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gravel gearing 1How to get ultra-low gearing for gravel bike adventures
Want lower gears on your gravel bike? We do, so we set about combining some parts that aren’t supposed to work together to get a massive gear range. Ssshh, don’t tell Shimano.
Gravel bikes are over-geared.
Out of the box, your typical gravel bike has a 50/34 chainset and an 11-32 cassette, giving a range of gears that’s fine on roads unless you’re riding somewhere very hilly, but with limitations you very quickly bang up against when you venture off road.
That bottom gear is far too high. When I head out of Cambridgeshire to the gentle slopes of Suffolk I find myself wanting something lower for longer climbs. When he tested Trek’s new Checkpoint David Arthur — who is much, much fitter than me — found he had to get off and walk when riding the Cotswolds. "Compact chainsets have no place on gravel bikes," he said in a road.cc office discussion of the issue.
In gear inches that typical 50/34 & 11-32 set up has a low of 29in and a high of 123in — a 428% difference between smallest and largest.
Not only is 29in too high, but so is 123in. You’re never going to use that top gear off-road and you’re not going to get much use from it on the road either. (I could digress into a rant here about component makers supplying almost nothing but pro-class top gears on bikes that will never see a sprint for the line, but that's a topic for another time.)
Let’s try and cook up a better gear selection.
Sprockets
The arithmetic of gearing makes a change of sprockets the most effective way to get lower gears, and in the last few years Shimano and others have made available 11-speed cassettes with ranges of 11-36, 11-40, 11-42 and even 11-46, all with the same sprocket spacing as our gravel bike’s 11-32.
But there’s a problem: no Shimano road derailleur is rated to work with a sprocket larger than 34-tooth. How about a mountain bike derailleur? Nope. For some reason known only to Shimano, their 11-speed road and mountain bike shifting systems aren’t compatible. Back in the nine-speed days you could use a Deore XT rear derailleur on a road bike if you wanted to, but that’s not the case for 11-speed. What to do?
Well, Shimano’s assessments of derailleur capacity have always been conservative. When Shimano say something won’t work, that often means it won’t work to the high standards Shimano sets, not that it won’t work at all.
And this is what we find with Shimano’s latest GS line of 11-speed 'Shadow' road bike rear derailleurs. The £58 Ultegra R8000 medium cage derailleur (RD-R8000-GS for fans of part numbers) is not supposed to be able to shift to a sprocket bigger than 34-tooth, but YouTube is full of backroom tinkerers demonstrating that it works just fine with an 11-speed 11-40 cassette.
The 105 GS rear derailleur looks geometrically identical to the Ultegra, but is typically £20-£30 cheaper. Could this be a cheap way of getting really low gears on a gravel bike?
To find out, I bought a 105 RD-7000-GS rear derailleur (£36.95), an SLX CS-M7000 11-40 cassette (£40.77) and an 11-speed Shimano chain (£19.01). I thought about pushing my luck and going for 11-42, but I wussed out. Maybe another time.
The cassette is a big beast of a thing. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get used to just how huge a 40-tooth sprocket is, never mind the 50-tooth and bigger sprockets now available for mountain bikes. Rotor’s 13-speed system includes a 52-tooth sprocket. When Ah were a lad, that were a chainring!
The 11-40 cassette fits straight on the hub of my Prime RR-28 wheels in place of the 11-32, and the 105 R7000 GS rear derailleur substitutes perfectly for the 105 5800 GS unit. To give the derailleur the best chance of handling the big sprocket I dial the B-tension ‘angle of dangle’ screw all the way in, pulling the body of the derailleur as far back as it will go. I tweak limit screws and cable tension and run carefully up and down the gears.
Success! It shifts just fine to that huge sprocket, clicking into place as if it were designed to.
I’m still running the original chain, so I try shifting the front mech into the big ring. Bad idea. It’s immediately obvious that things are going to go seriously wrong if I try to use the big/big combination.
I ditch the original chain and fit the new one I’ve bought. At this stage I don’t have the chainset I want to use, but I want to ride this weekend. The existing chain would probably work fine with the 46/30 chainset I’m waiting for.
