Keeping a straight chain

danielsbrewer

Hello,

I have been advised by a number of people that I should try and keep a straight train if at all possible to reduce the wear on the chain. This makes sense, but how do you do this in practice?

I have an 8-speed so at the moment I am thinking of doing gears 1-3 on the smallest chain ring, 4-6 on the middle chain ring and 6-8 on the large chain ring. Does that make sense?

el_presidente

It makes sense, in practice all you are really looking to do is avoid the extreme crossovers

choirboy

danielsbrewer wrote:

Hello,

I have been advised by a number of people that I should try and keep a straight train if at all possible to reduce the wear on the chain. This makes sense, but how do you do this in practice?

I have an 8-speed so at the moment I am thinking of doing gears 1-3 on the smallest chain ring, 4-6 on the middle chain ring and 6-8 on the large chain ring. Does that make sense?

No need to be quite that precise. Depends on your chainset but small ring on steep uphill, middle on the flat and large for tanking it downhill works for me. In practice that probably means 1-3 on the small, 2-6 on the middle and 5-8 on the large. You just want to avoid small ring-small sprocket and large ring-large-sprocket combos.

crankycrank

It always reduces wear to keep the chainline as straight as possible. You just have to consider how much effort you want to put into doing this just to save a few quid over a years time. Of course big ring to big cog and small to small don't always function as smoothly as using another combination so that's another reason to use the best chainline gear combo. With practice you can train yourself to intuitively know what is the best combo for any given speed. Personally I don't sweat it too much. I'll usually use the big chainring/big cog at stops if I plan to be going fast enough to stay in the big chainring for a good distance after pulling away. If I'm going from one intersection to the next in traffic and having to stop frequently I'll just stay in the small chainring but basically just enjoy the ride knowing that even if your sloppy about gear choice it's not that big of a deal. Oh, except when you have a 400 quid cassette, chainring and chain combo!!!