• This topic has 30 replies, 17 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by luket.
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  • Single speed conversion
  • yorkshiresfinest
    Free Member

    Hi Everyone

    Making another MTB outta all the spares I have so it’s abit of everything. I’m wanting to try something different and go single speed..
    Im thinking of using the Dmr single speed chain tensioner kit. Question I have is I’m looking to change my chainring from 3 to 1 I’ve found one that will fit my crank but there’s options in regards to what ratio i.e 34t, 35t, 36t, 37t, 38t and 39t. I’m wanting something that’s fairly good all-round i.e abit of road and abit of road I appreciate they will be more hard work than gears.

    Thanks
    Tom.

    colin9
    Full Member

    It depends on wheel size. A good starting point with 26″ wheels is a 2:1 ratio, so 32t:16t.
    My 29er runs 34t:18t.

    Anything in this ballpark will be OK to get going with. The thing about singlespeed is you’re in the wrong gear 90% of the time anyway so it doesn’t really matter. It takes a while to build up your legs and there’s certainly no shame in walking occasionally.

    boxwithawindow
    Free Member

    The standard start point point for mtb singlespeed is 32/16 so maybe 2 or 4 teeth more.

    Be sure to buy a rear cog with a wide base or it will eat your freehub.

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    joshvegas
    Free Member

    I’m wanting something that’s fairly good all-round i.e abit of road and abit of road I appreciate they will be more hard work than gears.

    unless you live somewhere flat… ie not yorkshire.

    YOu’ll not have a fantastic compromise. best gearing for the offroad and just accepting the spinning on the road.

    yorkshiresfinest
    Free Member

    Thanks guys yeah I’ve heared there abit hard work but really good for fitness and I’ll definitely get used to it. In regards to the rear cog with a wide base any suggestions on these as the Dmr kit doesn’t look upto much but I might be proven Wrong.
    Yeah I live in Yorkshire so hills are everywhere haha.

    Tom

    yorkshiresfinest
    Free Member

    Sorry forgot to add yeah I’m running 26″ wheels.

    kayla1
    Free Member

    I’m on 37:19 on 26″ here, it’s a good trail/pottering ratio. Freewheel down hills and use the momentum to help you up the other side 😎 I love singlespeed 😋

    wheeliedirty
    Free Member

    I’ve been running a DMR conversion kit since the summer on a gravel bike and it ain’t chewed up my freehub yet. Maybe I’m just not pumping out enough watts

    boxwithawindow
    Free Member

    I tend to use surly cogs, there are cheaper out there the surly cogs are good kit.

    Klunk
    Free Member

    32/16 for 26 here…. don’t forget the short “singlespeed” chainring bolts btw

    ajantom
    Full Member

    I’m in the ‘prerer to spin’ camp.
    I’d rather be under geared on the road/crosscountry, and have a slightly lower gear for the ups.
    Currently running 33×19 on my 29er bike.
    Did 50km on it this morning with 1200m of climbing.

    A gearing of about 50-52 gear inches is considered to be the best off road.

    To work out gearing times front teeth by wheel size in inches, and divide by rear cog size.

    So my gearing is about 50.4 (33×29÷19)
    Maybe a bit higher due to having a big 2.6″ rear tyre.

    And as above, Surly cogs are great. The On One chromo wide based ones are good too.

    If you’re using a tensioner then i prefer the 2 jockey wheeled ones. Paul’s, Rohloff, and Shimano Alfine are all good.

    spooky_b329
    Full Member

    Thumbs up for singlespeed, makes you much faster and fitter if you can stick at it long enough to adapt.

    Going from my 26″ hardtail to a 29″ rigid was the real game changer though, faster up, faster down, smoother, more fun, more efficient. I’ve barely touched my other bikes for the last 18 months.

    Use a gear calculator like Sheldon Browns gain ratios to help decide your gear, you can plug in the details of your other bikes and make up a sheet to compare, this makes it quite easily to visualise the different between a smaller chainring or wider ratio cassette/cog. (Gain ratios account for wheel/tyre/crank size so you can compare gears between bikes)

    BigJohn
    Full Member

    You should aim for a ratio which gives you the most fun on the best part of the ride. I live near Cannock Chase so the slightly downhill twisty singletrack sections with occasional sharp climbs are what you want to be in the right gear for so you can throw your bike around and get out of the saddle and mash the pedals without worrying you’ll lose the chain. Yes the hills are harder to pedal up and the flats are spinny, but that’s the same with gears.

    joshvegas
    Free Member

    I sort of agree with John but its not mUch fun if you can’t get up hills so i would amend it to gear for aomewhere between the best bit of the ride and you longest/steepest climb. I acy eun two cogs a smaller one for getting there/flatterrides and a bigger one for offroad. I don’t really change it during the ride its more a ride there on a slack chain and swap vut i don’t always bother.

