Who’s selling a 30t eagle setup? Surely 32t would be the minimum ring size spec from a factory.

Essentially they are trying to give as big of a range as possible with the simplicity of 1x.
34:10/47 is good for me for everything, but my wife needs 30:10/47 (or 2x) and I’ve friends who’ll pedal 34:11/40 all day long with silly elevation gains.
Basically, wide ratio lets the rider choose where in the spectrum they want their by selecting their front ring tooth count.

4mph is fast enough when it gets steep. In fact I’m happy enough to be moving, ok I’d love to go faster but a bigger chainring won’t make that happen. Over 18mph off road and I’m probably going downhill so freewheeling and pumping (or more likely dragging the brakes). Only place a higher gear would be useful is on the road but I’m happy to compromise this for better off road capabilities.

If you want to try it then it’s very easy to swap the front ring. You don’t have to stick with stock or ride what everyone else is riding.

I’d love to go faster up steep hills but sadly I have a finite power output and it’s only a few hundred watts!

With a top gear of 32:11 I’ve managed to pedal past 40 mph downhill – 80 rpm isn’t trying very hard.

The reality of ‘real rider’ use is that smaller chainrings with 1x setups are what people need to enjoy their ride and not worry about pushing up steeper or longer climbs. I would rather be slower and ride up than have internet bravado and a bit chainring only to push up a hill. As for too end speeds, to be honest it’s only an issue on fireroad descents and I try and stay off them. Doubt many normal people are pedalling 80rpm at around 20mph on a technical or even long descent.

I do like the fact that you can choose your gear ratios fairly easily now. When my current rings wear out I’m going up a chainring size and swapping out to a sunrace 11 speed cassette for better spread of gears

I think it’s an interesting reflection of how bikes and riding have changed. When I started mountain biking proper back in 1989/90, it was all about how fast you could climb and racing XC. The bikes weren’t capable of doing much else but the novelty of having a bike that could go up steep off-road hills was, quite frankly, amazing. Since then bikes have got heavier and much more capable on technical descents and riding habits have changed. It’s now much more about enjoying challenging descents than covering ground and climbing big mountains. I have a 21lb carbon 29er hardtail that I ride mostly in Hampshire and the riding here is only fun at warp speed. On the hardtail I regularly hit 35+ mph and at those sorts of speeds you can get air on the smallest of trail features, which is all we have. As such I need the 39×11 top gear and I rarely use less than 39×26. There are only a couple of hills where I use 26×28 when I’m being lazy. A 1x setup with anything less than a 38t chainring would severely limit my enjoyment.

On the other hand, I use my 30lb full-susser in the usual technical honeypots in the Lakes, Wales, Dales and Peaks and I’ve rarely wanted for more than the 32×10-42 that the 1x setup offers on that bike. It’s a much more plodding climber, despite being remarkably efficient as full suspension bikes go, and the descents I tend to ride on it are generally technical enough that pedalling is all but impossible.

The type of riding that a lot of people do now means that you don’t need to be as fit as many of us were back in the XC racing days and that, combined with the increase in bike weight, slack geometry and bouncy suspension, means that a smaller chainring makes more sense for more people. I just wish there was more choice for us old XC die-hards!

I think it’s about where you ride and what you ride.
I’m about to go out on my new 1×11 30:11-42 setup so I’ll let you know.
Very muddy out there, suspect I won’t be on the ‘big climbs’ today but I’ll be surprised if I’m hitting 30mph on mud clogged trails!
Bike is a giant Anthem 29er, riding on the mendips today.

I use a 38t with 1×9: 11-32 on my CX bike, it works for that bike, as it’s rigid, light and intended for less technical riding, seldom use the 11t sprocket (normally on the road/flat), I do use the 32t sprocket for climbing and I’ll probably fit a wider range cassette at some point…

MTB is 32t with 11-40 (26″) and that pretty much suits my use… Translate that to a 29er and a 30t makes sense.

It’s worth noting back when I had multiple chainrings there were much lower and higher ratios available…

but why the obsessions with speed at a given cadence? Especially offroad. Nobody spins at constant speeds, especially up rock and root strewn hills.

