The front derailleur is challenging for the best of them. I really struggle with it. Once i had the bike back together i was surprised how badly the front was shifting. I fought with it for quite a while, and then i rode it without shifting the front. All told i spent a good portion of three days fighting with it. I was very frustrated!
So i called my friend Dave, who can fix anything. He relished the challenge. We spent quite a while with it. He actually completely removed the derailleur and started over. We just couldn't get it to work. Then we took a look at the bottom bracket -- even took the cranks off.
And sure enough, the bottom bracket seemed to stick out 5 or 6 millimeters. That doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to prevent the front derailleur from ever working. We put the old crunchy bottom bracket back in and i rode to Bike Works. It shifted ok, not great, but a massive difference from the with the new bottom bracket.
The great guys at Bike Works suggested a 113 mm bottom bracket. I had originally bought a 118 mm bottom bracket because that is what the one i removed said on it. When i got the new one home i placed them next to each other and they are exactly the same - maybe 1 mm off, maybe not that much. Apparently, the old bottom bracket was labeled wrong!
I put it in, and almost like magic, the shifting worked! I struggled for days with that wrong size! But now it's working very nicely thank you very much! Thanks to Homer, Karl, Steve & Ryan at Bike Works who spent some time figuring out this weird problem!
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