Out on the road and the trail, the difference is soon obvious. I keep glancing down, thinking I must be getting close to the lowest gear, and finding I’m actually in the middle of the cassette.
This isn’t very surprising. The 34/25 combination on the old set-up, 37 gear inches, was two gears from the lowest. In the new set-up’s 34/24 (38.3 inches) I still have four lower gears.
My proving ride takes riding buddy Al and me down a narrow, wet bridleway into the village of Linton, home of the excellent Linton Kitchen cafe. We’re in the middle of a drought, but the leaky water tower at the top of the hill means there’s always a stream here to flick mud up at you.
Fuelled by coffee and carrot cake, we tackle the bridleway in reverse. My state of fitness could be accurately described as woeful, but nevertheless, it’s a doddle. The average gradient of the top section is about 10 percent, which by Cambridgeshire standards makes this a Proper Hill™, and climbs on trails never have perfectly even gradients. I pootle up it easily. Al zooms on ahead. Not having a 34/40 low gear he doesn’t have any choice, I tell myself. It’s nothing to do with him being a lot fitter than me. Ahem.
For fans of gear charts, this is where we started:
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 16 | 18 | 20 | 22 | 25 | 28 | 32 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 122.7 | 112.5 | 103.8 | 96.4 | 84.4 | 75.0 | 67.5 | 61.4 | 54.0 | 48.2 | 42.2 |
| 34 | 83.5 | 76.5 | 70.6 | 65.6 | 57.4 | 51.0 | 45.9 | 41.7 | 36.7 | 32.8 | 28.7 |
And this is where we are now:
| 11 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 19 | 21 | 24 | 27 | 31 | 35 | 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 122.7 | 103.8 | 90.0 | 79.4 | 71.1 | 64.3 | 56.3 | 50.0 | 43.5 | 38.6 | 33.8 |
| 34 | 83.5 | 70.6 | 61.2 | 54.0 | 48.3 | 43.7 | 38.3 | 34.0 | 29.6 | 26.2 | 23.0 |
In short, we’ve stretched the range from 428% to 538% with no downside except for a bit of extra weight. I think the gaps between gears are still reasonable; more on that later.
To go even lower (and wider) we’re going to need a change of chainset.
Chainset
One thing I wanted to avoid in this project was trying to persuade road and mountain bike components to work together. There was a time when you could cross the streams easily, but Shimano’s road and off-road derailleurs now have different geometries, so you can’t use mountain bike mechs with road shifters without some sort of cable pull converter. That’s a level of bodging I wanted to avoid.
That means the chainset can’t be too small or a road front mech won’t work well with it because the curves of the cage won’t follow the shape of the chainring. I therefore settled on one of FSA’s Adventure chainsets in a 46/30 'sub-compact' configuration. That’s enough of a difference to be worth the hassle, but not so much that the shifting will be balky.
FSA makes several 46/30 cranksets, from the high-zoot K-Force and SL-K Modular units with carbon fibre arms to the inexpensive Tempo CK Adventure cranks that fit old-school square taper bottom brackets. In the middle, at a sensible price and weight, there’s the new Energy Modular BB386 Evo crankset (£200), with hollow forged aluminium arms, so I went for one of those.
Fitting was straighforward, with just one caveat: the position of its mount stopped the front derailleur going quite as low as I’d have liked. The front derailleur cage ended up a couple of millimetres higher than Shimano recommends.
That’s another reason not to use a mountain bike chainset. If you have a braze-on front derailleur it’s unlikely you’d be able to get it low enough for the 38-tooth outer of a typical mountain bike double — and of course you probably want a higher top gear than the 38 ring would provide.
The gear range
With the FSA 46/30 chainset, the resulting gear range is massive. Here’s what it looks like:
| 11 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 19 | 21 | 24 | 27 | 31 | 35 | 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 46 | 112.9 | 95.5 | 82.8 | 73.1 | 65.4 | 59.1 | 51.8 | 46.0 | 40.1 | 35.5 | 31.1 |
| 30 | 73.6 | 62.3 | 54.0 | 47.6 | 42.6 | 38.6 | 33.8 | 30.0 | 26.1 | 23.1 | 20.3 |
That’s a 558% range, much bigger than the 428% we started with and most of the extension is at the bottom of the range where it’s most needed. But we’ve also preserved a decent high gear for those zoomy road descents.