I work off of gear inches, accounting for wheel size it gives a number you can relate to mechanical advantage…

The ability to turn feeble human leg newton’s into a bit of torque at low revs to get you up, over or round some particularly tricky bit of trail can’t be undervalued and you’ll only get that from a lowish ratio…

Error in the OP’s calc (and poss others) – the nominal diam is the diam with the tyre on, not without. So you don’t need the tyre size. Of course makes the actual size inexact unless you calc it accurately as we used to have to with old wheel rotation computers. Hence a 29er wheel is really an ISO 622mm ID rim – and 622mm is actually 24.5″

pi x diam x ratio x rpm x 60 = speed in units/hr (whatever units you use for diam)

So to the OP’s post; a 27.5″ wheel is nominally 27.5″ = 0.7m; hence in 30:11 at 80rpm; speed is 3.14 x 0.7 x 2.73 x 80 x 60 = 29km/hr

But 80rpm is hardly shoving along, I ride normally at about 95, which is already 20% faster = 22.5mph, and can do 120rpm for periods which would be 50% faster = close on 30mph.

Plus I ride a 29er so that’s another 5%

And in any case as noted above once I get going anywhere near that fast I’m usually trying to slow down not speed up.

I thought Eagle was for Pros like Nino to enable them to push a 38×10 and still get up the hills.

How many people on here can pedal a modern, slack, widebar’d “Enduro” style MTB along even a flat road at more than 20mph for any length of time?

On a road bike, which is heavily optimised for aerodynamic drag, you can pull tall gears, on an MTB, unless you are a very very fit athlete indeed, you’r going to be doing less than 20mph when pedalling!

I can alway use a lower gear, but unless i get legs like Chris Hoy, i’m sadly never going to need any taller ones….. (32/50 here btw)

And when you’re actually sat on your bike the wheel diameter shrinks by at least 40mm! Not easy to calculate. I’m a fan of the “Stealth Granny Ring” so I can run a standard 11-36 10 speed cassette and have a really low gear for those really long steep 600m climbs. Run a 30T chainring; CBA with riding fast along roads anyway.

And aren’t those top speeds going to limit?

The highest gear on my dh bike was 36/11, and that’s pretty typical at pro level too. So, no.

On the flat, it can come into it a bit, and if you’re building a bike that does a lot of road bashing then that’s something to take into consideration. But My 1x drivetrains both let me do the road riding I do on them, very happily.

I’m on 11-42 with a 32t oval. Sometimes I wish I had another gear on a long steep climb. Conversely I’ve never spun out the pedals at top speed whilst off road, though of course it is easy to do on road, but I have a different bike for that purpose. This year I will change to 11 speed 11-46 or put a 30t up front for those brutal Climbs.

Where I cycle, we hit a max speed of 50km/hr and an average of 16km/hr so the gearing ranges of a typical 1x setup seem perfectly fine.

Its because modern mountain bikes are crap at going up hill and are designed to go down fast

Except for the XC bikes, which are faster at going up hills than ever before, and still often use 1x.

TBH it all feels like logical conclusions. I was relatively early at putting a 22-36 setup on a trailbike and at the time, the standard response was “Oh you’ll miss all the big ring gears”. It took an awfully long time for a lot of people to understand how few gears you actually lost, it was unintuitive.

But then that started to catch on, and dual rings became mainstream, and triple became a niche (and still a valid one)

And then the wide cassettes came along and started nibbling at it from the other end, in much the same way- people still say “But you lose all those gears!” and the response is, well not really, my highest gear is equivalent to an 11/35 and my lowest is 30/42 which is about equivalent to a 22/31- very nearly the same as what was on my first doubles. So all I’ve really lost is overlaps and some narrower ratio gaps.

Mostly, it’s just hard to intuit exactly what the differences are. When I built up a new XC bike a couple of years back, I just automatically made it 2x. It wasn’t til a few rides in that I realised I would be just as happy on 1x on that bike.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=246875215758590&id=229204914192287

I dream of 4mph uphill at times.

Well there we go then. Lots of us have proper hills to ride in 🙂

Sram do an 11spd 11-36

I tend to run 34 or 36 on 650b with 11-42 and before that 11-36. I prefer a taller gear on the modern bike with its low bb because spinning on fast rocky stuff can end in broken toes or OTB.

I have three chain rings that I swap out depending on the ride. 32 for general use, 28 for endurance races with lots of climbing and 36 for flat fast stuff