Other Details of Bike Gearing and Shifting

Friction Shifters

You may be fortunate enough to get a bike or two with friction shifters. Sometimes on the bar ends, these are more usually on the handlebar stem or the downtube. So-called purists bleat plaintively about stem shifters, possibly due to their proximity to the genitals when crashing, but one must be brave. I like stem shifters, and on one of my bikes I have turned them to the left so I can shift left-handed, with my right hand kept for the front brake. The other bike with stem-shifters has them straight, but I still shift left-handed.

One has to remember where the gears are. The left lever is forward for low (small chainwheel) and back for high. The right lever is forward for the fastest gear and back  for the slowest gear. The three other gears are clustered together in the middle, close to each other and quite a way from either of the fastest and slowest. The rider finds them by memory and feel. When the chain is not making noises, you are properly in a gear, and hopefully the one you want. My two friction-shifters have a different character – the too-old-to-be-a-roady requires the lever to be moved past the gear then back a bit (all by guesswork and sound). Failing to do this correctly may well result in an unwanted gearshift 30 seconds later or when inconvenient. The gentleman’s roadster requires that the lever be moved to the correct position and subsequently not moved at all, lest the gear shifts unexpectedly back to the original gear. These are two outwardly similar technological approaches, but requiring very different techniques. At least both have all their intermediate gears in a lump in the middle of the lever travel, though in different places on each bike. I love it. Makes me feel like hooking on my lights and going for a ride.

Downtube Shifters

I have a bike with downtube shifters, but these date from 1985, and so the cluster is a 6-speed and has indexing! The indexing can be disconnected, which is apparently rare. It was handy a few years back when the derailleur got destroyed and temporarily replaced by another with a different cable/movement ratio. Until I got a suitable derailleur I have the choice of indexed shifting to gears that were somewhere else, or friction shifting. It was nice to get the indexed shifting back. Indexed shifting is a much easier system.

Downtube shifters are on the downtube, and the shifting hand can touch the front wheel until one gets used to the technique. The right hand shifter is easy to use left-handed, thankfully. (I use a mouse and these gears left-handed, write right-handed, and use tools with either hand. Thank you for asking.) Downtube shifters require a hand to be moved a long way from the handlebars, and hard pedalling or tricky cornering is a bit unsteady under these conditions. I find myself using skip shifting on my 12-speed downtube shifter bike, to decrease the time without both hands on the bars. On the flat, where acceleration is quick and big gaps aren’t a problem, a typical shift pattern might be: L2, H2, H4, H5. I do shift sequentially up hills.

Grip Shifters

I hate these. I am sometimes in situations where I put a lot of twisting force on the handgrips. I had my wife’s foldy bike off-road a while ago (yes, I eventually cleaned it) and I went through a particular patch of mud in 1^st. I put a whole lot of force on the pedals and the bars to get through the deepest bit, the grip twisted, and the gears changed to second at the worst time. Hideous noise, but thankfully no damage. A lever near the thumb is not moved unless the thumb or finger pushes it, but a rotating grip can be rotated when the hands are rotated by big bumps and big forces. And I will persist in taking whatever bike wherever I feel like riding it, however inappropriate it may appear. I am getting used to grip shifters, but I still think it is a bad idea. The cheap ones can get unusably stiff, and oiling the internals and the cable only gives moderate improvement. I had an old bike with the first grip shifters, the early high-quality ones, and mounted rather oddly by someone else on the bar ends. They were strange, easy to use, but still not as good as little levers.

Compound Shifting

Compound shifting is a truck technique of shifting two elements of the gearbox at once. A typical shift might be from 4th Low (called 4^th) to 1^st High (called 5^th) in a European double-H-pattern 8-speed. The well-loved Fuller Roadranger series is mostly similar in practice if different in terminology. The High-Low box is probably air-powered and synchronised. The driver moves a button on the gear lever and it goes “glunk”. On bikes we do not have boxes that go glunk. (Neither do the Fiat 682 and 690 trucks. Watch on youtube and enjoy.) The advantage of compound shifting is that one can go from one chainring to another without a big gap between gears. I am most likely to compound shift when riding one of my mountain bikes, and thumb shifters are best for this. A typical compound shift might be from M6 to H5. However, the whole thing may behave better if it is broken into two shifts – M6 to M5, and an instant later, M5 to H5. The chain is less likely to get wriggle about and fall off. Theoretically one can compound shift out of the granny gear, going from L3 to M1, but this in reality is slower than just dealing with a big gap such as L2 to M2, and having to pedal slowly for a couple of seconds. And in reality, compound shifting, for all its theoretical elegance, is generally slower than simple shifting of the chain rings and spending a few seconds pedalling slowly, pushing through a big gap. Accelerating hard on the flat on a mountain bike, M3, H3, H4 and so on to H7, has the big gap from the middle to the big chainring at low speed, where the slow pedalling is for the minimal time.

But compound shifting can be a handy technique as well as a form of entertainment. It might give you both minutes of happy fun and easier access to the most suitable gear for a particular hill.

Pie Plates.

“Pie plates” are the big discs that go on the back wheel between the cluster and the spokes. They have some benefit in preventing a badly-adjusted derailleur going into the spokes and causing much damage. Someone called the Bike Snob, who lives in Noo Yahk and types voluminously on the Intermess on bicycular topics, hates them. Thus, I leave my pie plates on (unless they disintegrate) because this annoys the bike snob, and when he is annoyed he is even more amusing than usual. Perhaps I will start to manufacture special boutique pie plates – they could be huge and triangular and made of soft plastic in faintly nauseating colours (or perhaps tweed cloth or even old pizza with embedded Christmas decorations) and be printed with quotes from little-known philosophers or people I’ve been in bands with. I can make them in a special size that doesn’t quite fit any known back wheel without time-consuming modification. Flavour flav can wear them around his neck, and I can send a pack of seven to the Bike Snob and we can sit back and enjoy the resulting flood of prose. If I get it right he will win a Nobel Prize and that will be a Good Thing.

In short: real cyclists simply don’t care about pie plates and in any case, don’t want to remove their clusters without some actual valid technical reason. (I actually have no idea what “real cyclists” do, except go for bike rides.)

Corncobs

A so-called corncob cluster is a cluster in which all the sprockets have a difference of one tooth. Recently one of my most bicyclous relatives came past and gave us a small-framed 12-speed roady from the 1980s. It has downtube shifters, 42 and 52 chainwheels, and on the back wheel the sprockets have from 13 to 18 teeth. Of course I had to borrow this wheel and whack it on one of my roadies, with – mercifully – 38 and 52 on the front. Even so, the bike has no low gears, a couple of medium gears and lots of fast gears.

In short, dear reader, to climb hills with such a drive arrangement requires pedalling with lots and lots of force. Just think, dear reader, how bad it would be to climb a mile or two on such a thing. But it is only half as bad as this. I don’t understand quite how this works. I set my best time up my local hill, gasping.

And later, I took my other roady for a nice long cruise, at one point climbing a long, gentle hill in a rather higher gear than usual, a gear that matched a corncob gear. The corncob wheel (sitting at home as it was) must have inspired me. I gasped and pedalled hard. Every time I was about to give in and shift down, the hill eased off, then as some oxygen returned to my bloodstream the hill would gently point up again.

A corncob provides a more amusing alternative to a singlespeed. 42 to 18 (low 1st on the little roady) is a typical singlespeed gear, and there are eleven more gears available, all harder and faster. So one gets to fiddle with gearlevers, but one also gets the increase in brute strength that seems to be the sole benefit of single-speeds.

Enjoy. I shall.