I mean, do we need any more than 1×12?

I think 34T and 10-51 is enough for MTBing, and on road something like 10-42 with 44T would match or exceed the range of my current 2×10.

There might be niche requirements for more gears though – like adventure racers/tourers (but even then the MTB setup is likely enough) and also tandems/recumbents.

Is 13sp ever likely to become mainstream?

I run 10-50 x 32 on a MTB and 10-42 x 38 on a gravel and find them both spot on for there use.
You don’t say what 2×10 you are using to compare the ratios.

1×1 is ‘enough’, for a given value of ‘enough’.

30T front and 11-42T 11spd rear is enough range for me for adventure racing, I ran out of gears once on rideable terrain when using 32T. I rarely use 30/11 so don’t really have a need for 30/10 as a top gear.

Tourers are always (IMO) likely to go with 2x or 2x systems just to give them the options of those near duplicate gear ratios that 1x seeks to do away with, for when they come across a 10km long 4% gradient for which 45″ is too much and 38″ is too low but 43″ is just right.

The difficulty is in making space in the back of the bike for 13 or more gears and keeping the wheel strong, it’s what Boost was meant to sort out. Then you have chain deflection – to allow a chain to work on so many gears it needs to have lateral flexibility which comes at a cost of durability. Compress 13 or more gears into the width of 12 and you need a new chain width which brings its own problems. There’s a lot of compromises.

Of course someone will no doubt bring out a 13spd to test the waters.

My current 2×10 is 50/34 and 11-28. I can get 11-32 if I downgrade to Tiagra or go third party. 11-28 isn’t quite enough for me to do steep hills without going into the red, but it was considered ‘standard’ for road for a long time. I’m planning to upgrade to 2×11 but even that whilst welcome only goes up to 11-32.

Is there going to be a market for 13sp given the compromises whitestone talks about?

Of course someone will no doubt bring out a 13spd to test the waters.

Already exists made by Rotor – same kit for road and MTB too. It looks like the cassettes come in 10-52 aimed at MTB, and 10-36, 10-39 and 10-46 for road.

Range is everything – little interest in number of gears. I have 11 but 9 would be enough
I have 30T and 10×42 at the back – Just about enough for the steep riding I do.
Have been considering dropping to 28T on the front to get my cadence up on the very steepest climbs as I don’t often use the 10T cog and I’m not sure if straining every sinew just to turn the cranks is very efficient.

I believe 13 speed is a thing though – isn’t there a hydraulic group set that does it?

Shimano patented a 14 speed system some years ago. Most 2x systems replicate a 14 speed system anyway, so maybe that’s the end-point.

As someone who isn’t too fussy about cadence, range is more important than step size but I know that other folk disagree.

Surely, we are not far from the point where a gearbox can be made light, low friction and durable enough with sufficient range and ratios?

Or maybe, that won’t be disposable enough for component manufacturers…

range isn’t everything, big gaps are annoying, not so much offroad, but certainly on. Plenty of opportunity to fill in the gaps.

For MTB I think I’ll go for a wide range 9 or 10 speed once my current drivetrain wears out.  The range with eagle is great but I don’t mind bigger gaps, I find myself going up and down 2 or 3 clicks at a time often enough.

For road bikes the benefit of 1x isn’t as clear, not really my thing but I can’t see 2x by going away for road and touring.

Surely, we are not far from the point where a gearbox can be made light, low friction and durable enough with sufficient range and ratios?

It’s not magic, there are fundamental physical limits involved. A gearbox will always have more friction than a chain and requires a lot of parts with very fine tolerances, so it will always be more expensive to manufacture than a derailler system.

Range is everything – little interest in number of gears. I have 11 but 9 would be enough
I have 30T and 10×42 at the back – Just about enough for the steep riding I do.
Have been considering dropping to 28T on the front to get my cadence up on the very steepest climbs as I don’t often use the 10T cog and I’m not sure if straining every sinew just to turn the cranks is very efficient.

Interesting. I have dropped to 28t with a 10×42 and it’s absolutely brilliant for my age (50) and level of fitness (not that great). It was also a cheap way to not have to upgrade to GX and keep my complete XT M8000 group set (with a SRAM cassette).

1 x 12 on the mtb is fine (Eagle, 10-50 with a 32t) everywhere I’ve been, but I think road needs that bigger jump a compact 2x whatever brings. I rarely trouble 50×11 but I can stay in the big ring for more or less the whole ride bar actual hills, when I am suddenly very grateful for the 34t.

