Originally Posted by
Slaninar
Good point. Makes sense. Have you had problems with such set ups - with inner cage hitting the middle chainring when shifting to the big ring? The "height" difference between 38 and 42 is a little over 1 cm.
Road triples used to be commonly 52/42/30, and that is my preferred combo. Shimano at some point started using 39T middle rings and modified all of their front derailleurs to suit. I tried an Ultegra 6603 FD (going back ten years or more) with a 52/42/30 triple. The FD had to be set so high for the inner cage to clear the 42T ring that shifting was unacceptable. I did eventually find that a FD intended for a 50/39/30 triple sort of works but takes some finessing still. And that's just going 1 tooth less than Shimano's design intent of a 11T difference.