Understanding Mountain Bike Gears
The gears in mountain bikes just keep getting more and more intricate. The bikes of today have as much as 27 gear ratios. An off-road bike will use a
Aggregate of 3 different sized sprockets in front and nine in the back to produce gear ratios.
The concept behind all these gears is to allow the rider to crank the pedals at a continuous pace irrespective of what sort of slope the bike is on. You can understand this better by picturing a bike with simply a single gear. Whenever you rotate the pedals one turn, the rear wheel would revolve one turn as well ( eleven gear proportion ).
If the rear wheel is twenty-six inches in diameter, then with eleven gearing, one full twist on the pedals would result in the wheel covering 81.6 inches of ground. If you are pedaling at a speed of fifty R.p.m, this suggests that the bike can cover over 340 feet of ground per minute. This is only 3.8 Mph, which is the equivalence of walking speed. This is ideal for climbing a steep hill, though bad for ground or slipping downhill.
To go faster you are going to need a different proportion. To ride downhill at 25 Mph with a fifty Rpm cadence at the pedals, you’ll need a 5.6:1 gear ratio. A bike with plenty of gears will give you a sizeable number of increments between a 11 gear ratio and a 6.5:1 gear ratio so that you can always pedal at 50 R.p.m, no matter how fast you are actually going.
On an ordinary twenty-seven speed mountain bike, six of the gear ratios are so close to each other that you cannot notice any difference between them.
With tangible use, bike riders tend to select a front sprocket appropriate for the slope they are riding on and stick to it, though the front sprocket can be difficult to shift under heavy load. It’s way easier to shit between the gears on the rear.
If you are cranking up a hill, it’s often best to select the tiniest sprocket on the front then shift between the 9 gears available on the rear. The more speeds you have on the back sprocket, the larger advantage you could have.
All in all, gears are critical to trail bikes as they dictate your general speed. Without gears you would not be able to build speed nor would you be well placed to pound pedals. The gears will move the pedals and help you build up speed.
There are all types of gears available in mountain bikes, all of which will help you build a lot of momentum if you use them the proper way.
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