Molgrips, which bit would you have to downgrade to get 32t .. the cassette? Unnoticeable. The mech? Probably not, I have a 32t on my cross wheelset (road is a 28t) and they swap out fine. Might be worth borrowing a 10 speed 11-32 cassette and trying it. I don’t have to do any tweaking to gears when changing wheels, disc callipers sometimes need it (different hubs).

for a given value of ‘enough’

Exactly this, 12 speed is more than I really need but I still prefer 2×11 as in my experience it runs smoother at the extremes (e.g. the lowest gear on my 1x CX bike is noisy, and the shifting over the biggest three sprockets has never been as smooth as my 2x setup) and offers more options w.r.t cadence, which I notice, particularly on the turbo trainer.

Plus I’ll never warm to the sight of 50 tooth cassettes on road bikes, but that’s just a personal thing, in my eyes a road bike always looks better when the biggest cog at the front is bigger than the biggest cog at the back!

Molgrips, which bit would you have to downgrade to get 32t .. the cassette? Unnoticeable

No I know, it was more a question of the manufacturer’s intentions which reflect market opinion.

Range is everything – little interest in number of gears. I have 11 but 9 would be enough

There are a couple of manufacturers making wide range 9-speed systems. Box and Microshift IIRC.

Still running 1x 11sp 11-40. Range is fine for vast majority of what I ride and to be honest I could happily deal with 10 or 9 gears so long as the same range. Just all my kit is 11sp so may as well stick with it. Got no interest in 12, 13 or whatever next.

The main thing for me has been dropping the front mech and the range at the back is key to that. Front mechs with 2 or 3x have always had too much cross over, too much range and in the case of 2x a hideous jump between rings and subsequent chain suck. Hated 2x.

The range of gears required is easily covered but closer spacing is always nicer. My 10 speed set up on my mountain bike covers everything I need so if I went 12 speed I’d look to keep the range the same but with closer jumps in gearing.

Interesting. I have dropped to 28t with a 10×42 and it’s absolutely brilliant for my age (50) and level of fitness (not that great). It was also a cheap way to not have to upgrade to GX and keep my complete XT M8000 group set (with a SRAM cassette).

I think that 42T SRAM with tiny chainring has a fair few advantages over 50T eagle
Less mass, less chain flop, better ground clearance at the crank and the wheel (those eagle mechs look crazy vulnerable in the high gears – especially with my tiny 26er wheels) and of course…less cost

I can see Eagle being advantageous if you do road miles on a mtb and want to turn big gears downhill. Cant see me using the full range personally

I think that 42T SRAM with tiny chainring has a fair few advantages over 50T eagle
Less mass, less chain flop, better ground clearance at the crank and the wheel (those eagle mechs look crazy vulnerable in the high gears – especially with my tiny 26er wheels) and of course…less cost

I can see Eagle being advantageous if you do road miles on a mtb and want to turn big gears downhill. Cant see me using the full range personally

+1 apart from the 26″ bit.

I think I could ride anything I want to on a 10-36 11 speed cassette and 30t chainring. Gives the equivelent of the 32-42 without the massive weight penalty. Until someone makes that im sticking with 10speed!

And at the top end 3:1 is still about as hard as i can push on the road (23mph). Any steeper than that and its tuck and coast time as the time gains are going to be small unless you use your mtb for riding downhill on the road a lot!

No.

On road you want a close ratio block to minimise massive cadence changes, look at typical road block and there’s ten ratios to go from 11T to 25T. A road 2×10 using a compact 50-34 chainset and that 11-25T block has a range of 375% (a typical racer’s setup has a range of 290%). To put those into an MTB context, on a 1x setup an 11-42T cassette has a range of 380% so very close to the compact.

On both my compact 2x road bike and my 1x MTBs I usually use a range of around 280% – basically the 11T and 42T cogs see very little use but it’s nice that they are there for those occasions I do need them. So for me, extra range isn’t really a priority but having smaller and possibly more consistent jumps between gears would be useful. Just had a play on http://gear-calculator.com/ slotting the 12 gears of Eagle into 11-42. I get a cassette where there are only two ratio jumps greater than 15%. Adding an extra cog brings everything down to 15% or below.

For MTB I think it isn’t how many gears, it’s how much of a pain in the bum it is to set up and maintain and then how durable it is out on the trail, 11 and 12 speed IMO isnt the easiest for any of these. I see Box have launched a 9 speed 11-50 with more robust chain and mech this takes my fancy as I assume easier to do the above 3 things!

9s chains wont last longer, shimano made some big improvements to manufacturing when they went 10s.

They will probably be more tolerant when shifting though (assuming decent cable pull, spring tensions, mech doesnt go sloppy etc).

Would be happy going back to 1×10 but with the spread equal to 11 spd.

Currently riding with a mate on his old 2×9 with bash guard and chain roller. It looks so clunky and heavy.

Most of my riding is grind and drop. Either up or down. Not much in between.

