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How to Adjust Your Bike's Gears for Maximum Shifting Performance

Video: Bike maintenance Pt 4 – How to Adjust Your Bike's Gears for Maximum Shifting Performance

Clicking or mis-shifting gears can ruin a ride and seriously impair your bike's performance - here's how to keep them shifting smoothly
by Tony Farrelly
UPDATED Wed, Oct 06, 2021 14:10

First Published Dec 8, 2016

6

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. 

How to Clean and Lube Your Bike for Maximum Cycling Efficiency
How to Get the Best from Your Bike's Brakes
How to Keep Your Bike's Wheels Round, Tight and True
How to Adjust Your Bike's Gears for Maximum Shifting Performance
How to Choose the Right Gear Ratios for You and Your Bike
How to Cure Your Bike's Creaks and Squeaks
How to Choose and Set Up the Right Tyres for Your Bike
maintenance
cycle maintenance
Bicycle Maintenance
Tony Farrelly

road.cc's founder and first editor, nowadays to be found riding a spreadsheet. Tony's journey in cycling media started in 1997 as production editor and then deputy editor of Total Bike, acting editor of Total Mountain Bike and then seven years as editor of Cycling Plus. He launched his first cycling website - the Cycling Plus Forum at the turn of the century. In 2006 he left C+ to head up the launch team for Bike Radar which he edited until 2008, when he co-launched the multi-award winning road.cc - finally handing on the reins in 2021 to Jack Sexty. His favourite ride is his ‘commute’ - which he does most days inc weekends and he’s been cycle-commuting since 1994. His favourite bikes are titanium and have disc brakes, though he'd like to own a carbon bike one day.

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6 comments

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BBB | 4 years ago
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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.

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Spangly Shiny | 6 years ago
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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.

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Danger Dicko | 8 years ago
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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.

 

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Danger Dicko | 8 years ago
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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.

 

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02curtisb | 8 years ago
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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.

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caaad10 replied to 02curtisb | 8 years ago
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02curtisb wrote:

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.

 

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.

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