daSmirnov
Well-Known Member
- Location
- Horsham, UK
Nice work. So when are we doing the Milton Keynes group ride?
Couple of tips on the gears, since I'm always trying to explain this to the other half (who commutes by bike and I'm sure only uses 2 gears!), and a couple of fellow semi-newbie mountain bikers who don't understand and spend most of their time walking when we go for a ride *sigh*, I'd like to say I'm quite good at it.
First up, most of your changes should be with the back gears. Using the rear dérailleur, which is usually controlled by the shifter on the right of your handle bars. Shifting on the back is less of a dramatic big-bang approach to gearing, and they shift pretty rapidly compared to shifting on the front where it can be half a pedal rotation before the chain has finished settling in.
Just dealing with the back gears is easy. The largest cog on the back is like 1st on a car, and so on until the smallest cog is your highest gear.
Then think of your front gears as the different terrain gears. So the largest cog on the front is your flat-out going fast mode, great for nice smooth surfaces and down hills, but a difficult grind on anything else. The middle is your steady run of the mill gears, probably good for riding on grass. And then the smallest cog on the front is your extreme hill climbing gears. A lot of my rides I don't even touch the front gears at all, so you shouldn't find yourself needing to change them that often unless you're doing some hill climbing.
Halfords should have it sorted now. If he was flicking around all the gears without any grinding noises it should be sorted. If it's a new bike, the cables have probably stretched a little bit, so they'd just need a slight tightening that's pretty normal.
But since your fixing punctures, maybe tuning your dérailleurs is next on the list. :-)
+1 for tucking trousers into socks.
Couple of tips on the gears, since I'm always trying to explain this to the other half (who commutes by bike and I'm sure only uses 2 gears!), and a couple of fellow semi-newbie mountain bikers who don't understand and spend most of their time walking when we go for a ride *sigh*, I'd like to say I'm quite good at it.
First up, most of your changes should be with the back gears. Using the rear dérailleur, which is usually controlled by the shifter on the right of your handle bars. Shifting on the back is less of a dramatic big-bang approach to gearing, and they shift pretty rapidly compared to shifting on the front where it can be half a pedal rotation before the chain has finished settling in.
Just dealing with the back gears is easy. The largest cog on the back is like 1st on a car, and so on until the smallest cog is your highest gear.
Then think of your front gears as the different terrain gears. So the largest cog on the front is your flat-out going fast mode, great for nice smooth surfaces and down hills, but a difficult grind on anything else. The middle is your steady run of the mill gears, probably good for riding on grass. And then the smallest cog on the front is your extreme hill climbing gears. A lot of my rides I don't even touch the front gears at all, so you shouldn't find yourself needing to change them that often unless you're doing some hill climbing.
Halfords should have it sorted now. If he was flicking around all the gears without any grinding noises it should be sorted. If it's a new bike, the cables have probably stretched a little bit, so they'd just need a slight tightening that's pretty normal.
But since your fixing punctures, maybe tuning your dérailleurs is next on the list. :-)
+1 for tucking trousers into socks.
Far more likely they were impatient drivers that would have had the same attitude to any other road user they thought was holding them up, same type of people that will beep at the learner driver that stalls at the lights. Unfortunately as a cyclist you're an even easier target 
