I recently finished rehabbing a '95 Schwinn "Ridge Searcher" that was in very neglected condition. It was given to a lady who has little or no money by someone who had "stored the bike away in the basement" for many years without any maintenance. Bad a shape as it was in - and it was pretty darn bad - I only had to replace two major components, the BB and the chain. Having cleaned everything up (which included two hours in an ultrasonic tank to get the cassette knocked loose of all the built up grime and lots and lots of elbow grease on other parts) I finally began to reassemble everything last week. And although the cleaned and lubed RD worked just fine, I had a devil of a time getting the FD to work properly over the three chainrings.
And, of course, this was one of those bikes with upright bars and those accursed "twist lock" shifters. The RD shifter on the right side of the bar worked OK with little adjustment necessary of the RD. But the FD was a nightmare which included multiple tightenings of the shift cable, penetrating lube on the FD pivoting points, etc. in order to get it dialed in properly. And, also of course, it too was a three-position twist lock shifter on the left side of the bar. The main reason I'm bringing this rant to this forum is to agree with Grant's recent Blahg about the over-the-top work that some bike manf's are doing with something along the lines of AI in order to insure that the FD gets positioned properly in relationship with the cassette cog in which the rear is positioned. Grant's premise is that nothing could be simpler than shifting the FD back and forth and manually "trimming" it to accommodate whatever gear the rear happens to be in at the moment. I couldn't agree more. This "twist shift" business is bad enough in some respects for the RD, but couldn't be more of a of a disaster for the FD. Why bring about yet another costly intervention that would be completely unnecessary if riders would just take the time to learn how to "feel an adjustment" into place instead of relying on some next generation gadget to do their work for them! Could be DT shifters, barcons, stem shifters - doesn't matter as long as they require a bit of manual adjustment on the part of the rider. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/0ad6fc88-5e6f-4441-b38e-f10e75d39320n%40googlegroups.com.
