Easy to do adjustments to fine tune your rear derailleur (electronic and mechanical)

By Wires March 10, 2016

0 Comments

Despite the complexity of derailleurs, you can fine tune it with easy to do adjustments and this can make a big difference in your training and racing performance

RD11

Understanding about how your bike works isn’t something most triathletes are interested to learn, with limited time for your sport, you may as well spend most of it training instead of learning the ins and outs of your bike. However with some very basic adjustments, you can make an impact on how smooth your rear derailleur will work.

Very often, in the process of packing and unpacking the bike for a race, or switching from your training wheel to your race wheel, you will get on the bike and feel that something isn’t quite right and the chain isn’t aligned and smooth as it should be, the gears may also be jumping without you shifting them, if you don’t have access to a mechanic, you will need to solve this, otherwise this can result even in a crash in case your chain jumps a gear in a hill or sprint

Luckily, both the electronic and mechanical shifters are relatively easy to work on.

Mechanical Derailleur

You can easily find a screw that regulates the tension of the cable and that will adjust the gears. Typically, if the gears aren’t going up, there isn’t enough tension on the cable, so you need to rotate the screw ‘up’, and if the gears aren’t going down, there’s too much tension on the cable, so you need to rotate the screw down. This makes it very easy to remember and adjust, just rotate the screw to the direction it needs adjustment, up or down the cassette.

cambio_traseiro_bike

Here’s the screw you want to use to adjust the rear mechanical derailleur

Electronic Derailleur

Adjusting the Shimano Di2 electronic shifters is also very simple, there’s a button specific for it on the piece that connects the cables (and where you have the battery indicator), press the round button until the red light switch on. The shifters now is where you will make the adjustment, similar to the process described for the mechanical derailleur. Once done, press and hold the same button on the connecting piece to reset the shifters function.

Botão de ajuste

Adjustment Button

Passador

Shifter

If after these tweaks you still have issues shifting, especially in the newest electronic version, then it could be a more complex problem and you should take your bike to a qualified mechanic.