Originally Posted by
bobotech
So it looks like to me all your bikes are setup with road front derailleurs using mountain bike cranksets which can work just fine if you know how to get it working right. You do have to be careful that sometimes the cages on road derailleurs are so much bigger than MTB derailleurs and have problems shifting small front chainrings.
Agreed. When I put an Ultegra FD on a crankset with a 48T large ring, the radius of the cage put the tail of the cage so far from the ring, that after using the shifter, I had to reach down and grab a handful of cable along the downtube and haul back on it to temporarily pull the cage even further to the right to actually make the chain climb onto the 48T ring.
Replacing the Ultegra FD with the Alpina-D solved the problem.