Piaw: It's easy and, thanks to AliExpress, relatively cheap to build your own cassettes from loose parts -- at least, perhaps not for really huge cogs. But a half step + granny could give me, anyway, nice close cruising gears in the 75" to 60" range plus a downhill gear or two and some low bailout gears.
I did this long ago for a commuter with 48/45 or 47/44 rings and a 7 speed cassette, something like 13-32, half-stepping (more or less) the middle 5 cogs with cruising gears in the middle, and using the small for a downhill gear and the big for a bailout gear: 25" wheel: 48 45 12 100 13 92 87 15 80 75 17 71 66 20 60 56 24 50 47 32 35 BTW, this shifted very nicely from hoods, ramps, and hooks with Kelley Take-Offs, on pavement; would not want KTOs on bumpy dirt. Generally speaking, though, with 9 cogs or more I prefer crossover, and I'll trade top high and bottom low for close middle ratios; with a 10 speed cassette giving many more possibilities and the new knobby 50 mm Oracle Ridges requiring slightly lower sandy dirt gearing, my Matthews "road bike for (sandy) dirt" has a sub-compact plus granny: 28 1/2" wheel: 44 28 14 90 15 84 16 78 17 74 18 70 19 66 20 63 40 22 57 36 25 50 32 28 45 29 On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 10:54 AM Piaw Na <p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm a big fan of half-step + granny for 7-speed rear cassettes and > freewheels. I think I even wrote an article about it for the Rivendell > Reader at one point (good luck digging it up!). What killed it for me was > once cassettes got to the point where constructing your cassette was no > longer supported or too much work, it was no longer practical -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfgutvKBCwCpnU6LzuW0kJDznCdnqkPwfiwV0oaQVraevjQ%40mail.gmail.com.
