Disregarding my Schwinn Typhoon, I started keeping score with my 1976 Peugeot PX 10 LE. It came with a Stronglight 52 x 45 and a 14 x 21 five speed freewheel. I always thought this Peugeot was set up for the pavé of northern France with those gears and wire-wrapped and soldered 3x tubular wheels. Yet according to Peugeot’s advertising, this is what the boys rode in the Tour de France. Chapeau! Since this was my first real bike, the coolness of this Rule #5 rig was lost on me. The uncoolness of Mafac brakes and Simplex derailleurs was not lost on me and over time I swapped out many of the French components for Campagnolo ones but the Stronglight crankset was worthy and it stayed the longest. I found a drilled-out 42 inner ring. Surely Bernard Thévenet would approve of that. It was not such a taskmaster as the 45 and scored very high on the cool scale.
Eventually the 52s went to 53s and the 42s to 39s and there they stayed.
Post-Peugeot I lived on the sandy moraine called Cape Cod. It is rolling, easy-to-ride country; there were no steep, long climbs and the default 39 inner ring was too small for the Cape. Some switched back to 42s but our LBS had a handful of Campagnolo 44 tooth inner rings and a few of us installed them. It didn’t occur to me at the time but I was reverting to a more modern version of my original Peugeot gears. This was not a chainring for the early season but once summer arrived, it made perfect sense. The shifts between the front two chainrings were subtle and smooth. It was all good until we ventured over to a proper climb on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard. That climb, known to us as the hill-o-death, started off steep and never eased (this was pre-Garmin world, an estimated 15% grade). It actually was the kind of climb where if you were going to have a heart attack, it would be here. The 44 worked, it just meant most of it was done out of the saddle and the pain cave entrance was lower down. But, it may have been a faster way to get the job done. There was no in-the-saddle spinning going on; it was just more heaving of bike and body trying to turn over the shortest gear the 44 would give up.
I came to Maui armed with the 53 x 39. Earlier on Kauai, I once felt shame and horror as an older dude with stick legs passed me on the Waimea Canyon climb. Those sorry sticks were whizzing over a vile compact crankset. It gave me pause. But on Maui the 53 x 39 got the job done, until I did Maui’s version of the hill-o-death, The Wall. I got up it, but it wasn’t pretty or easy. Something was going to break doing that: knees, heart, chain, pedal, more likely part of me, rather than the bike. I was on Maui for the long haul and the Wall was not going anywhere so I opted for a compact crank.
My above prologue leads me to this, my theory of relativity. The terrain dictates the chainrings. You want a 52 x45 on your bike, stay away from the Pyrenees. If you have a compact crankset on there, there had better be some big ass climbs out your front door. But here at Velominati we like to quantify our suffering. My math is as weak as my VAM but I’m working on a calculation with correction factors which would determine what kind of crank one should have on their bike.
((GL2 x %Gr) 1/age) Bf x BPf x Df
Where:
GL = length of toughest grade encountered on Sunday ride.
Gr = Steepest sustained section of GL.
Bf = Belgian Factor, also known as Museeuw. The need to always ride in the large ring, always.
BPf = Big Pussy Factor, inverse of Bf. The inclination when a climb begins to sit when one might stand, to shift down rather than up.
Df = The Dutch factor, this is a terrain correction for sea level riding, as the Dutch do along the North Sea.
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@ChrisO
Fuck. Picked up by the pedant's pedant (or should that be pedants' pedant? I think not). Time to go for a beer.
@johnthughes ahh¨, not bad indeed. i just wanted to know if you attented the party i was spinning records at :) funny 'lil' world!
just did the alpine loop in harrisonburg va on my 53/39 and13/26 in the back everyone had compact and huge cassette in the back
@ErikdR
Despite the way it looks in the photo, the causeway is similarly underwhelming. Basically it exists purely for a horse & cart to take tourists back and forth from Victor Harbour, the gap it spans would be less than a kilometre. Based on the island name I assume it may have been there originally to allow mined granite to be carted off the island...
@ab
No flogging sir. Sorry to disappoint. This is the road version of Britt's enduro bike. I like to hear of people screwing around with their equipment. I remember Rob taking his front derailleur and large chain ring for a race up Mt Washington but never considered it as a possible solution for all riding. Bravo!
@frank
I realize that going small is in vogue and that the world is overpopulated by pussies and people who pay attention to "facts" and "science". That said, that science is clouded by doping and all other manner of skewed data.
This is an excellent point, Frank! Why are there so many pussies? No standards, I say.
I was sub teaching 10th grade last week at a local, expensive, respected private school where most of the teachers have Ph.Ds. In a world geography class groups were presenting on communal work/living experiments around the world. A group was presenting on lobster farming in Mexico. I asked where, considering that whole two ocean thing.
One student told me I was "doing it wrong" and that their regular teacher didn't do it that way, making them oh, you know, look at a map or anything. Then all her classmates started chirping in as well, telling me the location didn't matter. Fucking hell. High school world geography and any mention of a map/location is "doing it wrong." Little fuckers.
(I discussed with the regular teacher and he confirmed what I knew; he tries to not make the focus strictly on maps & facts, but all the groups should have indeed known where on the globe their community lived.)
@Mikael Liddy
OK, I see - Cheers!
As for the Cogal in Oz in February: I would sure like to try something like that at some point - but 'unfortunately' I have a 4-week-long ride lined up in the USA in the summer of 2014. I fear that most of my holiday time (and budget) will have to be earmarked for that little jaunt. But 2015? Who knows...?
@HMBSteve
Is this the coast-side of West Old LaHonda?
It had Campagnolo Super Record, the Tesch 101. We had a circuit race at the Zigurat in 1987. It had a small hill every lap. I made the mistake of working on it the night before. But it must look pretty, precious. And I didn't have a girlfriend, so I occupied my time by working on my bike and riding.
The Campy SR front der was cool. But I stripped the fixing bolt at 10 PM the night before the race. I actually had a Dura Ace front der in the bin, and I saw it had a threaded insert whereas the SR was thread aluminum. But a DA part along side Campy?
Still, that hill was likely small, so I figured I do without the 42 chainring. Just left off the front der and put the chain on the 53.
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Cheers!