How to adjust your derailleur for perfect shifting (indexing your derailleur) | Syd Fixes Bikes

welcome to the shed i'm sid mackie's on the camera and today we are gonna be learning how to adjust your rear derailleur so that you have perfect shifting on your mountain bike all the time i just screw and unscrew them all until things get worse for this task you will need a two mil allen key or a phillips head screwdriver four mil five mil and your brain i think everyone has heard this noise or something similar if it's making a clickety clackity noise like that it means the derailleur is confused i like to anthropomorphize the bike equipment it thinks it should be in a lower gear but it's not quite in the lower gears or higher gear that's what you have to figure out that's where you use your brain for some reason these sorts of things just get out of whack your cable could stretch out like if you just got a new bike or got new cables put on you arrived for a while like this will probably happen to your shifting it can be a sign of the end of your cable and housing's life because the cable and housing might be worn out and you have to replace that do you want to talk us through a little bit how a derailer works and we're talking about a mechanical cable actuated derailer not an electronic derailleur i'm gonna see the floor to lily hey lily how does a derailleur work that's clears that up basically there's a cable tension is put on the cable which pulls the derailleur out you sound doubtful pulls it one way or the other yes which is why when you break your cable you're always stuck in your hardest gear okay you're stuck in your hardest gear which way is pulling it's pulling it in i guess okay so that's shifting easier which is putting more tension on it and then going the other way less tension there's a couple variables here one is the amount of tension on your cable so that's one thing that we can change the other variable is the range that your derailleur is moving so the start and end point there's some little screws over here somewhere your limit screws so one is the high and one is below and i imagine we will learn which one is which today and then there's this one which is a mystery to me but we'll get to that later i just screw and unscrew them all until things get worse so the tension is controlled by first off where you have attached your cable to your derailleur and then because bike manufacturers are kind human beings and they know that we don't always get it right when we put the cable in the thingy there's also these guys which are called barrel adjusters this is the most common barrel adjuster you'll find on mountain bikes but on road bikes you usually find them either part way down the shifter table coming out of the hoods or at the point where the cable goes into the rear derailleur if you're just riding on the trail things start going it's probably not that out of whack so you should try on your barrel adjusters this is like the brain part of it where you have to like think really hard right now do you know what gear it should be in so the only way to tell is go to shift to your hardest gear so sid is in her hardest gear now shift one gear easier okay so it's it should be one gear from the hardest but it keeps dropping into the hardest which means what don't tell me [Music] uh i think it means there's not enough tension on the cable because otherwise it would go the other way if it was too much tension if there was too much tension it would go up a gear or easier a gear first of all let's just decide on how we're going to talk about it instead of calling it low and high easy hard so it's going harder than it should be which means that there is not enough tension okay so barrel adjusters to me are just like really have been very hard to wrap my head around because you kind of do the opposite of you what you want to happen that only makes sense to the people it makes sense too but i'm here for you basically if you want to make there be more tension on the cable you loosen the barrel adjuster if you want there to be less tension you tighten the barrel adjuster do you know why i do actually after five years of trying to figure this out i think i finally understand i have to go to the other side does mackie will do this while he's riding the bike i have to get off the bike get on the proper side and look at dead in the eyes righty tighty lefty loosey we're loosening it so you're loosening it you're backing this out so by backing it out what are you doing pushing the housing backwards which is stretching the cable yeah so you're basically making the housing longer you're making the path that the cable has to take longer which puts more tension on the cable so if you tighten it you're shortening that path and making the path shorter for the same amount of cable so loose or cable to tighten the cable you do the opposite that's the opposite part you unscrew it yeah it's always opposite day here gonna unscrew a lot i find it's helpful to just go really far in one direction and so you want to be careful because you don't want to unscrew it all the way like if you if you wiggle this it looks like it's not actually screwed in anymore oh so you should screw it in just a couple turns there you go so now what's the plan you unscrewed it a certain amount now we're gonna see what happens let me tell you a secret for adjusting derailleurs instead of shifting one gear up one gear down or like one gear up one gear up do two gears up see how it's doing