maintenance tips

There are so many things to learn it's really hard to even start about maintenance. I guess I'll just do it in FAQ format.

My gears are skipping

Every single source on subject will tell you to check your cables and I'm not going to be original here:

check your cables

Here are some examples I've had in those couple of years riding my bike in variety of conditions:

• frayed cables made shifting inconsistent
• dirty housings (insides) made shifting problematic

front dérailleur is "acting up"

twisted

well I found that on some of my bikes dérailleur got misaligned after some time. And it wasn't the misalignement of "cable" sort. Dérailleur was rotated couple of degrees and became non-parallel to chainrings. Releasing cable tension and releasing fastening bolt followed by adjustment of dérailleur fixed the problem for me on more than one occasion.

cables

a-ha! cables again! Turns out that with temperature shifts that I've been going through ( -10C in the morning and +5C in the afternoon) my dérailleur alignement got totally out of whack. But using the adjustment barrel on handlebar somewhat reduces the problem down to minor annoyance.