To all you 29er's out there!

Not sure if genuine advice or troll

Usually DJ is trolling, but today he's trying to be helpful.

Personally I prefer SRAM drive trains, but there's clearly nothing wrong with Shimano XT.

Narrow/Wide chainrings are a modern design specifically for single-chainring drives, and are claimed to reduce the possibility of the chain falling off.

If you really don't know what you want, you would probably be best off picking a ready made, it will be cheaper and you can change the things you don't like once you establish what they are.

NW and TT are two names for the same thing, depending on brand.

So long as your single chainring has an even number number of teeth and your chain doesn't have any halflinks, you can guarantee that a tooth that meets the inner plates of a chain will always meet inner plates (unless the chain drops). This means that every other tooth can be even wider than a normal SS chainring's teeth. The benefits are that you don't end up with alternating clean and dirty teeth as you would with an even-numbered SS ring, and also when you're at the extremes of chain angle, having the wider tooth in between the wider plates reduces the risk of the inner plate hitting the top of a tooth rather than going either side...