Hello, I was on a hill climb on my Van Rysel NCR CF yesterday when I wanted to swatch to the small disc on the front before a climb, while it was working in the beginning, I did hear some gear sounds and nothing happened. I try doing it on another climb and the whole chain just derails and gets stuck between the pedal disc and frame, scratching quite a lot. (Pictures included).
I admit I did work on the back dérailleur when I received it from the shop (supposedly correctly set up) but I didn't touch the front. I'm going to decathlon today but I wanted to know if it's because the front dérailleur wasn't properly set up or did I mess up my shifting ?
Ideally I'd like the change the whole bike cause it's not even two months old and I have a 5 year warranty on the frame and 2 year on the component.
by YZ-31
6 Comments
If it’s been fine in the past two months since you got it, it’s probably not the shop’s fault… Derailleurs need indexing every now and again and it just seemed to happen a bit faster. Something could have happened in that time to knock it out of sync. Hard to say exactly what went wrong without more info/pictures of the derailleurs and how they’re set up, though.
Changing the whole bike after one chain drop is a bit excessive, though. It’s likely not a warrantyable issue, and more to do with maintenance.
Wow, that is a lot of scratching from one dropped chain.
It sounds like your gears are poorly indexed, likely with limit screws at the front set wrong. Who’s fault this is is hard to know from this side of the screen, but if you’ve been out riding over the past 2 months and this is the first time you’ve had strange behaviour, then I’d be skeptical of the shop being responsible.
I wouldn’t expect their warranty to cover this in any case, as this is unlikely to be a manufacturing defect.
Things that could cause this include improper setup of some sort, improper adjustment by you, or something like leaning the bike on its components, dropping/falling with the bike, knocking or kicking the derailleur, and so on.
If the derailleur is correctly set up with limits, it should be more or less impossible to “mess up” shifting and drop the chain.
Even with a perfectly set up front derailleur the chain can still come off. If you’re grinding up a hill and putting tremendous pressure on the pedals the chain is under a heavy load. Then, the second you shift to the small ring that load is gone. So chain tension goes from 100 to 0 in a millisecond and can jump off. Remember to ease up on your pedals slightly just before you shift. Then, once the chain is where it’s supposed to be you can start putting the power back down.
Are you shifting under load? Drop into lower gear before being in the middle of a hill.
You worked on the rear derailleur…if you do this you should be checking the front too and trimming as necessary. A misaligned rear can cause issues up front too – you should be adjusting both together ideally.
When I get a new bike I put tape protection on the frame in case of chain drops. I also have chain drop protectors that help prevent this too.
Learning to adjust derailleur’s is easy but it can happen that chains still come off – note it happens to the Pro’s too even with mechanics looking after their bikes.
Yours is a maintenance issue, not warranty. Learning curve. Hide the scratches with protection tape 👍🏻