Only mountain bikes have lower gears. While single-chainring gearing has all but taken over on mountain bikes, some double-chainring bikes are still available, with gearing down to a positively wall-climbing 22/42 (around 15 inches, depending on wheel and tyre size).
Those systems sacrifice the high end though. With a 36/11 or 38/11 top gear (around 90 inches) you’re going to be doing quite a bit of coasting on descents.
Riding
Out back, the 105 rear derailleur clicks effortlessly and without fuss from one sprocket to another, even when it gets to the final 35 and 40-toothers that it's not supposed to be able to handle. Up front, the old 5800 front mech flips easily between the 46 and 30 chainrings.
This set-up is noticeably gappier than the one it replaced. There are a couple of 15 percent jumps between gears, and the gap between the two highest, provided by the 11 and 13 sprockets, is a whopping 18 percent. I can live with that, but if you're a finely-tuned pedalling machine who struggles to change cadence more than a few percent, you're going to find it a bit jarring.
The big advantage of a gear set-up like this is that it reduces the need to hit the redline every time you go uphill. Back when I was doing a lot of mountain biking, I was always the guy pootling along at the back while everyone raced up the first couple of hills. And I was the one with plenty in the tank at the end of the ride, sitting on the front towing everyone for the last 10 miles home.
Tweaks and alternatives
If Shimano's 11-40 cassette is just too gappy for you, SRAM makes an 11-36 11-speed cassette (£63.05) that shrinks the biggest gap by dropping a 12 between the 11 and 13. With a sub-compact chainset like the FSA that still yields some usefully low gears. SRAM says the 11-36 is only compatible with single-chainring gear systems, but that's almost certainly a matter of marketing rather than engineering.
If you wanted to go electronic, you could assemble a Di2 version of this transmission without breaking any of Shimano's rules. The XTR and Deore XT electronic rear derailleurs work with Ultegra and Dura-Ace Di2 drop-bar shifters. The Di2 rear derailleurs are rated for a 42-tooth sprocket in a 2 x 11 system, so you could go slightly lower than I have. I'd love to hear from anyone who's tried this.
If you wanted to save money, you could use a £22.95 Wolf Tooth Roadlink to extend the capacity of your existing rear derailleur. According to the manufacturer, the Roadlink will extend any non-Shadow GS rear derailleur to work with an 11-40 cassette.
That'll work if you're still running 10-speed too. SunRace makes a couple of 11-40 10-speed cassettes, the £30.59 MS3 and lighter MX3 (£40).
Conclusion
I think the system I’ve put together provides the best wide-range gravel bike gearing currently available, at a sensible price. It's very handy that it can be put together in two stages and the most effective one — changing the sprockets — is the cheaper.
There are plenty of arguments for alternatives, though. People fitter than me like the simplicity of 1 X 11 systems and are prepared to sacrifice a bit of range to get an easy life, and more power to them.
It's a pity Shimano doesn't make it easier to put together a wide-range system like this. They could offer SGS versions of the Ultegra and 105 Shadow rear derailleurs, for example, with the capability to handle 11-40, 11-42 or even 11-46 cassettes. And they need to offer chainsets with smaller rings and front derailleurs that work with them. Maybe next year, eh?
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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C'mon Shimano - even on road, never mind gravel or touring, us mere mortals would really be better served by 48/32 or even 46/30 "sub"-compacts, and sensible cassette options - 13 or even 14 to 32/34 ??
Shimano have been behind the game in this for a long while, they've followed the path of 1x and whilst that will suit some it's not actually what the majority want certainly not for road riding and I'd contend that 1x on all but very specific types of MTBing is not all that brilliant either.
They've shot themselves in the foot with regards to the more touring and leisure riders and I'd even say audax too by stopping up their triple groups to Tiagra (4700 currently), even then it's very expensive and not that common, you certainly wouldn't find it in stock in a shop on the high street and online retailers are few and far between. Sure 'we' have all had to adapt because the big three have all ignored touring/audax for the most part and we make do with bodges like mix and matching cassettes or buying third party chainsets or simply be forced to have something that doesn't really suit your needs.
