Well after a bad fire day yesterday, (We actually had our bail-out gear ready and two fires got within 20 km (12 miles) of us) today is a good day and no fire bans, so started work on the bike, I was not working for long when I had an idea, ran into town with two rims to get the freewheel clusters removed:
The one on the right (14-28 tooth) is the original off the rim for the bike, the other (13-34 tooth "Mega Range") is off a Giant Elmore touring bike I picked up a while back.
I was planning on running the original 14-28 with a 55 tooth front sprocket, giving a top gear about the same as my road bike, but realised I would be pretty much never using the lower gears with the small 20" tires. So I started thing about what other sprockets I have, as part of my order from Jon @
barnbikes I got two 70 tooth sweetheart sprockets, working out the ratios with them gave good results but the sweetheart did not suit the look of the bike one bit, I even considered cutting the webbing out and welding it to a normal sprocket...
Then I remembered the mega range freewheel, and quickly sat down and did some calculations, got the answer I wanted, and jumped on the computer to do a mock-up:
Ok, that looks doable...
You might be wondering where is he getting that huge front sprocket from and just how big is it? Well also as part of my order from Barnbikes I got two 120 tooth sprockets for use on an early speed record styled bike, but of course I have 2 and only need one for that...
So here it is, sitting on top of one of the 20" slicks for this bike:
A quick visit to the SheldonBrown gear inch and rollout pages gives these numbers:
One revolution rollout low gear: 218" (5.5 meters)
One revolution rollout high gear: 565" (14.5 meters)
Gear Inch ratio low gear: 70.58
Gear Inch ratio high gear: 184.61
Quote from the Sheldon Brown pages: The lowest gear on most mountain bikes is around 22-26 inches. The highest gear on road racing bikes is usually around 108-110 inches.
So it should provide a nice useable range for road biking in the first 2 gears or so, but the top ones would be for theoretical "drafting behind a car for a speed record" use only!
Also picked up some 100mm (4") PVC water pipe while I was out, got a use for it on this bike too...
Anyway, got to get out there and build it now!
Luke.