Mini Deraileur

Thom473

Member
My deraileur misses gears going down from 7 to 1. Granted, I've had this same thing happen on other bikes and adjustment is usually finicky but do'able. It doesn't bother me a lot since I'm usually in 7 and downshift a bunch of gears at once when I hit a hill. But thought I would mention to folks and see if they have the same experience. I probably will decide to fix it eventually...
 
After the first week or so I started loosing lower gears. Bike shop shop said they can set it up to be better at the higher gears or the lower but with the quality of the equipment it is the best they can do. Over 3000 miles now and I am finally upgrading to a better derailleur system.
 
Doncha miss the old deraileurs that had no numbers and you had to feel each gear as you tried to shift into or out of them (yah, I"m old)? Sure, when the push button shifters came out I thought it was great, for a little while anyway.
 
I adjusted mine a couple weeks after I got the bike last Christmas and they have been flawless since then. I never touched anything on any of my prior bikes - just took them to the shop. I've learned a lot with this bike, from the initial assembly to installing the fenders and then adjustment of brakes and derailleurs. I am about to take it to the shop to have a pro give it a tune up.
 
I'm going to try to adjust mine this weekend, any tips or any how-to websites?

I just searched on Google and YouTube. Lots of good videos. Start with the easiest adjustments - that's all I needed. There are some that got way too complicated.
 
@Thom473 This is totally normal for any bike out of the box, especially after a short break in period. It is recommended that you have the limits and cable tension on the derailleurs adjusted regularly, whenever shifting is not smooth or it is skipping gears.

There are upper and lower limit screws as well as a barrel adjuster to fine tune the cable tension. All shifter cables stretch a little bit when they are new, and usually a few turns (counterclockwise) of the barrel adjuster compensates for this. Agreed with @Doug Edwards above, some videos get overly complicated, a local mechanic can probably adjust and show you the basics very quickly.

Feel free to reach out to [email protected] as well!
 
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