9 or 10 speed with a big spread would be lighter than 11 or 12 cassette, or could be as heavy as 11/12 but more robust and not as finicky.

niche requirements for more gears though – like adventure racers/tourers (but even then the MTB setup is likely enough) and also tandems/recumbents.

We need to get rid of this ‘niche’ mentality.

If you want to encourage more people, some fit, some not, old and young, to ride bikes then we need wide range, cheap, easy to operate gears.

Current 1* solutions are almost there. 3*/2* has been there for 50 years in terms of range and cost, but isn’t as intuitive for newbies or casual riders.

I think there is room for both, but all three criteria have to be met before we can say we have a perfect solution.

Older/less fit people using bikes for shopping and general transportation in hilly areas need low gears just as much as tourists.

Rising costs and built in obsolescence have marginalised ‘MTB’ for many people and cutting edge, high cost alternatives to a mostly non existent issue will be become increasingly irrelevant.

I sometimes think I’d be happy with four speed, giving me the equivalents of 32:11, 32:17, 32:28, 32:46.

I’m very curious about the Box Prime 9 system. The GX Eagle 12 speed setup on my hardtail has gone very finicky in the middle of the cassette and I’m wearing out SLX 11 speed very fast on the ebike.

Well considering with a typical 2×11 set up you only really have about 14 gears, the rest being duplicated across the two chainrings, so with 1×12 you’re getting pretty close if you ever thought 2×11 was enough. The distance between gears is usually the main driver for ever more gear ratio’s. If you don’t mind a bit of a jump between gears then there is scope to minimise the number of ratio’s.

Regarding gearboxes…yes, there is a way to go but considering you can already buy decent gearbox systems for the same price as a top end wireless derailleur system then we’re already there if you’re the sort to be willing to spend that sort of coin. If gearbox systems became more popular then the cost would come down due to reduction in production costs due to volume and i’m sure significant weight could be taken out of the current gearbox designs. Casings can easily be made from composite materials. Gears themselves could be hybridised with composite wheels and metal toothed rings bonded to them (been done before in other applications)…its all possible but just a case of development costs and getting the production costs down.

On a MTB it is enough for me. I have SRAM GX Eagle (10-50T), the largest cog is enough to spin up anything to the point of wheelspinning and/or looping out, the smallest is enough to take me faster than I dare and the gaps are sufficient to maintain a sensible cadence at all these speeds.

I couldn’t comment on whether it would work for a road bike as I don’t ride one.

@Rusty Spanner – the issue of ease of use for occasional/new cyclists is a good point. The interleaving of ratios between chainrings confuses the hell out of a lot of people: “Why can’t I just go up the cogs at the back and when I get to the top move to the big one at the front and continue going up?”. With a few exceptions like Land Rovers cars don’t have low and high ratio gears, it’s just: 1-2-3-4-5.

1x makes a massive amount of sense for “utility” bikes and you probably don’t need anywhere near the range of Eagle, 9/10spd 12-36T would be enough with maybe a 24T chainring but a chainring that size would almost certainly have to be direct mount. 24-36 on a 29er (or 700c) gives 19 gear inches. A quick search of bike touring sites suggests around 18 GI for a loaded setup so not that far away. Go to a 42T at the back and you are down to 16 GI. A 1×9 utility bike setup would be very cheap – £24 for the mech, the same for the cassette, £20 for the shifter.

I demoed a bike at the weekend with a 2x drivetrain and the front mech felt positively agricultural, it was Sora so not exactly high end.

The main problem (at the moment) with gearbox systems is that you have to design a frame around them whereas derailleurs are a standard mount. Derailleurs are also easy to maintain. I can see gearboxes being “No user serviceable parts inside” for a good while yet or at least out of the realm of the tinkerer.

1x isn’t just about ratio – chain retention is one of the big drivers. I was so happy to get rid of my 2x chain device that wore out twice a winter. Plus 1x has the added bonus of not having to mess about at the top of the climb switching from granny to big rings. I really do not miss 2x setups on MTBs!!!

I think a step change in technology is needed to go much further. Tooth narrowness is limited by wear considerations, I don’t know how much narrower chain plates can get with existing metallurgy. Cassette width is at the max for chainline reasons. Reducing the standard 1/2″ chain pitch might do something, I wonder what pitch would be optimal if you were designing a 12 speed system from scratch?

We need to get rid of this ‘niche’ mentality.

Not sure what you mean by ‘niche mentality’. I’m saying the same thing – 1x is fine for all except certain unusual situations which is what I mean by ‘niche’.

I’m totally happy with 12 speed, actually almost completely happy with 10 and 11 speed too, on different bikes. But the big bike needs to kind of do everything, pedal like mad down big hills and grind up endless climbs on long days so I’m always glad for the extra bit of range.