Saturday, October 11, 2014

Fargo Gearing Perfected

Ever since Odin's Revenge, and before that, actually, I have known that I was very close to having the Fargo Gen I gearing figured out for the less gravel/more off roading purposes I wanted to drift this bike's uses towards. There was one issue- The granny gear!

I had a traditional 22T chain wheel on there, but for whatever reasons, the dang thing wanted to chain suck whenever I put the hammer down on that cog. It effectively made the cog useless. I did manually shift into that cog at Odin's and managed a long, muddy uphill climb without chain suck, which was absolutely amazing. I could have used that gear a lot there, but after that climb it wanted to jam all the time, so I had to forgo using it.

I also figured out that a 22T was really lower than I needed for what I was looking forward to doing with the Fargo Gen I. I checked into things and found out that a 64BCD chain wheel existed that had 28 teeth. This I thought would actually work well, and it would make the jump from the granny to the 36T middle ring easy. Not only that, but a bigger ring has way less chance of causing chain suck. But where would I track down this ring at? Well, it wasn't a "high priority" need, so I threw that on the back burner. One day as I was rummaging for something else, I came across a granny ring, looked at it, and what do you know? It was a 28 tooth 64BCD ring!

A quick bolt up and after several rides since, I have used the 28T with no issues whatsoever. The shifting has been great, as I thought. Now the crankset is a wide ranging, off road touring capable set that I will be using off and on throughout the Winter months and hopefully at Odin's revenge next year!

1 comment:

Tyler Loewens said...

I read this:
"so I had to forgo using it."
This way:
"so I had to Fargo using it."
:)