Bikepacking Gears

cdempsey

I am looking at doing a bit of bikepacking on my Giant Revolt 1. The gearing on this is 50/34 front and 11/34 back. Bearing in mind I am 15 stone would my granny gear be enough to carry my kit or do I need to look at trying to get an 11/36 on the back (or bigger)? My rear derailleur is Shimano R350 (basically old tiagra 4600 I think?). I've seen a video where you can fit an 11/36 on this by switching the B screw around and adding a chain link. Anyone got experience of this? Otherwise I suppose I could just fir a mtb RD - I am aware that this needs to be 9 speed to deal with cable pull issues. I'm not sure I can get anything bigger on there???

sloppyschleckonds

Stick with what you've got, just avoid steep hills

imafatman

Depends whether you want to go over a big censored off mountain range or not. With total load of 150kg I could make it up some pretty decent 12% grades in France with the 34/32. It wasn't fun grinding out at 50-60 cadence but doable.

For normal rolling hills here in the UK it's fine. Just slow.

jameses

I have done some touring with full front and rear panniers, and definitely needed lower gearing than usual for that. I have just recently started using a bikepacking setup, and it's a whole different experience. Because you're carrying less weight and it is more centrally distributed, it just feels like riding a *slightly* heavier bike. To put it in context, you weigh about 95kg, your bike probably around 10kg, so about 105kg in total. You're not going to be carrying more than 10kg (including the weight of the bags), and likely less than that depending on how minimal you go. So in total, you're only adding 5-10% to the total weight of the system - really not very much.

The questions you need to answer - do you struggle to get up hills with your current gearing? Are you going anywhere with significantly steeper gradients than you are used to? If not, it shouldn't be necessary to change anything.

bobmcstuff

Also depends how comfortable you are at lower cadences. I just did a week long tour with rear panniers, a tent and a bar bag (probably 15 or so kilos) on my Fratello which has 34:32 as the lowest gear. You do find the granny gear very quickly when the road goes up, but it's only really a problem on the steeper stuff. Looking at the Strava files I was doing 60-70 rpm pretty regularly on steeper hills, which is very low but manageable.

If I was building a dedicated touring bike, I would probably put a mountain bike chainset on it (with maybe a 44-28 or something, I'm not so up to speed with MTB gearing these days). This might be easier than bodging your rear mech!

cdempsey

Thanks all for responses. I am OK on hills so will stick with 34-34 granny and see how I get on. I live in the Lakes so no avoiding hills (unfortunately or fortunately).

laurentian

Rather than switching the B screw around (which is a bit arbitary as it cannot really be adjusted), just get a 1" B screw - your LBS should be able to help you there (mine gave me one). When planing your route, just be aware that you are likely to be significantly slower with panniers etc on the bike.

Have a good time

lesfirth

laurentian wrote:

Rather than switching the B screw around (which is a bit arbitary as it cannot really be adjusted), just get a 1" B screw - your LBS should be able to help you there (mine gave me one). When planing your route, just be aware that you are likely to be significantly slower with panniers etc on the bike.

Have a good time

When I tried this I found that with a long B screw the angle the screw was working at ment that the end if the screw no longer made contact with the gear hanger. I used a screw with a countersunk head screwed in the wrong way. The side of the screw head made contact with the hanger. A bit of a c0ck up but it worked.

stavgold

You could always buy one of these

https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/gear-spares ... -extender/

Or the original more expensive one from Woolftooth

https://www.sigmasports.com/item/Wolf-T ... lsrc=aw.ds