Re: Extensive article on Rivendell and Grant Petersen

On 9/24/2024 10:15 AM, Wolfgang Strobl wrote:

 I wasn't confused by those three front chaingrings on the bike a local
shop built for me in 1996...
 But I certainly learned to dislike its many weaknesses.
 

As a
bonus, most with >1 chainring get more gear range than they'd otherwise
have, and without resorting to unusual or proprietary equipment.

 I wouldn't call what Shimano and SRAM sell for ordinary road bikes or
MTB for quite some time now "unusual" or "proprietary".  There is the
usual fight about patents, but that's about it.
 Anyway. Those two bikes that I built for my wife and me in early 2023
<https://www.mystrobl.de/ws/pic/fahrrad/20240624/P1107879.jpg>
got a single narrow/wide chainring and a gear range of 10:52. ...
 She likes it and so do I. I'm grateful to have finally got rid of the
misconstruction called a front derailleur. That radio-controlled
electric gearshift works like charm, too.

My touring bike matches your gear range: 19 inch low, 100 inch high gear. (For the uninitiated, those are equivalent wheel diameters.) All done with very conventional equipment, stuff available in the mid-1980s.
I'm not sure what you consider "many weaknesses." But I value the fact that if a problem arises with shifting, I can diagnose it visually and fix it. I'll never be able to do that with a radio link, and probably not even with wired electronic shifting.
Same with brakes, BTW. As mentioned, I fixed a brake clearance problem on a friend's bike last week, one that required disassembling her brake. If a similar problem occurred with a disc brake, I'd have been reluctant to disassemble. I dislike black boxes with hidden functions. And I tend to disbelieve the sales pitch "But nothing will ever go wrong with this system!"
--
- Frank Krygowski