They should have gone down the compact triple route years ago following up on the old RSX compact road chainset fom the 90s, they really fucked up IMHO by continuing with the 'road' triple and insisting on 52(or 50)/39/30 but further by not offering triple STIs in 11 speed not higher than Tiagra in 10 speed. You can still buy new 6700/5700 triple STIs but they're circa £170 and very few and far between and they're holding their price for mint used ones because they're so spartan.
I'm using a 50/39/24 with an 11-28, that gives me a 23" low and I don't need to worry about the jumps between the ratios which is something people (including reviewers) don't want to talk about when transitioning both up and downhill particularly under load. When your're betwix and between and trying to find your cadence sweetspot that's when wide range cassettes get found out and the jumps are so wide that that transition can be disrupting to your flow and can unbalance you if putting lots of effort through the pedals going down a much bigger gear than you want or find that the jump up means your cadence is much slower so you're having to dig to get back up to optimal revs, this is just as important touring as it is racing IMHO and is why I won't ever want to go to a really wide cassette.
Don't get me wrong, I like 11 speed, it makes 12-30 so much easier and I've said in the past that a 12 or 13 speed cassette in say 12-32 with a 50/28 would be just about the sweetspot for me. I can actually get 50/28 easily enough using my old Stronglight 86mm and the rings work fine with 10/11 speed chains but the problem is that 12 and upwards means a whole new frame/wheels.
I think a 12/13/14 speed hub gear with a double chainset might well be a way to go to get that really wide range without massive cassettes/really long drailleurs and chainlines and jumps that are at extreme ends.
A racing internal gear hub reduces wheel dish (so stronger/lighter compared to a wide dished wheel, no rear derailleur, perfect chainline all the time, more aerodynamic, not having to spread the frames even wider and with electronic/wireless shifting already a thing for gear hubs with some tweeks regarding weight (like not building them to last 40-60k miles) they could end up being a solution for the wider and lower gear ratio. Unless one of the big three take the jump and go back to making triples (ok SRAM never made them) with sensible gearing options, but it simply won't happen.
I’m quite surprised by Shimano’s apparent unawareness of these massive gaps in their groupsets. It wasn’t an issue up to 9 speed, so no one complained. With all the different cable pulls now, it’s up to Wolf Tooth, Microshift, FSA, et al to make Shimano’s stuff work in a whole bunch of real world scenarios.
Enjoyable read. We sometimes forget that bikes aren't all that complicated. The first time I stripped a bike down to its frame was a weird experience, one moment it was just a pile of bits and a little while later it was a bike again. They're not F1 cars or living things where everything is unique, they're just a collection of bits - levers, cogs and stuff - and those bits are frequently interchangeable.
Another option for sub-compact chainrings on a Shimano chainset :
https://absoluteblack.cc/oval-road-chainrings-30-46-and-32-48-for-110-4bcd/
I run this on my Trek Domane for Audax rides. I think the jury is still out on whether the oval shape is an advantage but it does allow 46/30 on a standard Shimano 4 arm crank. The front derailleur sits rather higher than ideal but it changes fine. I run 11/36 at the back. Excellent low gear for 200 metre climbs at the end of a 600km Audax.
Chirs
have SRAM X0 type 2 (clutch) rear derailure. Enables me to run a std Cmapy Compact 50/34 with up to an 11/40 casette. Will work with SRAM's std 2x11 brifters out of the box.
however i cheated and prefer Ergo's so im running my old Chorus 10 speed Ergo's so i have modified the castte by replacing the spaceres with 10 speed spacers, dumped the 11t and 13t and added an Ultegra 10 speed 13t end cog. 50/34-13/40 is a decent gravel gearing for +40mm 700c tyres.
Im still missing the 14t, 16t cogs though for a tight higend. When said i really love the even jumps from 21-24-27-31-35-40 on the low end when climbing.
Slightly off topic, but has anyone ever converted a ss Shimano derailleur to a GS by swapping the cage plates? You can buy 6800 plates from sjs cycles, lot cheaper than a new derailleur.
