I am with the OP. 1 x 10/11 is fashion led. ok for trail center stuff that the blokes who like it ride. places like the lakes Highlands where proper mtb riders frequent, it is nigh on useless. absolutely fine and quite popular
good old 3 x 9 was and still is far better. fine
and don’t quote the weight saving crap…..most men can afford to lose a stone or 2. adding the weight of a front mech/shifter/ring mean nil. Just 2 🙂

Got 1×11 on the new ride seems to cope with N.Wales and the Alps quite well. Don’t talk. Get your cadence. Enjoy the climb.

A “not proper” mountain biker and his 1×11 drivetrain recently:

I was on the verge of heading off to do something more productive but i thought i would reply tho this one.

Posh cassette 😛 i will admit to spending a fair whack on a complete X01 drivetrain with no real expectations on how it would perform. I had the money to burn after a refund from a set of carbon hoops that kept committing suicide on top of very high mountains.

So 18 months down the line this is where i am at, i am still on the same cassette. I am on the 3rd chain and the second front chainring which i dropped down for hitting the mountains this summer 🙂 yea i know.

In that time i have ridden shed loads. 2 week long holidays. 2 week long multi stage events with trans in the title. and lots and lots of normal riding. I dont have the exact figure but its lots 🙂

On that basis alone i don’t think it is fair to say they last 2 minutes. If you take care of the drivetrain it will last. It really is not rocket science. And change the chain out before it really trashes the cassette.

Oh and before i forget as i said i was very open to accepting the disadvantages and advantages of the system, for the riding i do its pretty much a perfect solution. Simplicity it where its at. If you ride mountainous terrain all the time i think a 2 x 10 may benefit you more but for me i see no real disadvantages to 1 x 11

Exactly. I have a 32 on 26″FS and a 30 on the 29″FS, and the only time I ever run out of gears is on the long boring road sections between some of my local trails, which doesn’t bother me tbh.

That’s why I still have 3×9 on the Salsa – it does road.

Why on earth not?

Well, it worked well enough for me doing some fairly long, high-altitude steep alpine climbing a few weeks ago and I am overweight and unfit at the moment.

Rode 3×9 for years,however, it was not as good as 3×8 or 3×10 (or 2×10) – both of which seemed to set up better, wear more well and were ‘crisper’.

I have a pile of 2×11 bits waiting for the matching cranks and a frame to fit them on. For me, hilly bikepacking benefits from a decent low and top end and 1x just doesn’t provide enough range.

Blackspire bruiser, protects the chain and front ring.

Pish, complete and utter pish. Whoever wrote that need’s to have a long hard look at themselves. Stop generalising. There is no getting away from the fact that we all like different types of kit and not everything is one size fits all. As i stated before my thinking is that if you ride in the mountains nearly all the time then 2 x 10 with a clutch mech is the ultimate solution, but 1 x 11 is very very close. And thats not just from my experience but from a lot of very capable riders i have met on my travels.

I think (hope) that Ton was trolling for amusement there. I don’t think it worked very well TBH and is likely throwing the thread, which will now no doubt go on for another 10 pages with people giving death threats over whether 32 tooth chainrings are better than 34s 😉

Haha, well i bit good and proper 🙂

Choice was made for me, apparently I have inherited dodgy knees which seem to like 2x more than 1x solutions. It is not the extremes at 30×36 but using granny for longer climbs and especially after 2 hours granny really makes a difference in post-ride pain.

I’d still enjoy continuity of 1x solution but not riding only every other week and spending others in armchair with ice packs on my knees. 🙁

We will never know how fast he would’ve been with gears…..

just go in from fitting a 28 tooth front and 42 tooth expander to my enduro.
if you cant beat em, join em eh…….. 😀

SPLITTER!

cant wait to shred dalby…. 😆

I’ve been on 1×8 since I crashed and smashed my front shifter 3 years ago.
36t x 11-32 was fine on the Moray coast but since moving to Aberdeenshire where the typical climb had hundreds of meters as opposed to tens of metres of ascent I’ve dropped my gearing to 30t x 12-36 which is low enough until it’s time to get off and walk.

Have had 2 x 10 on my past two bikes and am a pretty decent climber. Have just bought a new bike with XX1 and a 32t chainring. The big difference for me is the very lowest gear; I can’t remember the exact ratio but my new lowest gear is equivalent to my second lowest on my 2 x 10. I did the Scott Marathon recently and there was stuff that I would normally get up that I just couldn’t manage. Perhaps a lot of that was very tired legs but it came as a surprise. I am getting used to it though.

Shimano already did, look up their ‘capreo’ groupset… And of course then there’s the hope cassette that never actually made it to market…

“New ideas” for cycling kit seem to take about eight years to a decade or so to turn into ‘mainstream products’…

I wasn’t suggesting that. What I am saying is someone was able to not only complete, but win, that race, over hard mountain terrain, over multiple days, with just one gear. Therefore, the assertion that you need multiple gears to do ‘proper mountain biking’ is demonstrably false. And by extension, that a slightly limited set of gears ala 1xn should not be any handicap to a lot of MTB riding for a fair percentage of people.