Originally Posted by craftygeek

Well, I spent several hours with the bike this afternoon...ended up making my own Rear Deraileur alignment tool out of some aluminium section that I had in the workshop.

The hanger was bent - its now perfectly straight...but the problem still exists - I'm now thinking that the indexing steps on the shifter simply aren't the correct spacing to match the movement of modern deraileurs...I can't think of anything else!