Gearing is probably the area that has changed the most from the first evolution of the bike and the adventure version and driven or confirmed the other changes on the bike. Portsmouth, my primary cycling grounds, are flat, like really flat for the places I need the railway bridge is the steepest ‘hill’ I have. This isn’t really great for deciding what is good for riding other areas but is what I was initially mainly considering.

I started with Shimano 105 group set on the bike with short cranks… for the little legs 😛 and a compact 50/34 chain set. At the rear I had an 11-36 cassette. I used the standard chain that came with it. As it is a road group set it came with brifter for drop bars. All in all a really nice set and stood up to my abuse really well (think multiple falls onto the derailure). Great for my commute, getting fast then I had been. Good, when lightly loaded or riding on flats when touring but I struggled with hills… Struggled a lot when loaded, so much walking when cycling around Dartmoor and the Pennine Cycle Way. So it needed to change.

The adventure evolution lead me to change from road gearing to mountain bike gearing to get the range and gear ratios I wanted for touring.

To assess what gearing would be suitable I used the Sheldon Brown’s Derailer Gear/Internal-Gear Calculator and the information on cyclingabout.com to calculate the gear inches for my bike as it was and what I could achieve with group sets that appealed. I compared the ratios to what other long distance tourers had on their bikes. The beauty of this approach is it allows comparison to other bikes which have different tyre and crank size.

The comparison table I ended up with was as follows:

Bike	Highest Gear Inches	Lowest Gear Inches
Mine with Shimano 105 Group Set	118.2	27.6
Toms Expedition Bike	104	16.8
Frances Penelope	108	17.6
Mine with Delores XT Group Set with 34/24 chain rings	85.6	15.8
Mine with Delores XT group set with 38/28 chain rings	95.6	18.5

The main difference between myself and the bikes I was using to select my gears was they both opted for triples on the front while I was looking at a double. I had been struggling so much with climbing and the higher gears didn’t seem to get used with the 105, I chose to achieve the Lowest gear inches and sacrifices the higher gear ratios, which was impacted by choosing the smallest chain ring pair at 34/24 instead of 36/26 or 38/28. Only time will tell how well this works but the test rides so fair (although unloaded) I have found climbing a lot easier.