Commuting - My Rear derailleur exploded yesterday.

I was going home thursday night in the mud on my usual trail that I take when suddenly, I noticed I wasn't spinning anymore... I look down and back and my entire pulley cage is jammed up between the chainstay and my spokes on my wheel. "That's not normal", I think to myself and stop, only to see what the problem was.. Seems like my entire pulley cage sheared right off the main der. body. Completely and fairly smooth. In the process I managed to chip and bend two teeth off the guide pulley, and seriously bent the der. hanger towards the cassette. Needless to say, I wasn't going anywhere quickly. I took the remaining der. off the hangler and pulled the cable off. Tied the cable to the seat stay to keep it off the spokes and got my chain tool and shortened the chain so i can get it into a gear. Then basically limped home, taking the roads rather than my usual off-road trail.

Fortunately, I'm told that 9-spd der. are compatible with 8spds so I didn't have to go through hoops to get a new one. But I need new fork seals for my Marzocchi and a new parallel arm on my rear V-brake which I broke aweek ago. I will have to be taking my road bike to work now until I get the new der put in...

Just wondering, do they make any mountain bikes that aren't single speeds with horizontal dropouts? Even after removing the link, the chain was still a little loose and if I really mashed the pedals, the chain would slip.

Jay

Brilliant. As soon as I saw the title of the post I thought of what I would do then called up your post. Great minds think alike. Have you gotten a solution to the horizonta dropout problem yet?

Jay, Surly do a 29-er hardtail MTB frame (Karate Monkey) with rear der. mount and horizontal dropouts, i'm pretty sure they do a 26" as well.

Jay, Surly do a 29-er hardtail MTB frame (Karate Monkey) with rear der. mount and horizontal dropouts, i'm pretty sure they do a 26" as well.

The 26" version is called the 1x1 and for some reason they never bothered to put a derailleur hanger on it.

There are lots of 29ers with horizontal dropouts, sliding dropouts or EBBs with derailleur hangers so that you can go single-speed or geared. But considering how rare it is to break a rear derailleur, it seems kind of silly to go that route just for that special case. I've only had one catastrophic derailleur failure in 20 years of mountain biking (okay, 15 if you don't count the single speed years). I've bent plenty of them, and broken some chains, but you don't need to be able to tension the chain in those cases since the derailleur can still take up the slack.

Hmm, wow, old post from me. I did get a new 9-spd derailleur after my LBS was able to bend my hanger back properly (steel frame) so that is cool. I am kind of looking at a new commuter anyway, but will probably go with bike with disc brakes for winter and of course, rack mounts. Not going single speed but will look at the Surlys of course.

Jay

Just wondering, do they make any mountain bikes that aren't single speeds with horizontal dropouts? Even after removing the link, the chain was still a little loose and if I really mashed the pedals, the chain would slip.

Jay


You can get a no-railer for about 20 bucks. It goes in place of your derailleur to keep tension.

whoops, just realized your post was from february 2004...

^^^Raise the dead! :D