and then go one gear down and then two gears up and then one because then your move you are moving your way up the cassette but you're testing both easier and harder at the same time it seems pretty good the other thing you can do is if you look at the chain so this is what it looks like if your cable is slightly too tight you can see right this gear right there is basically touching the chain right there and that's what's causing it once it pedals hear that click click noise that's it trying to shift up another gear when it shouldn't be so in that case what does that mean we are going to do the opposite of what we did before so we're going to make the cable looser by tightening this by screwing that in it's probably the better way to think about it righty tighty okay so we're not ticking anymore and if you look here it's actually still really close it's basically touching so i would probably loosen the cable maybe two or three more turns so now there's some space between that chain and the chain ring and that's what you want it's in the hardest gear it has been shifted all the way down so it should be in the hardest gear right yep okay so that's fine go ahead and pedal it stays in that gear everything's hunky-dory but now shift one gear easier but the derailleur doesn't move at all which means that it's an entire gear off it actually is shifting okay after that but it means you'll never be able to get into your easiest gear right now if you try to fix this with the barrel adjuster what would happen it would probably like pop all the way off yeah you'd basically unscrew the barrel adjuster fully so instead we have to tighten there although based on my experience i would not recommend doing that when it's in the easiest gear i would do it in the hardest gear because then you have the least amount of tension yeah just hold the cable and let go of the derailleur that is probably about where it was previously right so now pull on the cable and now try tightening it up do not have enough fingers for this you think that amount was going to make a difference i don't think it moved at all well think about how much it changes when you're twisting a barrel adjuster that much so i guess we just see okay so that's your hardest gear whoa it won't go into the hardest gear so i went too far talk us through what you're doing i'm loosening it loosening the bolt letting the cable pull itself back a little bit and then tightening it again it went back a little bit we'll see excellent now if you just do one gear cool zip up and see what's going on on the top end one two three [Applause] i want three so do the two one direction one the other and try it just that seems like it's working pretty well i feel like you just had an epiphany about limit screws i literally don't think i understood what limit screws were until like 30 seconds ago i think the fact that these are controlling a different variable than the tension never really made sense to me so i didn't know when to do limit screws it's kind of easy to tell when you need to mess with your limit screws because it's when you're losing your chain off the back or the front or if it will never shift into one of those gears if you go to your hardest gear for example yeah and you shift one gear at a time all the way up and you only get 11 shifts and you can't get your 12th shift you're like something is stopping my derailleur from moving into the easiest gear but it's not cable because you know you've only shifted 11 times that would be a limit screw issue as sid pointed out these limit screws don't have high and low marked on them and your derailleur may be a screwdriver here so if you're in your hardest gear as you are right now right it's limiting out because it's this one is touching that one yeah so if you look really carefully here you can see that this one is not touching anything so obviously that's going to be your low limit or your easy limit okay so they do call low is easy low is easy not small so go ahead and shift all the way to the opposite gear and let's make sure that the low limit is touching at that point and then you're for sure that that's what's going on you can see that low limit screw is touching right there okay so you know this is your low and that's your high it's literally just a screw that touches the thing i kind of thought it was like magic to be honest so now tighten your limit screw like a couple turns sorry yeah the low limit screw because tightening it will make it closer so now i won't be able to get into my smallest gear most likely and now what happens like if you're pushing up there nothing's happening so that's because if you look right here your limit screw is already hitting the stop and so it's limited out it's saying like nope derail is going to go too far if you go past here yeah so how would you fix it i would loosen it yes indeed this is like a huge revelation i'm not gonna lie see what happens not quite enough okay so it's going up but then it's falling back down so that's not quite loose enough it's much less intimidating to me to mess with these now that i know that it's literally just like a physical process of like this touching that seems less likely that i could horribly mess things up the thing about understanding things makes you less afraid of messing things up if you were to loosen it more then as you were shifting into that easiest gear it might just push it beyond the cassette into your folks so let's go back to the opposite side of the cassette and play with