#sram force

Installing & Testing the 1x11 • 12/31/17

Attempting to climb the Old Lawley Toll Road in Calistoga a few days ago made it clear that if I’m going to be doing events like Old Caz with significant steep climbing I’m not going to be able to do it on a single speed (not really that I had expected anything different, really). 

I have triple cranks on both my road bike and my mountain bike, so I’m used to having a bunch of gears. The largest spread cassette I can run with Sram Force with a long cage derailleur is 11x42 (I could do 10x42, but would need a rear hub with an XD driver; I’ll worry about that later if it seems like it would be useful). 

SunRace makes an 11x42 cassette that’s well-reviewed and significantly cheaper (and a bit lighter) than the Sram version. So, got one of those, removed the single speed rear cog and spacers, removed the single-speed specific sliding dropout and replaced it with one with a derailleur hanger (which the previous owner of the bike had passed along), and mounted a long-cage rear derailleur to that. Then I ran fresh shift cable and housing, and measured, cut, and installed a new chain. 

There was a bit of daylight left, so ran over to the Bay Trail and did a quick spin up and back to test it out. Shifts great! WIll need to try it on some hills to see how the ratios work out.

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