 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I've got a Rival 1 mech and the shifting is so-so and at the same time I'm dropping my chain pretty frequently, so I've been suspicious that I'm using a medium cage mech with a 11-42t cassette (the limit for med cage is 36t)
So I've just received a long cage, and it looks identical... I cannot find any sign on either mech indicating the cage length and online pictures aren't helping as med and long look pretty similar by eye. Any idea to work out what I have?
Are your front chainring and / or chain worn? Are you using a narrow / wide chainring? Is your chain the right length?
You can enter the serial number (should be on the back of the cage) here for the exact specs.
The pictures on the model page shows the varying cage lengths (short, medium, long):
Ah, great, the serial number form worked: my new one is a long (phew)
As for the rest, my chainlength is good, but I'm not using a narrowwide as finding anything bigger than 38t in 104mm bcd in the UK proved impossible (although I've a 42t coming from Germany now)
I did have a little chainkeeper on there, which seemed do nothing for keeping the chain from dropping, yet made it almost impossible to get the damn thing back on once it had dropped
I think I just realised why I've been struggling to identify from the pictures: is it possible that the med and long have the same distance between jockey wheels, even though the long has a longer distance between the clutch and the lower jockey wheel?
I'd put money on it being the lack of N/W chainring that is causing the issue - it really is designed to work as a system.
If it's a SRAM crank you can probably ditch the spider and fit a direct mount chainring which will give you a wider variety of options (including aftermarket like Absolute Black).
Ah! many issues just solved...
The mech I was using looks to be a medium cage Rival 1: compared to my new one, the jockey wheels are the same distance apart, but the clutch/pivot to bottom jockey wheel distance is shorter
This explains the shifting and chain dropping issues to some degree, as my chain was running pretty slack on the 11t sprocket, despite being as tight as it could go on the 42t
The other issue was probably the older 2.1 clutch on my current mech, which I've read are a bit crappy: the one I've just installed is the newer 3.0 one
Finally, I'd routed the cable wrong... I had it like in the top pic rather than the bottom
I agree a narrowwide will help this too: I have an old Raceface Turbine crankset on there, so no removable spider unfortunately and I will have to await the German thing -- this one:
https://r2-bike.com/GARBARUK-Kettenblatt-Round-1-fach-narrow-wide-LK-104-mm_1