    Dmr kit is fine chewing of the freehub is only really a concern if its alloy and even then youou can fix it with a file and you can use it as if nothing ever happened. If you enjoy it you can get a wide based cog when you decide you want to adjust ratios.

    luket
    Full Member

    As others I’ve run 32:16 on 26 or a shade harder (33 oval) for fairly hilly off road. Now on 34:18 on 27.5, which is essentially the same. In your shoes I’d be tempted to buy a couple of cheap cogs to try different ratios. If you have an old short cage rear mech knocking around, that’s another tensioner option, as is a bb mounted roller lower chain guide.

    I also have a 42:18 700c gravel bike that lives somewhere flat. Maybe irrelevant but I find that a nice road gear in a flatter area.

    kerley
    Free Member

    Thumbs up for singlespeed, makes you much faster and fitter if you can stick at it long enough to adapt.

    I haven’t ridden gears for 20 years and am not that fast or fit so god knows how slow I would be if I had used gears for those years 🙂

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    +1 for under gearing rather than over gearing. Even a low gear like 32-20 (on a 29er) will give enough resistance for sprinting out of corners on single track.

    Half the fun is learning to ride differently, carrying speed through corners and pumping rather than peddling.

    Klunk
    Free Member

    go easier to start, spinning out on the flat is better than having to monster every climb over 2% (you’ll have plenty of opportunity to practise your gurning on even a moderately flat ride).

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    If anything, over time I’ve gotten lower. You can keep learning to spin quicker which gives you a greater range of speeds but you can’t go down lower.

    yorkshiresfinest
    Free Member

    Thankyou for the advice it’s really appreciated. I’m quite looking forward to trying it I’ve never owned a single speed always had gears and it’s something new.

    Andy-R
    Full Member

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    thisisnotaspoon
    Full Member

    If anything, over time I’ve gotten lower. You can keep learning to spin quicker which gives you a greater range of speeds but you can’t go down lower.

    Same here, although maybe it’s also because I’m quite a lot older than when I started with this singlespeed bollocks….

    mlke
    Free Member

    I converted a semi broken carbon hard tail a few years ago. With rigid forks it is well under 20lbs.
    Love it for Winter riding and nice for core strength because you’re waggling the bike around a lot to pop up to the top of those little rises.
    An hour is enough for me though.
    I have a 2:1 ratio on a 26 inch wheeled bike.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    What’s wierd is after years of riding singlespeed, I now find gears exhausting. I used to do 50miles on the SS, but now a lap of Swinley on the geared bike kills me.

    It’s definitely harder work in the short term getting up hills, but at the same time you have to focus on riding smoothly on the descents. And you learn to pedal slowly, but with the same effort so you get up the hills without being out of breath, rather than shooting off ahead trying to maintain 80rpm you put the same effort as anyone else but at 40-50rpm.

    Andy-R
    Full Member

    When I started riding singlespeeds getting on for twenty years ago I credited it with keeping me riding mtbs when otherwise I’d have probably just packed it in – don’t ask me why but it just seemed to suit me, loping uphill rather than spinning high cadences.
    For years that was all I rode and that, I think, is the secret to becoming the best that you can be at it. Much like playing fretless bass – just play fretless bass…(which for years was all I played too).
    However, now that I’m as near as dammit seventy, I’m finding it hard to motivate myself to suffer on the tough climbs as much – especially as now I’m mostly riding alone and have nobody to “perform” to (‘cos it’s amazing what a difference an audience makes, whether it’s riding mates or spectators at a race) 😉

    At the minute I’m actually running six gears on my singlespeed (a la Jeff Jones) but I reckon it’ll be getting returned to how it should be soon…

    n0b0dy0ftheg0at
    Free Member

    For the year before the driveside crank sheared on me, I was riding my Wazoo fatbike without a rear mech cable, using the high/low screws on the mech to fix the chain on the 17T sprocket. When using the 29er wheels typically with ~32mm tyres, climbing sub ~3min tarmac climbs that hit up to ~13% was ok using the 38T ring unless I was knackered, but with the 26×4″ Jumbo Jim fitted it was rare that I didn’t drop into the 24T ring.

