You think youve got some respectable mechanical chops, but you are working on a front derailleur on a new, or like-new bike, and nothing you attempt leads to anything like respectable shift performance. Its because front derailleurs are just finicky equipment and their time is coming to an end (at least if the 1x11 advocates have their way), right? Maybe not. While its true that a great front-derailleur adjustment requires great precision, and the methods by which that precision must be achieved are sometimes quite inelegant, the blame just as likely falls on the shoulders of the equipment mix. Particularly if you havent been heavily involved in cycling for four decades, its easy to miss the fact that at a quasi-glacial pace the cycling industry has undergone a deeply fundamental change, but a lot of key players (most bike manufacturers, and many mechanics) simply cant see or refuse to acknowledge the change. Four decades ago (thats the 1970s), the entire bike industry was in love with mix-and-match componentry. It was the norm that the various parts of the drivetrain and shift system were made by different manufacturers. Brand A made the derailleurs and shift levers, Brand B made the rear gears, Brand C made the chainrings, and Brand D made the chain. It was possible to get away with this for two reasons. First, shifting technology was much less sophisticated, so the meaningful differences between the brands were relatively small. Second, shift performance was so rudimentary that the consequence of mixing and matching equipment resulted in little more than the difference between so-so and marginally so-so performance. The bottom line was that bike-operating skills were the far more important variable in how well you could get your bike to shift gears than were variables in equipment combinations. The sophistication of shifting technology began to change in the 1980s, and by the 1990s it had developed to the point that some of the big component manufacturers tried to force the bike manufacturers into foregoing the mix-and-match approach by using punitive pricing policies to get the bike manufacturers to stop the mixing practice. This policy had, at least in part, a noble intent (improved control over equipment performance), but the policy was being pursued by an ignoble means (punitive pricing). Interestingly, it wasnt the bike manufacturers that rebelled. Instead, up-and-coming component manufacturers successfully sued to end this punitive pricing approach because it interfered with the up-and-comers opportunity to get their product specd by the bike manufacturers. Ironically, some of those up-and-comers are now the establishment and are big fans of designing drivetrain/shift systems that are fully integrated. So the end result was that no matter how much the component manufacturers designed their drivetrains and shift systems to work optimally as fully integrated systems, bike manufacturers ended up with financial incentives to ignore these benefits. The practice became common, and remains common, to use cranksets and/or chains that dont match the front derailleur because the consumer has been trained to care about the brand/model of derailleur and not to care so much about the brand/model of the crankset and/or chain. So if you are that individual feeling frustrated with getting a front derailleur to perform well, before you beat your head against the wall or go round and round trying ineffective workarounds, ask yourself this, Does this bike have a fully-matched set of drivetrain/shift-system components? The cause of the problem may be nothing more than that the wrong brand of chain has been substituted, or it could be a lot more financially challenging to address the problem because its a mismatched crankset causing the problem. Either way, once you understand the necessity of keeping components properly matched, you wont be unnecessarily beating yourself up when its not a lack of skill on your part thats the cause of the problem. But to get to this point, you must have complete confidence in your mechanical techniques. At BBI, we pride ourselves in our ability to provide you with the best possible front-derailleur adjustment techniques. Once youve learned to do it our way, it wont be your skills you call into question when a front derailleur gives you fits; it will only be the budget that determines whether to nix the mix!
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:23:07 +0000
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