Don't know. First I've heard of the possibility – but I'm making a note of it cos it sounds good!
Yes I've done this on several derailleurs, converting both 6700 and 6800 SS derailleurs with 6800 GS plates and inserting a reverse facing allen head bolt in place of the b screw to give a 34T capacity.
Have also run one of these with a Wolftooth Roadlink to give space for up to a 40T sprocket.
Yes, did it on the Di2 Ultegra RD. Works perfectly and I now use it with a 11-32
Bit late in seeing this, but the answer is yes, although I converted a Dura Ace 9070 Di2 to a long cage using 6800 cage plates. Think you can only do this with Ultegra and Dura Ace mechs, either Di2 or mechanical.
105 is different. But then just buy 105gs cage plates.
On one bike I have a 44/28 chainset with a Tiagra 9-speed f.d. I think it's 4500 series mech, anyway it works fine. I probably wouldn't go any smaller with a road mech, but as numerous people have already said, it does depend on the configuration of your bike. Used with an 11-32 cassette this gives me a lovely low granny gear of around 23" while avoiding large gaps between gears, and still keeping a high top gear of 108". Which is high enough that I only use it about twice a year, ymmv.
With this set up I not only find hills much easier, I reckon I often get up them quicker by spinning a low gear than when I had to grind a higher one. And my knees are probably going to thank me for it too, especially when I get a bit older.
I'd like to add my voice to those saying how useful and informative this article has been. More please!
How did the mech handle all the excess chain with a monster cassette like that? I’d imagine it was hanging like the doors on a Lancaster Bomber in any sort of small-small combo
Shimano 11x34 with Acera triple (26/36/48).
There you go. Now you're riding a Giant Escape.
Great post and so true about how the major component manufacturers ignore the needs of regular riders. When I lived in hilly Seattle, on the west coast of the U.S., I had to set up all my bikes with gear-inches in the low 20's. In cities like Seattle or San Francisco, you can have climbs of a mile and more that average a 10% grade, and shorter hills with grueling 18 to 20%. grades I was able to achieve low gearing, including with a couple of IGH bikes.
Interesting feature. Could we have more of these please? Perhaps one on understanding gear inches for idiots.
I posted a while ago about needing to increase the range before heading out to the Pyrenees next month. I have a 10 speed 11-25 cassette on the rear with a compact chainset. I have an old Record rear derailleur that won't extend as low as 32. I don't understand gear inches and the online tables mean create more confusion as I don't have an engineering degree.
What size chainset should I replace mine with to get the equivalent of a 34-32 (or lower)?
I have been riding a 3 x 11 set up on my Disc Trucker for the past three seasons which is also not supposed to work. Deore 22, 36, 48 + 11-40 + XT bar end shifters + XT Dynasis rear mech + Woolftooth Tanpan, all work brilliantly for me. I expected accelerated chain wear but have not seen it. Lost a tooth off the 40 sprocket on "The Distance" but didn't notice until the post ride wash down.
Brilliant - more articles like this please!
Good read! More articles like this, please.
Suffolk, longer climbs. this does not compute. Max elevation in Suffolk is128m asl, where are these longer climbs as us local types would like use them for training.
I quite liked the setup Bombtrack run on their Beyond gravel bike.
Apex 2x10 shifters.
SRAM 42/28 MTB X5 chainset.
GX rear, MTB X5 front. 11-36 cassette.
Gear range is 21-104" depending on tyres which is scarily close to what I used to run on an MTB 3x7 (48/36/24 & 12-28) back at the dawn of time.
Interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I followed the LF6 Long Distance route across Belgium on my Kinesis ATR with about 20kg of luggage/water. The route attempts to track a 'scenic' path across the region that takes in both the Bosberg and Kluisberg not to mention miles and miles of forests and dodgy concrete roads through corn fields. I felt that the 50/43 and 33/11 combination should have been sufficient, but it was taking me all day just to cover 100km (my average speed was barely 15kph). The heat obviously didn't help (it was touching 32° most days), but I do wonder now whether a wider breath of gears might have been wiser? I didn't think it was an option, really...
