that 2007 compact front derailleurs won’t work with smaller than 16t jumps, but my guess is that they will, and in any case, the 2008 derailleur is the same for compact and regular setups.
Then, for Mount Washington, I leave the 13-29 on, and get myself a mountain bike crank. The one I linked to is nice, because I could actually keep a double setup (32/22) and the capacity would be easily in range for the short cage rear derailleur. The only difficulty here is that there’s no chance that the braze on bracket would be able to accommodate the low position the derailleur would have to be in. However, I think–not sure, I’ve contacted Chris about this whole scheme and we’ll see if he thinks its plausible–I should be able to put a clamp on just below the bracket for this race. If that doesn’t work, the backup plan would be to go with a campy or mountain bike triple with the two larger rings removed along with the front derailleur (so just the 22 or 24 tooth in the front).
