Adding Gears

cams67hotford

I have a 2009 Motobecane 18 speed road bike. I have been riding for a few months now and now I’m looking into adding more gears to her. The question I have is, is it as simple as changing out the rear 9 gear set to a 10 or 11 gear set? I realize there would need to be some adjustments afterwards but would there need to be any other changes done to the bike.. Thanks for all your advice..
Cameron

sungod

no

to change from a 9-speed cassette to 10, or 11, you'd need also to change the shifter to match (and the chain, but that's trivial)

why do you want to do this? if you want higher gearing cheapest way is to just put a different cassette on (need to change the chain too)

cams67hotford

Thats what i was talking about, sorry. So would i still need to change the shifters and chain?

sungod

what cassette and chainrings does it have at the moment...

if the cassette is, say, 12-25 then simply fitting an 11-25 cassette will give you a higher gear

if you change cassette, you just need to fit a new chain at the same time (cassettes and chains wear together)

if it already has 11-whatever, and a 50/34 crankset, then you can fit a new crankset, with, say, 53/39, that'll give you the highest you'll ever need, but then you need to watch out that you don't then run out of lower gears for hills, an 11-26 cassette with 53/39 is ok if you don't have problems going uphill, but if you struggle it could be too much, you could get an 11-28 cassette, but that might mean changing the rear derailleur

there's a gear calculator here, you can put in various combinations, including your current ones, and see the relative difference...

http://sheldonbrown.com/gears/index.html

cams67hotford

I’m good with hills I’m just looking for more speed on the straights and downhill speed to attack the steep hills. We have a great place to ride here in Greenville, SC and it has a couple good hills but I rarely ever switch sprockets (1 thru 9) for the easy gears. It seems I’m always on the same sprocket (10 thru 18). I’m just experimenting really to see if I can get more speed..

As far as the bike I’m not sure of the specs for the gears on the bike. I’ll have to do some investigating of my bike to see what I have. I bought the bike used this year. So I really haven’t read the specs for her. Thank you so much for all the advice and helping me understand the lingo for the parts. Again thanks.

sungod

if you put the model/year into google you'll probably get some matches to pages that list the spec.

sheldon brown's website has a lot of articles on the various bits of bikes, well illustrated, and his no-nonsense style is excellent

so if you are new to the details of the various bits of the drivetrain it is a really good place to while away some time