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If you’ve got five hacks to make setting up your gears easier and also cure your shifting headaches. First up, correctly setting the limit screws on your derailleurs is a really important job. Potentially saving you from some very expensive mechanical disasters, particularly on the rear derailleur and our pro hack is to actually set our limit screws before we even put a cable in. Firstly, check at the high-limit screw. Technically this bit will be no different from normal when you’ve got your cable in. You simply stand to the rear of the bike, and you eyeball it from the back. You want to screw or unscrew the high-limit screw until the top jockey wheel is resting just outboard of that bottom cog. Shouldn’t make any noise, but being just outboard will help you shift into that smallest gear.

To set lower limit screws move the derailleur by hand, pushing on that cage without thumbs, and shifting until you’re in our largest cog. That way, when we set the low-limit screw, we know exactly where the limit of the derailleur is, in respective of where the cable might be limiting it. It’s like an insurance policy, basically. Pre-stretch your cables. You want to do this before you actually index your bike, otherwise, as soon as you get on and ride around for two minutes, you’ re going to have to re-index it anyway.

The trick is, you clamp your cable and then, holding your derailleur firmly with one hand, to stop it moving, you click through the gears. Only a couple, that’s all you need. You don’t want to actually force anything because technically we’re not really stretching our cable. What we’re doing is making sure that all the cable ferrules sit squarely and compress as much as possible onto the cable outers, and then they sit firmly in the cable stops. It will be tempting if you’ve got external cables to actually pull on the inner cable itself in order to do this stretching. But there is a risk that you actually kink the cable. so, definitely safer to do it that way.

Now we’ve got our pre-stretched cables, shift from the smallest to the second smallest cog at the back. And then, shift back down, without moving the pedals so that your shifter is effectively in its hardest gear. Then, you need to unclamp the cable and pull it tight, not exceptionally so, but under its own natural tension, re-clamp it, and then when you move the pedals, the chain should go back down into your smallest cog.

At this point, while it might not be perfectly indexed, it’s going to be pretty darn close, and certainly much closer than if you were to do it by guesswork. Rumor has it, that this is, in fact, the way that Mr.Shimano himself wanted people to index their gears. Setting the cable tension correctly on your front derailleur can be a fiddly process, especially if you don’t have some form of barrel adjuster somewhere on the cable, but this neat little hack gets around that problem. Firstly, before you even clamp the cable,   put your bike in your lowest gear.

And then, we’re going to use our lower-limit screw. You screw it in until the derailleur is just starting to press the chain against your outer chainring. It’s at this point which you clamp the cable, and then, when you screw the lower-limit screw out to its correct position, which is one or two mil, onboard of the chain, then you should have almost perfect cable tension. This one isn’t so much of a hack as a headache reliever, because it might be that no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, you just can get your gears to work correctly. And if that’s the case, it may well be because of alignment. If you’ve had a crash, for example, or your bikes just toppled over and landed gear-side down, you may well have bent your gear hanger. That’s the bit that your rear derailleur actually bolts onto. To check, what you’ve got to do is put your bike in its easiest gear, and then standing behind it, you simply eyeball it to see whether or not the rear derailleur is hanging straight.

Generally, if it is bent, it will be bent in the direction of the spokes. And if it’s bent badly, you probably already know about it, because it would have bent so far that the derailleur would have got caught into your spokes when you change to your easiest gear and ripped clean-off. You may well be familiar with that pain; you can try, very carefully, to bend your rear derailleur back. It definitely works better on steel bikes, or indeed heavier-duty and fairly durable bikes, not necessarily top-end carbon. Many top-end bikes, or mid-range bikes, will have replaceable derailleur hangers, which is a very good thing.

If you are going to attempt the bend it back, with a replaceable derailleur hanger, just make sure that your rear wheel is tightly clamped in place. Otherwise, you’ll be putting quite a lot of pressure on some fairly flimsy bolts that aren’t really designed to actually withstand much pressure at all. It’s going to be said that really this may well be a job for your local bike shop, if nothing else, you hand the responsibility for the safety of your frame over to them and their insurance. And what they’ll probably do is get out the tool, which is a DAG tool, the derailleur alignment gauge. They’ll take your read derailleur out, bolt this bad boy into it, and then it actually uses your back wheel to gauge what angle your rear mech hanger is hanging at. And then, once you’ve worked out which direction it is bent in, you can bend it back with your DAG tool. Oh yeah, that’s a good way to cure that. There you go, five hacks that will hopefully make setting up and maintaining your bike’s gear shifting system just that little bit easier.

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