Bicycle Mechanics - Is my friend's drivetrain hopeless?

A friend of mine has a 13-year-old Specialized Rockhopper with Suntour shifters and derailleurs. He was having a lot of trouble with shifting: rough shifting, ghost shifting, clattering noises after shifts, etc. mostly coming from the rear derailleur. He says he doesn't ever remember it being perfect, but it is certainly worse now than when he first bought it.

I took his bike and cleaned the derailleurs, cassette, chainrings, and chain, which were all quite dirty. Then I lubed the chain, shift levers and cables. I also reset the limit screws and performed an index adjustment. It's better than it was, but the shifting is still problematic. Is it hopeless? I know that old, high-quality components can still work quite well, but I get the sense that old and cheap components like these are a lost cause. Thoughts?

Suntour made great derailers for many years and like everyone else, made one or two dogs. Old, Worn Out, high quality components will not work well, no matter who made them.

The ghost shifting makes me think the levers are not holding their positions, maybe. Exactly which problems are remaining after the work you did?

Exactly which problems are remaining after the work you did?

Some problems are kind of hard to explain, but here goes.

The main problem is with the rear derailleur, which uses a sort of rapidfire lever set-up (one lever for shifting up, and one for shifting down, but they are both operated with the thumb). When shifting the rear derailleur from smallest cog up to the big cogs: First tick usually shifts ok to next cog. But the second tick does not result in a shift. You have to push it further (two ticks total) to get it to change gears. But then every subsequent gear change rattles until you toggle the other lever down which knocks it back in place. It's like you have to put too much tension on the cable to switch to that one gear, and then this throws everything else off until you take the tension off by tapping the other lever. I think he said this has always been a problem. On the other hand, shifting from the largest cog all the way down to the smallest goes pretty smoothly.

Rough shifting occurs under heavy pedaling. Very noisy sometimes and takes some lever tweaking to get the gear to finally engage.

On the front end, the chain has spontaneously jumped from the middle chainring to the small chainring a couple of times during normal pedaling (and I do not believe the derailleur was rubbing the chain when this happened).



Suntour made great derailers for many years and like everyone else, made one or two dogs. Old, Worn Out, high quality components will not work well, no matter who made them.
I'm not sure exactly which Suntour derailleur is on there (I don't have the bike with me now). But these particular components just seemed kind of rinky-dinky in terms of quality.

Ah, Crappu-shift (Accu-shift, HA), SunTour's answer to Rapid-Fart. Yeah, I know, STI is, in effect, a stepchild of Rapid-Fart, but they've got it right by now. It's possible the whole problem is in the shifters. Okay, one possibility is that it's out of "phase". You'd have to hit the "smaller-cog" lever as many times as you can, then set the derailleur and the cable tension so the chain is on the smallest cog. Adjust from there. 'Course, you said you did an index adjustment, so you've probably already done that.

Is it seven-speed? Maybe you should just try some NOS or salvaged 7-speed grip-shifters on it. I've converted one Crappu-shift and one Rapid-Fart to grip-shift, and they both work MUCH better (the Crappu-shift is even on a tandem, and even with the extra-long cables, and some very early vintage grip-shifters found at a swap meet, the shifting is pretty crisp).

'Course, if there are a lot of miles on the drive train itself (chain, cogs, chainrings), you may be out of luck. Have you measured the chain for wear? If there are a lot of miles on it, and the chain was not replaced periodically before it wore ("stretched") excessively, then an overly-worn chain will have also worn the cogs and chainrings. Do the chainring teeth look "sharp" (like Ferengi teeth)?

Ah, Crappu-shift (Accu-shift, HA), SunTour's answer to Rapid-Fart. Yeah, I know, STI is, in effect, a stepchild of Rapid-Fart, but they've got it right by now.
Yes, I do seem to remember seeing "accu-shift" somewhere on there. LOL!


It's possible the whole problem is in the shifters. Okay, one possibility is that it's out of "phase". You'd have to hit the "smaller-cog" lever as many times as you can, then set the derailleur and the cable tension so the chain is on the smallest cog. Adjust from there. 'Course, you said you did an index adjustment, so you've probably already done that.
Yeah, I did a whole index adjustment using the method outlined in Barnett's manual.


Is it seven-speed? Maybe you should just try some NOS or salvaged 7-speed grip-shifters on it. I've converted one Crappu-shift and one Rapid-Fart to grip-shift, and they both work MUCH better (the Crappu-shift is even on a tandem, and even with the extra-long cables, and some very early vintage grip-shifters found at a swap meet, the shifting is pretty crisp).
Yes, it is a 7-speed cassette. Actually, one of my suggestions to my friend was to find some decent used components and replace the ones he has. I had a bike that was two years older than his which used the single thumb shifters and the shifting was way better. I also suggested converting it to a single speed, but he was not too inspired by that idea. I know he could just as well buy a new bike instead of buying replacement parts for this old bike, but this is intended to be a city bike. In San Francisco, it's good to have a crappy looking bike because a nice looking new bike will get pinched in a heartbeat.


'Course, if there are a lot of miles on the drive train itself (chain, cogs, chainrings), you may be out of luck. Have you measured the chain for wear? If there are a lot of miles on it, and the chain was not replaced periodically before it wore ("stretched") excessively, then an overly-worn chain will have also worn the cogs and chainrings. Do the chainring teeth look "sharp" (like Ferengi teeth)?
He told me he has not ridden it all that much, despite its age. (My offer to work on his bike was to get it running smoothly and give him incentive to actually ride the thing.) So the chain and teeth are all still in good shape. Unfortunately, I do not have firsthand experience with this particular problem. It happened while he was riding and then he described it to me. I know that the front derailleur doesn't snap to a fixed spot when shifting. If you don't push the lever enough, or push it too much, the chain will rub on the derailleur, and you sort of have to eyeball it and move it back and forth with the levers to get the chain centered in it. I wonder if the derailleur was just too far to the inside, even though it wasn't rubbing the chain, and a rear derailleur shift knocked it down to the small chainring.

............Thanks a lot for the advice.