Bicycle Gears for the Dummy Cyclist (Bike Week)

May is National Bike Month, which is why we've featured the articles some dumbass freelancers have written about bicycles this week at the Antisocial Network. And who better to consult on the topic than a HubPages.com member who calls himself "David Bicycle"? Apparently, lots of people would have been better... Let's see just how big a dummy David proves himself to be. As always, on the assumption that David's native language isn't English, we'll cut him slack for grammatical mistakes. When it comes to facts, however, we're merciless... and there are some factual problems with "Everything About The Gear Shifting In Bicycles."¹ Let's see what he says:

"Mountain bikes are very much faster than the normal bikes and help in riding very rough terrains

We'll grant his point on the "rough terrains," but "very much faster"? Nahhhhh...

Basically gears are made of two circular discs of different sizes. Both of them are cut in the end to form numerous teeth like structures. When the smaller disc rotates, the tooth touches teeth’s the bigger disc making both to rotate. The smaller disc has to rotate many times to make the bigger disc rotate once.

Well, sure; except for a couple of things, First, a bicycle's gears don't touch each other – they're connected by the chain – and second, on a bicycle, the larger gear drives the smaller one, not the way Dave described it here.

"Mountain bikes have multiple gear sets attached to them. The speed of the cycle is determined by gear ratio. When people have to drive very fast, they use a certain type of gear. When they want to control the speed while riding on slopes they change the gears which have fewer ratios which help them to control speed.

Excuse us, but we're almost certain cyclists control their speed with brakes. And then there's this tasty bit of misinformation:

"For example say the smaller disc has to rotate 30 times to make the bigger disc rotate 1 time the ratio is 30:1. This is known as Gear ratio. The speed of the bicycle depends mainly on this gear ratio... Normally we feel it hard to pedal the bicycle because of the resistance. Let us take a mountain region for example. We feel so hard to pedal towards the hill top. Gears with maximum gear ration should be used then. Once we decoded David's fractured English, we realized that David's wonderful advice got this extremely important point in the science of cycling and shifting exactly backwards: in the real world, when you're climbing a steep hill you want the minimum gear "ration," not the maximum. Oh, David, you're such a dumbass!

And, while we're at it dear Dumbass of the Day, just WTF are those "shift forks in the handlebars" you cite?

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   https://davidbicycle.hubpages.com/hub/gear-shifting-bicycle

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