Gears give a mighty boost to your cycling performance by helping you climb hills easier and speed along on the flat, but if they are misaligned or poorly adjusted they can ruin a ride and take a significant edge off the performance of your bike.
Luckily with a little know-how they are easy to keep running smoothly and efficiently. In the fourth of our series of cycle maintenance videos former Cycle Surgery chief mechanic, Andrew Brown, shows you how to set up your front and rear derailleurs to ensure crisp, efficient shifts, and how to fine tune your gears for maximum smoothness between changes.
The whole series of our bike maintenance videos is available now on Youtube to help you get to grips with the essentials of keeping your bike running efficiently all year round.
6 thoughts on “Video: Bike maintenance Pt 4 – How to Adjust Your Bike’s Gears for Maximum Shifting Performance”
How often do people find they
How often do people find they need to adjust their derailleurs? Im finding that more and more often i need some sort of adjustment after any 50+mile ride. I know its expected after new cables due to soem strecthing etc. but has been ongoing for a while now. Using shimano 105 5700 i have heard is a bit of a tricky one to set up.
02curtisb wrote:
I had problems with 105 pretty much from new which turned out to be the cables, I changed the cables for yokozuna items and have never looked back. The cables were expensive, but I managed to almost do 2 bikes with 1 set. The increased brake performance was amazing and a complete bonus as I’d only bought the cables to sort the derailleurs.
I need to view this. The
I need to view this. The Tiagra on my winter bike does not like being in the lower 4 gears. Slips like hell, phantom changes etc.
I need to view this. The
I need to view this. The Tiagra on my winter bike does not like being in the lower 4 gears. Slips like hell, phantom changes etc.
He appears to be using a
He appears to be using a Posidrive screwdriver (which is too large) rather than a JIS screwdriver.
It would also have been useful to actually set up the gears from scratch rather than twiddle about with an already perfect alignment.
Setting the basic rear cable tension with the chain on the second sprocket may well result in too much tensioon in the cable to enable engagement of the first sprocket. I would rather first screw in the barrel adjuster, pull the cable tught by hand and connect, select the first click on the shifter then use the barrel adjuster to move the mech to the required position.
Short videos like this one
Short videos like this one may be applicable to older gen. 8 speed systems which really don’t need much effort to work perfectly.
Modern derailleurs work on much smaller tolerances than previous generations. Everything from a hanger alignment, cable routing, choice of cables, correct installation of the front mech with a bracing plate/screw and a cable pin orientation can make or break your shifting performance. What also many bike owners don’t realise is how terrible their internal cable routing is by design. If you have a look inside many downtubes of big brand bikes you’ll be shocked how ignorant designers/engineers let the gear wires run along the rear brake casing/hose without any system to manage/separate them. In such setups wires randomly partially wrap around the other cables/silencing foam badly affecting shifting. Then there are setups which will never index correctly almost from new, the best example being previous generations of “wooly” 10 and 11 Shimano speed groupsets or recently e.g. scandalously bad Sram Eagle SX and NX setups. Things are going to get even worse with increasing popularity of fully internal routing through stems, bars etc which will introduce more bends/friction into systems.