Hi, this is David back with Expert Village. And next I'm going to demonstrate for you, how to adjust the dérailleurs. This is especially tricky on a mountain bike. A lot of people have problems with the shifting, the, with the chain not properly engaging on the cog on the back. And they're riding along and they hear noise. So, there's two ways of performing this operation. The first I'm just going to do by hand. The second I'm going to show you is using a Philips head screwdriver. Now, what you are going to want to do, is put your bike on a bike stand, or you can flip it upside down. That works too. And now if you notice, see right now this is working fine. I put it in the, the furthest gear on the bottom. Now I'm going to pull up on this lever once. Okay I just pulled up, it did not click. That's not how it's supposed to work. It should click one cog each time. So there's a little plastic thing on the end of this cable right here. The whole purpose of this little thing is to allow you to adjust the clickless shifting on these bikes. So what I do, is I'm just with my right hand, I'm just twisting this until it actually shifts onto the next cog. So I'm still turning and I'm turning it. Okay and it just shifted. Now to test this to see if it's working properly, I'm going to go back down here and with my left hand I'm going to shift this back down and the, I just clicked it, and the rear dérailleur did not jump back down. So I'm going to turn it the other direction. And it just jumped back down. This is not an exact science. You kind of have to play with it, and figure out what works right for you. But to test it then I'm going to pull this, I'm going to click that back up. Okay and that, it didn't, it didn't shift again, so I'm going to gingerly, very gingerly adjust it, until. It shifted! Yay! And then I'm going to test it again by going back down. That time success. It successfully shifted back down. To test it, I pull back up. Shifted, back down. So that's how you adjust the clickless shifting.
There's two other elements of the real dérailleur that I want to point out. And that's just the amount of distance that the dérailleur will travel this way and this way is entirely determined by one thing and one thing only. Well two things. Two little screws, right here and right here. I'm going to turn the bike so you can see that. Right there. Those, those two little screws. The top one controls the amount of distance the dérailleur travels that way. Don't, if you're going to adjust that, you don't want to adjust it so much that your chain goes in there. So be extremely careful with that. Same thing on the bottom one. This bottom one controls how far the chain will travel this distance and if you don't adjust that properly it could, it could cause a lot of problems. So, it's something, you only really should adjust if you really absolutely need to. And it's just a simple operation, I'm not going to actually turn the screw, but you just simply turn it that way, or you turn it this way. And again the bottom one will control how far the dérailleur goes that way, and the top screw will control how far the dérailleur goes that way.
So those are the basic operations of how to adjust a rear dérailleur. Next I'm going to go ahead and cover how to adjust a front dérailleur. This is David Lyell for Expert Village.
More Photos
