PAP Wonders... Chainrings for You and Me

Here is our next PAP Wonders... topic: Chainrings. Chainrings are what engage the chain on the crankset. You can review from our Parts of the Bicycle series. In this article, we will be talking about the different types of chainrings and their pros & cons. If your building up a new bike (your first one or your next one) or maybe planning to change your chainrings, we hope that this article can be useful for you in your decisions.

One-Two-Three. There are different numbers for different uses. Mountain bikes typically have three and road bikes usually have only two. These past few years there has been a trend in mountain bikes to have less chainrings. Mountain bikes and mountain bike groupsets now come with two chainrings or just one. For road bikes, the triple (three chainrings) is available but rather rare. Also, single chainring options are offered by SRAM. This first appeared in their Force CX1 groupset (mainly geared toward cyclocross/CX riders). Now, they have the Force 1, Rival 1 and Apex 1 groupsets.

A Double Crankset - 2 Chainrings.