I have 46/36 and 11-32 on my sram apex equipped “gravel” bike. I could do with getting the gearing a bit lower, but funds are committed elsewhere just now. I’ve already forked out for the 46/36 cross chainset which I had to import from Germany as no one in the uk was selling it.
Cross chainset offers less gap between chainrings, but has a higher lower end than a normal compact . I'd suggest swapping the 36 for a 34 ring for a cheap and fast lowering of the gears.
Trouble with a 46/30 chainset mentioned in the article is that althought the mech works, it's not perfect (much more difficult to set-up to avoid chain/mech rub). The mech isn't designed to work with a ring size of 30t and the distance from the mech to that ring means the chain is further in towards the frame at the point the chain passes through the mech, meaning the mech must be allowed to move further towards the frame to stop the rub, meaning it rubs much earlier when shifting up the sprockets.
The gap between the rings in percentage terms on a 46/30 is also much bigger than on 50/34 (it feels much bigger than the numbers would suggest - I often had to shift two or three gears on the back when shifting between rings to balance things out pedalling wise).
If my bike hadn't come 1x, I would have stuck with double but gone for 46/32 to help deal with both issues.
Shimano need to produce a front mech specific to 'super compact' chainsets, and maybe a super compact chainset too, then I'd consider running such a set-up again (although I do like having my left shimano lever hooked up to a dropper seatpost ... there's another experiment road.cc could do and write an article about!).
To summarize;
Check your rear mech is as above
Shove the b screw all the way in
Fit bigger cassette
Reconfigure your rear limit screws and cable tension
Slam your front mech down a few mm
Fit subcompact chainset
Fit new chain
Reconfigure your front limit screws and cable tension.
Top job. May not work on every bike though, none of this is guaranteed, hence Shimano having such restrictions.
Great article.
Not usually brave enough to tackle this level of change and risk it all not working together. Thanks for the info. JIMTHEBIKEGUY wish I read your comments first. Important to have the screw on correct position. I had it reversed and was anxious when nothing seemed to fit.
1=got the ultegra derailleur for a reasonable price online (same as 105 retail)
2- XT 11-40t cassette That 40t is huge compared to original 32t!
3- Prefer SRAM chains with power link.
Basically, it all fits and works on my Raleigh Tamland with 34x46T crankset. Saving old cassette for commuting or winter road rides.
A very interesting read!
Are the SRAM 1x set up gravel bikes generally geared OK? I am on the lookout for a "gravel bike" to use for touring in countries with roads and trails even ropier than ours, and like the idea of a 1x on the ease of use and reliability front. For example the PX Full Monty maxes out at 42 42 which I thought would be good enough for pretty much anything bar really serious climbing.
That depends!
My gravel bike came 1x with 44 ring and 42 largest sprocket. This was fine on the road, if unladen, but as soon as I hit the gravel or added any load I began to struggle. Combine gravel and load and it became unpleasant. Most forest roads are easily as steep or often steeper than most tarmac roads, but with the surface being far from smooth and often very draggy due to moisture, there was no way I was going to stick with that set-up.
I decided to change the chainring for a 38t, and hey presto, sorted. On occasion I wished for even lower, but that's only on some really steep off-road stuff, and I'll just battle up those bits as otherwise it's perfect. I can still pedal at 28 mph which is plenty fast enough for the bike. If I want to go faster, I'll be on my 'normal' road bike, sticking to tarmac and riding unladen - on the gravel bike though anything over 25 mph and I just ease up and enjoy the rest.
I recently changed my SRAM setup. I bought the bike with a SRAM Force 1 which was running 42 chainring and 11-32 cassette. This served me well til I started doing some bigger rides with some hard gradients - 16% + climbs.
I am now running the SRAM Apex 1 mech with 11-42 so have that golden 1:1 ratio and it's doing the job - I'm very rarely going into the 42 unless it gets really hard but it's working perfectly. I'm yet to do a fully laden ride with all my bike packing stuff on so might be fighting a bit for some more range but just need to get a bit stronger. I can always get a smaller chainring for a big tour.
Don't get put off by the purists. They ride what they know and don't like change. That's good for them. I like the simplicity of less moving parts and less maintenance.
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