How to Choose Bicycle Derailleurs

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Eric from Spin City Cycling in Austin, Texas and I am talking to you on behalf of Expert Village and we are going to talk about derailleurs today. Derailleurs that I have in front of me are for road bikes and what derailleurs do is they move your chain up and down the cogs on your gears. So you've got on a geared bike, you will usually have a little cluster of gears on back wheel. That is called a cassette or freewheel and then you've got 2 or 3 gears usually on the front, on your cranks. The derailleur moves the chain up and down on those chain rings into your different gears. There are different levels of quality of derailleurs. The most common thing you are going to run into is derailleurs made by Shimano. They are one of the biggest component manufacturers in the world. There are others but we are going to talk about Shimano today because they are the most wide spread in general. They have different levels as I mentioned and starting from sort of their entry level model which is called Sora, the next level up is Tiagra, above that is 105 and something called Ultegra and Dura ace is their top of the line model. As you go up in quality, your are getting generally lighter weight components and in most cases you are going to get something that is going to have slightly better performance than the component just below it. So the 105 is going to perform slightly better than the Tiagra, Ultegra better than 105 and so on. Generally when you are buying a bike you are going to find that the nicest piece of equipment on the bike is going to be the rear derailleurs. This is where you do most of your shifting so most bike companies put kind of the nicest piece of equipment back there so that it will hold up for a long time and perform really well. A lot of times your front derailleur will be one step down in quality. Not always the case but that is the pretty common way of equipping a bike. Hopefully you learned a little bit about derailleurs and thanks for watching. "