    If you ride in a hilly area, trying to find a single gear combo that works is a compromise.

    Bez
    Full Member

    I would suggest just fit 2:1 and get the **** on with it, unless you don’t have a 2:1 combo to hand in which case just get as close as you can. Whichever ratio you pick it’s going to hurt until you’ve got your eye in (expect your first few rides to be miserable experiences where you can’t see why anyone would choose this sort of lunatic setup) and once you’re in the groove a 2:1 will get up pretty much everything a geared bike will. If you decide later to go lower, fair dinkum, but one of the nicest things about singlespeeding is not having to think about stuff like whether you’re in the wrong gear so just fit something and persevere. I wouldn’t try to aim for a compromise between an MTB gear (~52”) and a road gear (~70”) though: IME you end up with the worst of both worlds.

    As for wide-base sprockets: essential for aluminium freehub bodies, not so much for steel, especially at first.

    Stick with it; it pays back in ease of maintenance and mental health, plus if you’re lucky like me you can lend your bike to a mate and they’ll vomit on the first climb of the day 😁 (Or don’t, and ride gears, it’s all good.)

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    If you ride in a hilly area, trying to find a single gear combo that works is a compromise.

    Perversely I think the inverse is true.

    I rode up to SSUK at Comrie Croft from Spadeadam in Cumbria. Keilder was fine, the borders were fine, the Pentlands were a push up, the canal was fine. The flat road up to Sterling was my worst couple of hours ever on a bike. The remaining hills were fine.

    Same when I was in Cambridgeshire for months.

    You can ride up hills in a bit of discomfort, and enjoy the descents. But you can’t do anything about a gear that’s a smidgen too high or low on a constant 1% gradient or a flat cambridgshire ride with a headwind that hurts and a tailwind you can’t take advantage of 🤣

    kayla1
    Free Member

    The thing with singlespeeding that sometimes you’ll be off and pushing, which is fine, because it’s not The Law to be constantly pedaling a bike you happen to have with you 😎

    But yeah, just GTFO with it like you did when you were a kid and only had one bike that only had one gear and shit brakes.

    Also my OH nearly threw up yesterday after showing off on his (newly) single speeded bike which was tres amusant 🤣

    ajantom
    Full Member

    To muddy the water a bit, I do also run one of my bikes as a Dingle-speed 😉
    2 front rings and a Rohloff rear tensioner with a single rear cog.
    Works well for terrain with lots of steep ups, means you’re not pushing all the time.
    You can change down with your heel, though it is a manual change up!

    tomparkin
    Full Member

    Trad 32:16 here on a 26er for mostly off-road duties. I live on The Other Side to Yorkshire, sort of Pennine foothills, so reasonably hilly. I find I do end up getting off and pushing on certain climbs, but I can pedal up most stuff. Flip side is it spins out easily on the road, but I can live with that.

    I personally really enjoy it as something a bit different to my bigger geared bike. It’s small, light, and sketchy at speed! 🙂

    luket
    Full Member

    +1 for some of the positives of singlespeeding. When I fitted gears to my last hardtail (26 Soul) I stopped riding it. There’s no good reason I can think of, I just didn’t like the bike so much that way. Its hard to describe but I don’t want to be without a ss. I’m quite happy without a geared hardtail. As above, it’s partly because it is something a bit more different to the bigger geared bike. Current ss is a burlier hardtail but it still feels reasonably light to me and fundamentally different.

    My mindset is not that you’re in the wrong gear 90% of the time, rather it’s that 90% of the time you’re in a gear that’ll do just fine with some adjustment from the rider that I’m happy to make.

    I have a mildly bad back and weirdly I also found that on my previous full suss (admittedly more trail/enduro than xc but still an easy enough ride) I could get some lower back trouble where on the ss hardtail on the same rides I didn’t. I think it’s the extra mobility in the core and back from standing up for low cadence pedalling that does this. I don’t think I tire myself out more over up to about a 40km/1200m ride either on singlespeed, from comparing how I feel afterwards between the two bikes. So long as the climbs are limited in length. More power perhaps, but for a shorter time and with more rest along the way all else being equal.

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