Ok, I am doing a race soon for which I need my road bike - normall I race on my tri bike. My tri bike has decent wheels (easton vistas) but my road bike has sh!tty ones, which is normally fine as I use my road bike for training mostly. So I want to swop the wheels for the race, and I have a few questions about that - I’m sure the answers are straightforward, but I want to be sure.
If I just swop them and race, will the work fine? I am concerned that because the chain etc on the road bike might be more used than the cogs on the tri bike, that I might get slippage. Should I then test it the day (or whatever) before to check this out?
Could this damage the cogs on my good back wheel?
Additionally, for training generally, can I swop the road bike back wheel onto the tri bike and not damage the chain etc on the tri bike? Eg for turboing etc. Could this cause problems later with slippage?
What do people normally do with training & racing wheels sets?
(Yes, I know my wheels ain’t that good, but that’s all I have!)
In theory that works, but in practice there is likelihood that your cogs and chain won’t mesh due to wear factors and you may need to adjust your derailleur. If your chain, rings, or cogs have significant wear, things may be anywhere from marginal to truly nonfunctional, even if everything was fine on the both bikes individually. I’d make the swap early and see how things run. In particular, if all seems well, I’d do a really hard climb and see if your chain skips at all, which would obviously suck on race day.
Well… do your wheels have different cassettes on them? e.g. maybe a 9 or 10 speed cassette for your better wheels, and 8 or 9 speed cassette for your not-so-good wheels? If they are the same speed, then usually there isn’t a problem.
However, sometimes, even though they are the same speed, the position of the cassette on the freehub / position of the freehub on the wheel might be slightly different; it’d require a rear derailleur adjustment.
If the wheel is a different speed from the bike, you’d have to work around that with some complicated rear derailleur adjustments to basically “disable” a gear on either your shifter or your cassette. It is possible to do it in such a way to minimise slippage; for the longest time, I was running an 8 speed cassette on a 9 speed setup, and it worked fine for most of the gears, although shifting wasn’t perfect.
Another thing to note is that generally, your chain and your cassette tend to age together. When you change your cassette, you should change your chain too, as your chain tends to stretch over time. Using an overstretched chain (i.e. the chain on your road bike) on a new(er) cassette will cause your cassette to wear faster.
Good answers above. Try it and see how it works. There is one test you could do beforehand: measure your chains (see sheldon brown or park tool websites). If neither need replacement, then you should be ok.
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What HCD said – swap the cassettes between the wheels, and then all you MIGHT have to do is give the barrel adjust a little twist in case the locknut-to-cassette spacing is slightly different.
Good answers above, but there is one more issue to be aware of. Sometimes the dish of the real wheel is not perfect. So make sure that the rear brake is not rubbing after swapping wheels. Also, rim widths are different; so you may need to adjust the brake a little in order to have adequate spacing between pads and rim.
I completely forgot about the gears: my tri bike is a 10-speed and my road one an 8-speed, so swapping the wheels would probably not work. Although the race is just a draft-legal tri, I don’t want to muck up the cogs on my good wheel as they’re shimano dura-ace. There are no hills on the course, but if the chain did skip, it might cause a little havoc in a group. It’s also one less thing to worry about. I’ll just have to clean up the rear training wheel properly! It’s been rattling lately.
Oh, and swapping the cassettes around is beyond me, and I don’t have the tools for that anyway.
Thanks to all for the replies, much appreciated.
But what do you guys do normally if you have really good wheels/bikes you don’t want to turbo on or get wet etc?
As long as you switch the cassettes, you can use either wheel on either bike. There should be thin washer on the 10 speed (it goes on before the cassette) that you DON’T use on the 8 speed, so when you move the 10 spd cassette to your crappy wheel make sure you get that as well. (the 8/9 speed cassettes are wider than the 10 speed)
Ultimately, it is nice to have all your bikes that will be sharing wheels have the same # of gears, whatever that number is.
