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Front derailuer mounting design
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I find mounting and adjusting front derailuers frustrating. It’s this huge slot on a rounded mounting bracket. It’s infinitely adjustable if you loosen and fiddle.

They’ve improved the rear derailuer adjustment over the years

They’ve added adjustment screws to rim brakes

In the 20 years I’ve been working on my bikes , I’ve yet to see an improvement set up of front derailuers.

Is there something inherent in the design that keeps it from being improved ?. Maybe it’s just me and others think this basic design works just fine. I swear in building up and setting up a bike I spend more time on the front derailuer than any other component.
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [7401southwick] [ In reply to ]
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I think once you know how it works, it’s pretty simple. Frame design & cable routing can sometimes make it trickier. What issues are you having?
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [7401southwick] [ In reply to ]
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Also, you can go 1X :)
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [7401southwick] [ In reply to ]
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The Dura Ace 9100 front derailleur is a significant departure from its predecessors in a couple of aspects and is more difficult to mount. However I think they are on the right track.
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [7401southwick] [ In reply to ]
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Front is easy setup, as low as it will go without hitting and square to the chainring.
Exactly what is hard about that?
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [lyrrad] [ In reply to ]
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If you think front setup is easy you probably never had oval chainrings and/or etap. Just google q-rings+etap. On weightweenies there are some etap users that will swear there is no way to setup etap on their bikes without it dropping the chain to the inside on an upshift. This might be down to user error but I can confirm that while some bike+fd+crank+chainrings combo have a huge range of possible setups/adjustments that will work just fine (and thus a lot of margin of error), its more like an infinitely small point where everything will work fine with other combinations. Not everyone has experienced this, so some people might not be able to imagine how difficult it CAN be.
Last edited by: surrey85: Aug 12, 18 4:49
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [surrey85] [ In reply to ]
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No issues with eTap and Q-rings here??? Never had any front derailleur issues either in relation to the post and I run QXL on my tri bike with Dura Ace DI2.
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [surrey85] [ In reply to ]
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surrey85 wrote:
If you think front setup is easy you probably never had oval chainrings and/or etap. Just google q-rings+etap. On weightweenies there are some etap users that will swear there is no way to setup etap on their bikes without it dropping the chain to the inside on an upshift. This might be down to user error but I can confirm that while some bike+fd+crank+chainrings combo have a huge range of possible setups/adjustments that will work just fine (and thus a lot of margin of error), its more like an infinitely small point where everything will work fine with other combinations. Not everyone has experienced this, so some people might not be able to imagine how difficult it CAN be.

I do it for a living, so yeah I have probably seen more silly combinations than most.
But really, oval rings are exactly the same, just that they often need a hanger spacer to shift the derailleur rearwards so it can be set lower.
Di2 and E-tap are both easier than mechanical as they temper their downshifts to prevent dropage.
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Re: Front derailuer mounting design [lyrrad] [ In reply to ]
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lyrrad wrote:
surrey85 wrote:
If you think front setup is easy you probably never had oval chainrings and/or etap. Just google q-rings+etap. On weightweenies there are some etap users that will swear there is no way to setup etap on their bikes without it dropping the chain to the inside on an upshift. This might be down to user error but I can confirm that while some bike+fd+crank+chainrings combo have a huge range of possible setups/adjustments that will work just fine (and thus a lot of margin of error), its more like an infinitely small point where everything will work fine with other combinations. Not everyone has experienced this, so some people might not be able to imagine how difficult it CAN be.


I do it for a living, so yeah I have probably seen more silly combinations than most.
But really, oval rings are exactly the same, just that they often need a hanger spacer to shift the derailleur rearwards so it can be set lower.
Di2 and E-tap are both easier than mechanical as they temper their downshifts to prevent dropage.

I would also add that Di2 and E-Tap are significantly easier to setup than mechanical because most of the time the hardest part of setting up a front derailleur is getting the preload correct. With mechanical if you re-align the mount you lose any work you did with the preload adjustment. Electrical there is no preload, you just have to align the cage to the manufacturer's specifications and then set the limits. Done. I will note I ran into one snag w/ my E-tap and that was my crank was too close to the frame for E-tap (it worked fine w/ force mechanical). All I had to do was add a little bit of spacer to the crank to bring it out away from the frame and it was super easy sailing from there on out.
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