G-funk, I live in CT and love riding hills while I'm not all that great at them. I built this bike up as a training bike/easy bike. I have a 53/39 equipped cannondale CAAD9 for races in good conditions. I really like the frame and I actually wanted to use it so I built it up with stuff that I knew I could enjoy it with. I'm sorry about being snarky earlier, but it hasn't been the best day. First this happens, then I spend 11 hours in lab trying to purify proteins with no results... So, I'm sorry for being a little short fused earlier.

I love the superbe stuff, I honestly do, but I just can't climb well with it. I do a training ride that's 16 miles long with over 1600 feet of climbing, with the majority of that in 7 miles. The rest of the ride is just getting to the hills and back. I can't do that on a 42-26. More power to the people that can.

To everyone (including g-funk) who said go the ebay route and get a compact campy fd, thanks for the suggestion. I'm just going to get the new FD. That should sort everything out, hopefully. Turns out that the campy chain is narrower than the shimano chain I'm using so that can't be to blame. Unfortunately, there are no compact campy FD's on ebay right now.

I checked pbk and they don't have any compact fd's for sale. It turns out that the 2008 campy FD's are 'combined' with functionality for both doubles and compacts. Would this be a wise choice, or should I just look elsewhere for a compact veloce FD and a correct braze on adapter. I'm guessing my frame has a 28.6 seat tube, is this logical considering it's a vintage trek with 531P tubing? So I should get this braze on adapter right? PBK doesn't have one, I'll see if the LBS does.

Here's the FD for sale at PBK it says combined for 2008 meaning that it should handle compact and regular doubles: Link

Here's a picture of what's going on with my crankset:


Thanks for the help guys. I'm bummed that this didn't work out, but it was a good learning experience. The compact FD should solve the problem above right?