Postby europa » Fri Aug 31, 2007 2:00 pm
Seeing you already have a double ring fitted, going to a triple could easily require more effort and expense than justified. For starters, can your front shifter handle a triple?
You haven't told us what range of gears you've got at the back, but just go down to your lbs, with your bike (so that un-considered questions can be answered immediately), and buy the largest range of rear cogs that will go on your bike and can still be covered by your rear derailleur.
Although the gear calculator is fun and quite illuminating if you can get your head around it, you probably won't know what the numbers mean in terms of climbing ability. By all means have a play with the thing though - you'd be amazed what you learn about your bike once you start looking at the overlaps between the chainrings.
The Black Beast runs an 11-32 on the back, an SRAM cluster. I don't know if you can get them compatable with Campag though - possibly a different spacing. Not only that, you have to consider whether your rear derailleur can handle that spread of gears (the Black Beast has a DeoreLX rear dr). With that gearing, I can climb most things around here, only resorting to the granny for big climbs. Even with my lower than stock granny, I only get two extra gears over the lowest on the middle ring. However, I can not stand to climb on those low gears - if I stand, I have to be up three gears, which just happens to match the lowest gear on the middle ring.
The beauty of just fitting the largest range cluster your bike will take is that it's easily reversible - when you wear it out, if you've found you don't need the lowest gears, don't buy a cluster with them.
Richard
I had a good bike ... so I fixed it