Top Gear Tuesday

A couple days sped by while we were out of town, so I wasn't riding.  On the way home from relatives,  we were tempted into watching for whales again, and spotted one whale along with a gazillion dolphin!

And we came home and spent the whole day installing old food in a new refrigerator. Finally we got around to watching Top Gear on television during supper.

As a consequence, I thought I'd do a Top Gear Cycling show blog for you all.

One doesn't see top gear on a bike very often. Unlike a car, where you get into top gear anytime you are outside the city, or on the freeway, many bikes are greatly over-geared and seldom see the ideal conditions required for a 100+ inch top gear. Go here for more on gears and inches.

I decided to start with a cross-chain gear. This is the largest cog in the back and the largest chainring in the front. Try that with your 11-speed cluster, hah! (it's hard on all the equipment, so don't really try it).

In addition to not getting into top gear often, it's not very safe to take photos of your legs pedaling as you are probably going too fast. Thus, don't try this at home.

NOTE: These photos were taken by a semi-professional on a closed circuit public road.

Now you can see I'm coming around a corner to the downhill straight, with my chain on the small cog in the back and the large chainring in the front - thus, top gear.

For verification, here's another shot. You can tell I am not coasting, because my legs are revolving at speed. In this photo, at 85 rpm in a 99 inch gear (48 x13) I am doing 25 miles per hour. How do I know? You can do it with math or you can cheat and use a calculation program as found here.

On my tandem with 27" wheels, top gear is more like 95 rpm in a 120 inch gear (54 x13) for 34 mph. Frankly it's rare that the two of us ever push this for more than a quarter mile, although one day on the prairie outside Calgary we spun in top gear for more than an hour. Behind a grain silo on a trailer.

I spotted this police-ified Chevy on my way home after my speed run. If you remember, it also featured in an earlier blog, about 6 weeks ago, called Bars and Brakes. (No, I had don't have total recall - only partial - so I had to look it up too, using Google and searching on Cazalea and ominous ... the only words I remembered using to describe it).