FYI I live in Asia so buy all my bike stuff for the year in one go in the summer when we’re ‘home’ for the holidays.

I currently have a 1×10 with 32t at the front and 11-34 at the rear. I spin out on the flats and occasionally (but relatively rarely) struggle on the ups.

Just bought a t-rex and would like a bigger front ring. Is jumping up to 36t too big a jump or will it be nullified with the T-rex?

I’ve tried to properly understand ratios but would rather go back to Latin tenses! Gears just make my brain hurt.

What front ring do you have with a 1×10 and 11-40t sprocket?

Thanks all

Pointless asking what others have as that’s either what’s right for them or what the internet told them.
Divide front by back for a quick guide of what your swapping to.

Edit have a 36t home ring 104bcd in gold packaged and unused in Oz

Working out your gearing ratios is pretty straight forward and allows you to compare one potential set up to another to see if it will provide the low / high / range of gears you want.

Dived the number of teeth on the front ring by a the number and of teeth of which ever cog on the cassette (eg 11 for high gear, 34 for low gear on current set up) and then you can use these number to compare with the same calculation on potential set up. The lower the number the easier it is to pedal and vice versa.

So at the moment you low gear ration on a 32t chain ring and 34t cassette is 0.94. I you go to a 40t trex and 36t chain ring your low gear ratio will be 0.9 so pretty much identical to what you’ve got at the moment on the climbs but your high gear ratio will go from 2.9 to 3.2, so you will spin out less

I hope this works

If the link has worked it’s set up with as much info as you have provided.
The top box is what you currently run. With that in mind you can gauge how a new set up might feel. Play around with the settings like sliding the sprockets or entering different wheel sizes it’s a great tool. if the link has worked the link should always go to these settings so a kind of reset button until you get the hang of it.

Looking at it a 34 will give an even extension both top and bottom, a 36 will still give a slightly lower bottom gear but as good as another gear on the top end.

Thanks all.

Conkers, the link works and I’ll have a proper think about it.

I’ve ended up with a pretty full set of rings and they’re easy to change so I just experiment each time i’m doing a bike. And what I’ve found is, it’s just not as simple as you’d think, different bikes seem to suit different gearing. Like, this one’s quite obvious with hindsight- but fatbikes are great at going slow, rock-crawling etc, but hard work to go fast. So I’ve downgeared it a long way and I just don’t miss the high gears. The full suss is a constant compromise, it wears big sticky tyres and weighs 30lbs and has to do some very hard days racing, but also it can use a high gear because some trails are warpspeed on it. So it’s got a 30T but I could go up or down and find benefit.

(I went to a 36T just before EWS 2014 at tweedlove, on the 26er full suss and I just about died, I was pretty comfortable on 34T but it just turned out that slightly harder pedalling tipped me over the “sustainable” line and suddenly everything was tiring.)

@conkers – great little gearing calculator. thanks for that, book marked for future use