How many gears do you really need & use?

john peck said:
My experience is that a 6 or 7 spd freewheel will last twice as long as a 8,9,10 speed cassette,
requires less frequent adjustment, & are generally cheaper & readily available. I have yet to
break a freewheel, but cannot say the same for cassettes.
Click to expand...
On my old mechanical 21 speed I only used about 7 gears. I am old school and use the standing up method for natural low gears using your weight to pedal up steep hills. On my E bike I only use the highest gear 90% of the time on flats and slight inclines and may gear down a bit on steep hills.
It’s also depends on the rider and the level of exercise you prefer riding an e-bike.
 
A mid-drive with a selectable internal 2 speed overdrive gear would be awesome, like my old Triumph Spitfire.

Or even a separate gearbox like the pre-unit Triumph motorcycles
 
I agree with Stefan. I live in the Mountains and would sometimes like a lower gear on my Gazelle to help get started after having to stop on a hill. No throttle on my bike. The lowest gear on my 8 speed is barely enough to get up the Battery Sucking Hill to my house.

It all depends on where you ride. Might be moving east to the flat lands where I'm sure my bike will do well.
 
Cowlitz said:
I agree with Stefan. I live in the Mountains and would sometimes like a lower gear on my Gazelle to help get started after having to stop on a hill. No throttle on my bike. The lowest gear on my 8 speed is barely enough to get up the Battery Sucking Hill to my house.

It all depends on where you ride. Might be moving east to the flat lands where I'm sure my bike will do well.
Click to expand...
Do you live where power is regulated ?
 
Jmggc said:
It’s also depends on the rider and the level of exercise you prefer riding an e-bike.
Click to expand...

yep. this. plus the terrain. my goal is to use the motor as little as possible, i ride for exercise and pleasure, and live in a very hilly place with lots of incentive to ride the hills.

i can definitely see how a less short low gear would be acceptable if one was interested in the motor doing most of the work, or the rider was capable of sustaining 350+ watts for an extended period.
 
I use the whole range. Have had no durability issues. Number of gears is secondary to the range (running 1x with a wide range cassette on both the e-gravel and e-mtb, though the chainring sizes are very different). My non-e bikes are a mix of 9, 10 and 11 speed. Never noticed much difference in durability between them. Keeping things cleaned and lubricated is what makes the difference in longevity.

10/11//12 speed is nice if you aren't just using motor grunt to overcome hills. Human legs have a pretty narrow ideal power range, so having a good selection of gears between your minimum and maximum is helpful if you like to contribute a lot of your own power when riding (and obviously is almost mandatory on non-e bikes). But yeah, if you have a lot of motor power and like to use it you can get away with a lot fewer gears and less gear range.

My e-gravel I get away with 1x11 (11-42 cassette with a 42 chainring) which works pretty well. I have a 2x11 setup on the non-e gravel bike though. 1x is the way to go; not having to deal with front shifting is worth it, and modern wide-range cassettes make that totally possible for most riders.
 
My experience is opposite that of John Peck. I had a 7 speed shimano come unscrewed & drop the balls on the road, leading to a 4 mile walk & bike push. It's a cheap design to dominate the $180 bike market. Threaded internal race has no lock feature, no locknut to countertorque, relies on a 5/8" long ferrule to rub against it from the outer nut. Would last the 250 miles the average $180 bike is ridden before the kid loses interest, but not the 2000 miles a year I ride. Could have been worse, I could have pushed the bike 30 miles. There is a replacement shaft with machined on race shown from "we the people" which is never in stock anywhere. Trying to install a locknut I bought 4 orders of random hex shaped junk the wrong size or the wrong thread. Finally I bought a 3/8"x26 tpi tap from victornet.com and suitable pilot drill, and made a ***-**** half-nut to lock the race in place. Took 2 years to repair that piece of ****.
I had a shimano 6 speed freewheel break the axle under my enormous 180 lb weight. I don't jump curbs or picnic tables. I don't know what they were thinking putting a 8 mm diameter shaft in there. Before the axle broke that bike dumped me on my chin twice. Gave it away to a guy who was arrested for driving a car with no insurance and a fake driver's license. He only rode it once that I saw, away from my house. The other times I saw him he walked.
I wore out a 5 speed shimano freewheel on a 1986 schwinn MTB. Tips of the 3rd gear wore off & started jumping links. By the time I wore out that bike, 5 speed freewheels had gone the way of the dodo bird. Bought the 18 speed diamondback MTB disaster reported above.
The 8 speed shimano cluster on this yubabike has been no problem, ~7800 miles so far. Wore out one chain ~5000. Don't know if is freewheel or cassette, haven't had it apart.
As far as how many speeds, 52:32 to 52:11 do nothing for me. But the only way to get 32:32 is buy a 24 speed bike. I use 42:32 to 42:11 regularly in the city, but when I load up 60 lb supplies and head out to climb the hills, I ride 32:32 to 32:11 mostly. I have to really winded to get down to 32:32, but there are some stiff headwind days. Electricity is nice, but doesn't always work especially in hard rains. Electricity has failed in the rain a half dozen times requiring pedalling unpowered to maintenance base & treatment with a hair-dryer. Rain burnt off the pins on the ASI controller & Mac motor 7/14/21. I'm riding totally pedal powered until I manage to get some of the components for sale domestically to actually match each other.
 
