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Heading off for a Christmas trip and noticed at the last minute that my rear mech doesn't feel very healthy (very sloppy with sticky clutch). I don't have a compatable spare, but do have an on one doofer single speed tensioner.
In order to keep the trip going if my mech was to fail, are there any obvious issues with running the tensioner with my cassette (rather than a single speed cog and spacers). I'd pick a gear, shorten the chain and run it single speed.
It is OK provided the jockey wheel is fixed laterally. If it can float sideways then the shift ramps on the next sprocket can occasionally grab the chain and upshift. I've run emergency singlespeed in the alps for a day with proper horizontal dropouts / correctly tensioned chain, but if you got the wrong combination of flex and a bump then it would try to upshift and lock everything up. Derailleurs shift on the lower slack run of the chain, and singlespeed stomping can generate a fair bit of slack.....
I'd say 50/50 it'll work.
Back on my early singlespeeding days I ghetto SS'd a bike with some old cassette cogs.
Worked perfectly on one ratio, but when I tried a different cog (from the same cassette) it kept shipping the chain.
Can you not just take a SS cog, spacers and tools with you?
I would, but I can't find the ss cog and spacers. I know I have some, but where, I don't know.
The 'getting it lined up' and flex is my concern.
The On-One is easy enough to line up, it'll be fine. Also, if you take a Plan-B option with you you guarantee that of all the things that might go wrong, your rear mech will not be one of them.
If you mech can't shift properly then you could wind the limit screws so it is stuck on a single gearor use the reverse gear cable trick to use your mech as a tensioner