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Spent 6 hours chasing a rear derailleur ghost before I checked the hanger
Last week a guy brought in a Trek Domane with shifting so bad it skipped across three cogs under load, and I was sure it was a cable issue at first. I swapped the cable, reset the tension twice, and even pulled the cassette to check for a bent tooth, which ate up about two hours on its own. Then I threw it on the alignment gauge and the hanger was off by maybe 4mm, which is enough to wreck everything. I bent it back in five minutes and the bike shifted cleaner than new, so the whole repair took six hours when it should have been twenty minutes. I keep thinking about how we used to just eyeball hangers before the gauge came out and somehow got by. Has anyone else got a go-to order they run through before touching a derailleur, or do you all check the hanger first like a sane person?
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kevinw945d ago
Learned that lesson the hard way on a customer's Roubaix last summer. Did almost the same thing you did, chased the cable and the limits for way too long before I finally stuck the hanger gauge on it and found it was bent. Now my order is dead simple and I don't skip steps: check the hanger with the tool first, then check cable tension, then limits, then b-tension. Takes two minutes to rule out the hanger and it saves me from looking like an idiot for three hours. People forget that hanger gets bent from the smallest tip over or even a bad shift under power, and a few mm is all it takes to throw everything off. I stopped trusting my eyes on hangers years ago because they lie to you. Buy the gauge, use it first, thank yourself later.
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