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Am I the only one who was setting chain slack with the rear wheel off the ground for like 8 months straight?
So I've been wrenching on my own bikes and a few friends' bikes out of my garage in Bellingham for about 8 months now, and last Tuesday a guy rolled in with a clunky drivetrain on a hardtail. I did my usual thing, dropped the bike in the stand, checked the chain with the rear wheel spinning free, and set the slack to what looked right. He rode it around the block twice and came back saying it felt like the chain was trying to jump off every bump. I sat there staring at the stand for a minute and it hit me, I had been eyeballing chain tension with the suspension fully unloaded this whole time. On a hardtail that's not the end of the world, but on anything with a rear shock you have to set the slack at sag, or the chain goes tight as a banjo string when the suspension compresses. I rode that same mistake for months on my own full squish bike and just blamed the derailleur for ghost shifting. Now I pull the shock, cycle it to sag, and set it from there, and the clunk he came in with was gone in 10 minutes. Any of you got a bike stand habit you had to break once someone called you out on it?
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mason36129d ago
Buddy of mine ran his chain slack off the stand for a whole season on his Stumpy and couldn't figure out why it kept dropping on chunk. He finally set it at sag and the ghost shifting and drops just stopped.
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