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Reading this thread allows me to see how people think about the topic. It looks like people are attracted to having a wide range of gears. So, what if you could have a robust wide chain with thick cogs And have 27-speeds without throwing off your chain line? This hub works mathematically like a triple chainring X nine-speed but mechanically it is much more practical to run and you are less likely to drop the chain. I should make one. It is a three-speed hub for disc that gets an eight or nine-speed cassette. Sturmey Archer CS-RK3.
1629676214536.png
1629676374142.png
 
Reading this thread allows me to see how people think about the topic. It looks like people are attracted to having a wide range of gears. So, what if you could have a robust wide chain with thick cogs And have 27-speeds without throwing off your chain line? This hub works mathematically like a triple chainring X nine-speed but mechanically it is much more practical to run and you are less likely to drop the chain. I should make one. It is a three-speed hub for disc that gets an eight or nine-speed cassette. Sturmey Archer CS-RK3.View attachment 97478 View attachment 97479
Click to expand...


i have a commuter/city e-bike with a 4 speed sturmey archer. fabulous concept, in practice it’s by far the worst thing about the bike. not sure if that’s because of the way they integrated it, the particular design of that model, or what. i haven’t heard as much negative feedback about shimano or rohloff’s versions.

in combination with an 8 speed RD, i imagine you’d use that particular one in the middle gear until you were on the smallest cog or two, and then you could jump 33%. ditto the other direction. practically speaking it would be the range of a modern 12 speed, which can of course be easily achieved with a 1x setup these days.

and they’re all really heavy.
 
PDoz said:
Sram xg 1275 , the cheapest I can find that offers 10-52 and fits an xd driver.
NB I said $300 AUS
Click to expand...
The reason I asked is because a XT runs far less than that not that you should run Shimano and last I knew they had no 52 but that could happen. The 10 on my setup makes a difference over a 11 that I can use. For me I think I would loose traction before I could use 52 on the steepest climb. People talk about stepping down to SLX but I think running the XT as apposed XTR is the sweet spot. I bet Sram has similar levels as well it's my understanding is that if people are honest both companies make some good stuff.
 
Really no serious hills to speak of where I'm from. Converted my 10 speed to a Sturmey Archer 3 speed IGH. 44t front ring on a BBSHD and currently a 20t rear cog (soon to be 24t).

The 20t rear cog gave me the rough equivalent of gears 4,6,8 from the 10 speed. Expecting the 24t to lower that to 3,5,7 roughly.

I don't really think I need the change in rear cog but for $7 I want to see if I like this range a bit more.
 
One thing to note is while you may tend to use certain gears a good cyclist will find them selves shifting up or down threw the gears to get the best performance regardless of if you have a motor or not. Another words at times you may skip a few gears if your bike can dump gears like that or you may spend a short time stepping threw each gear or whined out each gear as you go!
 
Stefan Mikes said:
If we are talking bikes, it was the Japanese Shimano that invented the 1-by drivetrains, promptly followed by the American SRAM.
Click to expand...

To be fair, 1x drivetrains started in the MTB world with small companies like Wolf Tooth with custom kits. I have an Ibis mtb that still has a 2011-era wolf tooth 1x10 conversion kit on it (you would buy a 10 speed 11-36 cassette, dump the 17t gear and the kit had a 42t cog you would put on the back of the cassette; add a narrow-wide chainring and longer b-screw and you had a 1x10 drivetrain with a fairly wide range). Sram had the first commercial full kit (the XX1 groupset, circa 2012) that was, again, targeted at MTBers.

As 1x10 and 1x11 got rapidly popular in the MTB world, both companies started doing cassettes with wider ranges and then dedicated groupsets for 1x bikes in more than MTBs. Not sure when Shimanos first dedicated 1x groupset came out, but the XX1 definitely beat Shimano by a few years. The 1x10 conversions were popular into 2013-2014 just because the XX1 groupset was so expensive (and had a custom freehub to accomodate a 10t cog, so hard to convert an old bike without relacing the rear wheel to a new hub).
 
I ride in very diverse terrain. Mountains and flat valleys, one of my bikes has a Sram 8 speed (1x8) and the other Shimano XT 30 speeds (3x10). Until recently I had a third 24 speed (3x8). I could do with a 2x10 or 2x11. In that I'd use about 10 to 14 speeds, some on both chain rings like I do now on the 3x10. The 1x8 isn't enough anymore because of my experience with more. In the 70's when I rode a 10 speed (2x5) that seemed great! Ignorance is bliss🙈🙉🙊
 
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