{A MEATengines Mini Review}
[Opening Aside]These words don’t count. I mean, they count, but they don’t count-count towards my word count. It seems that my loquaciousness, my verbosity, my unironic tautological circumlocution, well, apparently my prolixity isn’t always propitious to the review process. As such, starting here today with Marc’s 4-Bolt 64-BCD Cog Carrier, I’m trying something a little different: MEATengines Mini Reviews.
I’m not even going to cheat by including epically long captions. So, three hundred words-ish write-ups split into a few paragraphs, PPP policy assumed, and go. Some will be follow-up pieces, some will be initial look pieces, and in this case, part 1 of 2, but both will be mini-reviews. So, without further rambling and preambling, well, here goes something.
[/Opening Aside]
Marc’s Cog Carrier
The idea is clean, if not simple. A wide aluminum spline interface is ultra-friendly to any HG freehub body. A classic 4-bolt 64-BCD mounting pattern lets any 4/64 granny ring, and I’ve owned these from 22t to 30t, act as a single-speed cog. The benefits are potentially many-fold, or multi-fold. These include reusing old granny rings sitting in drawers and bins all over the world, a lighter-weight way to mount a large steel cog, and easier access to truly massive cogs, narrow-wide cogs, and steel cogs.
The negative compared to simply running a machined #1FG cog is, of course, complexity. There are four extra bolts involved, and given that single-speeding ruins everything, that’s four extra bolts to semi-regularly check. There’s extra weight in comparing a 22t aluminum granny, carrier, and bolts against a 22t aluminum cog. That becomes even less consequential as the cogs become larger and when comparing typical steel cogs against a steel granny on Marc’s Cog Carrier.
I combined a classic {read: old}, North Van-made, top-quality aluminium eNVy granny ring with the MCC and a little blue Loctite on aluminum chainring bolts for a faultless experience. Now, for part deux, I plan to use the carrier more towards its true potential by mounting a 26t granny ring that I tracked down and setting it up on Crash Test Kevin’s Trans Am. Longer term, I also have a 28t N/W ring from North Shore Billet, which could make for some neat big-cog/big-ring efficiency experimenting, and I’m thinking about trying a dingle-speed setup on my Omnium Mini-Max.
This is one of Marc’s personal prototypes {thank you, Marc} and not something you can purchase at this time. But if you would be keen to granny-ring your silly-speed, I’d love to pass on that feedback.
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