How To Install A Mountain Bike Derailleur

Video Transcript

"Installing a new front dérailleur can be pretty tricky because it's a fairly, in most situations at least, a fairly indexed shifter that you're using. This one that I have on this bike only has three clicks, so one, two, three. So, only having three clicks, and three positions where you can go, then having such a broad range to move across, really means that, unless you get your dérailleur installed and adjusted well, you're going to have a lot of grinding, when you're in extreme gears, when you have the little ring here, and towards the small end here, you're going to get a lot of grinding and cross-chaining that's going to be... bad. Cause your dérailleur cage is going to hit your chain. So the first thing that you want to do, when you're installing your front dérailleur, is the height. the height is usually gaged off of, if you're using a new dérailleur, will be a little, little plastic thing, with a picture of a tooth, like a profile of a tooth, hanging off the cage. And when you put your chain ring on, and imagine that I have a large and middle chain ring here, I've left those off just for illustration purposes, you want to have the dérailleur so the teeth profile overlaps. It basically would look like this, with your little chain ring. If you don't have that on there, basically what you need is your dérailleur as low as possible, so it doesn't A. Hit the chain stay or B., when you shift down across the gears, you don't chomp into your teeth. The other thing is, you want your dérailleur to be parallel, the cage, you want to be parallel with your teeth. You can see here, we're a little bit out of line, this is moved out a little bit, for the most part, this cage wants to be parallel with your chain rings. This is just for the way the dérailleurs are designed to work, keeping things parallel is going make it a much better operation. So you've got your dérailleur height, your dérailleur tilt, and then also, you want to just make sure that when you've installed the cable, you're shifted into your easiest gear. When you, before you tighten up the cable stop. Cause that's going to make the next step, adjusting your front dérailleur, a lot easier."