Unexpected results
So I ripped off the 48 tooth chainring and replaced it with a 42 tooth one, then took a 37 mile route back home from work today. When I went up towards St Johns (against a fairly stiff wind,) it doesn’t seem to make any difference – I ended up in the 42×16 gear as opposed to my previous 48×18 gear, which still left me with three smaller gears – but when I turned east and the headwind became a tailwind, it was a different story.
I’ve been making an effort to pedal faster the last few months, partially because I’ve been trying to avoid the skippier gears, but mainly because it gives me a little bit of extra headroom when I run into a slight grade (so I can grind slower in the same gear for longer before I have to start downshifting) but when I was running west on Columbia I kept finding myself going along at somewhere between 90 and 100 rpm in my 42×12 gear as the wind blew me towards the gorge.
And as a side-effect of this, both knees were making very unhappy noises by the time I turned south and started winding up the long ramp to the summit of the i205 bike path at Gateway Transit Center.
But to counteract that the couple of times I had to drop into my new 42×32 dump gear it made the few (short; maybe I’ll climb Larch Mountain on sunday?) ramps much less exciting in the sort of “oh g-d my lungs!” way that Canby to Estacada were.
Maybe I won’t have to give up and put a second chainring on the front (or I’ll get a really small one and use a spare spoke as a manual shifter, thus avoiding the extra mechanical bits of another shifter and front derailer.)
Time to find a steep ramp or two and give it a better test.