The misconception of buying the cheapest

Zardoz

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 21:28:36 +0000, David Martin
<d.m.a.martin@dundee.ac.uk> wrote:

>I have winged at length before about how my wonderful road bike has been
>running the same rear mech for many tens of thousands of km. And it has. I
>stripped it down and the bushings are smooth ceramic, as they should be.
>
>My MTB is not so fortunate. It started life with an Acera or Altus.
>Something of that ilk, which lasted for a while. Being mean, I then bought a
>shimano reversed cable thinghy which gave up working reliably almost before
>it went on the bike (1 week commuting).
>


My experience with chain suck was the reverse - I upgraded to a nine
speed MTB with XT components and started getting it quite badly, to
the point where it bent my granny ring. My cheap but reliable 7 speed
never had this problem.

The problem seems to be that 9 speed chains + gears are engineered to
a much higher tolerance so if the components aren't accurately matched
then things start going awry.

In this case it didn't get fixed til I swapped out the chain with a
decent non-shimano one. (sorry - can't remember the brand but it was
about £35, one of the better ones in the shop). My experience with
Shimano chains has been pretty bad all round....

Arthur Clune

Eatmorepies <stopthere@lineone.net> wrote:

: XT is the one to buy.

I got a very nasty shock when I found out how much new XT
9 speed jockey wheels are though.

Arthur

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