the high limit screw so i don't think i want to even bother with getting it stuck in here so i think i'm going to shift up a couple yeah tighten that and then the limit will be there i mean i can just go ahead and tighten this all the way to confirm my hypothesis it still won't go off the other side so it didn't shift the range i just did this with the low end exactly it doesn't shift both sides it literally only shifts the side that you're on so if you go back up there all the way to your easiest gear easiest gear limit screw is still happy but then if you shift all the way back down okay so you just shifted a gear and nothing happened yeah so we're gonna go ahead and pull this guy out what you could do here is you just shifted one gear harder and nothing happened so you could loosen the limit screw until you get that one gear and then you could shift another gear and see if you get you that second gear or not i think i did it i mean we'll find out hopefully what you can do to just make sure is go ahead and tighten that hard limit screw until you feel some resistance because then that means it's hitting that little contact point and then make sure it oh that was too much so loose in a tiny bit there we go looks happy to me so if your chain falls off between the frame in the cassette what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to dig your chain out of this stupid spot put it back on this hardest gear and then take a look at these limit screws and one of them will be a lot closer to touching something than the others and that's the one that you will want to essentially look at it and tighten it until it is touching something yes and that will keep it in the gear that it's currently on which is what you want because you're there the opposite side if you over shift easier drop your chain between your wheel and your cassette really a bummer did get the chain out between the wheel of the cassette put it on your biggest easiest cog and then repeat that and then one of these screws will be very close to something but not touching it and you want to screw it down till it's touching it that was a very succinct summary the last thing that you might need to adjust on a derailleur that is this one right here and if you look at it it basically is the screw that changes how like rotated upward the derailleur is when it's pressing against the derailleur hanger so if this is your problem what are the symptoms what you might find if somebody's bike is having issues getting into the easiest gear is that their b index is totally off and therefore they can't actually get into their easiest gear because it doesn't have the clearance between that cog and the cassette go ahead and loosen that screw like three turns ooh saggy chain so we lost some chain tension that's one thing that honestly can be multiple things that could be that your chain is just too long okay and stop there now come to this other side of the bike you see how this uh-huh is touching that big ring or like very close to and there's some some rub marks on there some wear marks do that right now i think we may have as you tighten it it pushes this back which creates space between the top of the derailleur there and the teeth the way that you adjust the z index is go all the way to the easiest gear each derailleur will have a different measurement between the top tooth of the cog and the bottom tooth of the the cassette ring and for this derailleur the 12-speed shimano derailleur it's like a little over a centimeter so right now we're looking at probably three quarters of a centimeter so we could tighten it up and as sid tightens it you can see it moving farther away so that looks pretty good now if you shift down one gear you can see we are nowhere close to touching that tooth on the top of the derailleur this is how you adjust your derailleur for perfect shifting in under one minute if your derailleur is skipping in multiple places or in the middle of the cassette try adjusting your cable tension if it is jumping into an easier gear you have too much cable tension so tighten the barrel adjuster to loosen the cable if it is jumping into a harder gear loosen the barrel adjuster for more cable tension if it feels like it might be an entire gear off tighten or loosen the cable at the bolt and then fine tune with the barrel adjuster if you are dropping your chain off either side of the cassette or are unable to get into your highest or lowest gears you will need to adjust your limit screws adjust the high limit screw so that it is touching the stop when you're in your hardest gear and the low limit screw so that it is touching the stop when you're in the easiest gear if you've tried both these adjustments and are still having issues especially in easier gears check your b tension screw and adjust until the derailleur pulley wheel is the suggested distance from the cassette you

Channel: Syd Fixes Bikes

Views: 212,275

Rating: 4.908648 out of 5

Keywords: syd fixes bikes, woman mechanic, bike maintenance, bike maintenance how-to, diy bike maintenance, fix your bike, how to fix your bike, welcome to the shed, learn to fix your bike, wrench on bike, diy bike mechanic, learn to be a bike mechanic, work on your own bike, bike repair, bike maintenance tutorial, female mechanic, adjusting derailleur cable tension, indexing gears, indexing derailleur, stop skipping gears, fix gear skipping, perfect shifting, bike gear adjustment

Id: of-T8uB8tbs

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020