Further to yesterday’s post, after a 20-mile test ride the chainring swap appears to be a success:
Shifts to the so-called “granny” ring now seem to be consistent and reliable, and as a bonus upshifts are a little bit smoother too:
Why is it called a “granny,” anyway? Is it because grannies are supposed to be weak? Or is it because they have fewer teeth? Either way, it seems like grandpas are equally weak and toothless, and I’m tempted to say that going forward we should simply call it the “grandparent” ring. However, triples are virtually extinct as it is, so at this point it probably doesn’t matter.
Anyway, see that bulge along the inner plate of the derailleur, adjacent to the chain?
With the smaller ring the chain was below that bulge. Therefore, the derailleur had to move farther inboard in order to reliably move the chain off the ring, at the risk of dropping it. But with the larger ring, everything seems to line up more or less the way it should, so hopefully we’re all good now and that’s that.
So why use a triple on a road bike in 2025, anyway? Well, for one thing, I already had all the parts. (Okay, maybe I had to buy the chain.) But more importantly, I wanted the Roadini to be the alpha dog in my kennel of road bikes, and therefore I wanted it to have All The Gears–everything from teeny-tiny ones for scaling steep unpaved grades on summer vacation to big-ass ones for going down the other side, plus all the usual road bike combinations in between.
The modern approach to achieving wide-range gearing on a sporty all-terrain drop bar bike is something like SRAM Red ASSPLR:
In fairness to SRAM, I know you don’t have to get Red if you want the latest wide-range gearing. Nevertheless, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that their battery-powered remote control derailleur alone costs Seven Hundred American Fun Tickets:
Setting that aside, firing up the Sheldon Brown Gear Calculator, here’s the drivetrain on the Roadini:
And here’s SRAM Red ASSPLR with a 40-tooth chainring, which I believe is pretty typical, and their $600 ASS-tastic 10-46 cassette:
Not only are the low gears virtually identical, but I’ve got a much higher gear too, which means I’m 100% guaranteed to win a race against anyone riding a bike equipped with SRAM Red ASSPLR.
Best of all, I don’t even have to plug it in!
Also, a friction shifter allows you to use pretty much any cassette you want regardless of the number of cogs, and if you haven’t checked lately you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that 8-speed cassettes these days cost very little. Presumably enough people are buying $600 cassettes that the same company is able to sell you this for about what a couple of inner tubes* costs:
*[An inner tube was sort of a bladder made out of butyl or latex that cyclists once used to keep air inside their tires.]
In any case, with the shifting issue (hopefully) sorted out, I’ll next move on to brake curation:
The stopping power with these rims is excellent, but as I mentioned, I’m getting a little bit of squealing, and I’ve now tracked down what may be the last remaining ceramic-specific road brake pads on planet Earth.
Imagine what I could accomplish if I cared about something that was actually important…