Good compact crank

Change the cassette, 12-25 or 12-27, its cheaper. 😉

Shimano R700 Compact for me and it has behaved flawlessly for the 2300kms I've done. I'm a little guy, 58kgs, so it is combined with a 12 - 27 cassette and I love hills!
Halcyon1

Halcyon1 said:

Shimano R700 Compact for me and it has behaved flawlessly for the 2300kms I've done. I'm a little guy, 58kgs, so it is combined with a 12 - 27 cassette and I love hills!
Halcyon1

gzzzz, lol, i wish i loved hills. Yah uh usually i have to swerve left and right on hard hills. And sometimes it feels like my legs are breaking off. Yah i weigh 215 pounds

gclark8 said:

Change the cassette, 12-25 or 12-27, its cheaper. 😉

OR, presuming a 9-speed Shimano drivetrain, you can get a MTB cassette (e.g., 11-32 or 11-34) + an XT rear derailleur (okay, an LX or Deore if want to save some coin).

SRAM makes a 10-speed cassette with MTB-type range (NOT cheap -- over $100US) ... and, my 2-minute-on-the-workstand observation is that the hubbub.com alternate derailleur cable anchoring [at 3 o'clock] modifies the "geometry" of a 9-speed Shimano MTB rear derailleur to the appropriate indexing (if you have 10-speed STI shifters, that is).

BTW. Several years ago when I was trying to ascertain why Shimano crippled the capacity of their ROAD rear derailleurs to a spec of only a 27t maximum cog size, I deduced that you can often make a Shimano ROAD rear derailleur handle a 32t cog if you simply substitute the 11t upper pulley wheel with a 10t pulley wheel -- this is true of the 10-speed Shimano ROAD rear derailleurs, too.

NB. Some derailleur hangers have less drop than others, so viability varies ... and, sometimes, you have to tweak the B-screw to ensure clearance.

I've got a Shimano FC-R700 Compact Crankset (50/34). It gets me up most of the hills in my area but I'm thinking about switching the rear cassett (12-25 to 12-27) just to make things a little easier.