I know many of you are gearing your Terras down. I haven't really seen anything on Strada owners changing up the gearing. The Husky manual says they both come with 16:47 gearing, but I don't necessarily trust that given their record of mislabeling the WR300 gearing. If true, the Strada is not geared as tall as the Terra stock. Here's what I'm thinking, I'm planning out a thousand mile trip to take here over the 4th of July weekend. It's all paved two lane, getting as many miles out of the Ozark mountains as I can. So, average speeds will likely be 65mph. What I'm thinking is that since 65mph sits around 4500 RPM IIRC, if going up one tooth on the front (if this is an option, it looked pretty tight when I had the cover off to change my oil filter), would still leave the bike with a enough umph to get out of it's own way. That should move that cruising speed up to 70 mph and allow some additional range. Anyway, looking for thoughts on raising the Strada's gearing to make trips and commuting a little better.
Remember that the Terra runs on a 140/80R18 and the Strada is on a 140/80R17. Assuming front and rear sprocket tooth counts are the same (which I believe they are)...the Strada would be about 4% lower speed than a Terra at the same RPM. (I found 81.1" circumference and 84.2" online for tires...so it's actually 3.7%) That all said...I have a Strada and think the gearing is just fine. At 70mph the issue is increasingly aerodynamic drag for mileage....not gearing. It's a small x to the much bigger X of air resistance.
Ok, so, with the 4% change in rear wheel diameter, 16:45 (4.2% difference) should be the match for the gearing on the Terra. I'm aware of the wind drag, but I'm not talking gearing it real tall. Just changing it up for a 200-250PRM drop at average cruising speed would be nice to reduce vibration, wear, and increase range a bit. I have no intention of ripping around doing wheelies on this bike. It's basically a commute, random rides, trips here and there bike. I leave the crazy stuff for the dirt, because I'd much rather hit a hundred trees than a single car.
http://www.gearingcommander.com/ The website above has the Terra info in their data base. You can pull up the data, make a couple edits, and it will calculate more than you will ever want to know. I kept the rear sprocket stock on my Terra and dropped two teeth on the front. The calculations on this page were right on the money for RMP's and speed for the new setup.
