How to choose your road bike chainrings?

How to choose your road bike chainrings?

Visit chainrings road are certainly one of the most complicated parts to replace when you want to mount something other than what the manufacturer intended. Let's try to lay the foundations for choosing this part without making any mistakes.

Standard parts

  • Number of gears: nowadays 9, 10 or 11
  • Indexing
  • Mounting diameter
  • Toothing
  • Mounting standard

Tray standards and types

All components of a transmission are designed to operate under a specific gear standard, so you can't combine a chainring designed for 10-speed with an 11-speed transmission, for example. Today, most road bikes have 10 or 11 speeds, but you can still find 9 speeds.

Attention indexing* is different for each manufacturer. crankset must be of at least the same brand.

The mounting diameter of a platter, also called BCD*is the diameter of the circle you could draw passing through the axis of the chainring bolts. To measure this, on a 4-spoke crankset you can measure the distance axis-axis* between 2 mounting holes facing each other; for a 5-spoke crankset, measure the distance between 2 consecutive mounting holes, then refer to the diagram.

The teeth of chainrings works in the opposite way to that of cassettes: the fewer teeth the chainring has, the lower the effort required.

Finally, the most problematic point of all: the mounting standard. Today's cranksets are increasingly optimized, with specific assemblies between chainrings and cranksets. Even if the diameter of the attachment often remains standard, the position and/or manner of attaching the chainring may differ. With this type of crankset, it's important to identify the specific features when fitting or adapting a new chainring.

Which chainring for my crankset?

When you want to replace a chainring, you won't necessarily have a choice: the simplest and most reliable solution is generally to use the chainring branded for your crankset and specific to the model you have.

If, however, you opt for an adaptable chainring, you should be aware that you can find chainrings with special technologies to improve shifting reliability (Stronglight CT², for example).

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