so, i set up everything on my bike, and everything is wonderful... except for the FD. it takes a god awful amount of force to shift up and down, and i have no clue what i'm doing wrong here.

half a twist on the barrel adjuster after slacking it all the way and tightening the FD... anyone else run into this issue and resolved it?

Before doing anything, try shifting the FD with direct hand pressure on the cable arm, and see if it still seems too hard. If so, your outer limit might be set to tight, or if it shifts easy by direct pressure there's a problem within the cable run. Also check the position and angle.

If it isn't any of the simple things it's time to look elsewhere. Often when a FD (any FD) has poor shift response, or takes a ton of shift it's because it's too far forward. This has become a common issue as seat tube angles have gotten steeper.

For the FD to work properly it has to bear on the chain before it begins to engage the chainring. With a steep seat angle many FD's are pushing on the chain when it's already beginning to engage and so has to fight that much harder to shift. Chain pick-up pins on the chainring sometimes mask the problem somewhat, but the only real cure is to push the FD back a bit.

Look closely at your bike and if that seems to be a possible problem, you can sometimes twist the FD slightly heel out so it touches the chain farther back, or for braze- on mounts can improvise a spacer between the FD and mounting plate.

thanks for all the possibilities, it's not even the shifting that's spotty now, it's the actual movement of the derailleur to the outside that is difficult. to throw the lever is unbelievably difficult.

shifting by purely using the cable... is no more difficult than when i run any other shimano system, but there is no issue with the cable. pulls cable at tension just fine when not hooked up to the fd. i'm just confused now.

OK seems to be cable related, now isolate it. Test the lower section and FD, shifting by pulling the bare wire away from the down tube. If that's OK, either disconnect the wire from the FD, or hang the FD on the larger chainring, and work the lever against hand pressure on the bare wire. If that seem hard, something's wrong upstream, possibly a ferrule is misaligned, or the housing was cut badly and is trying to extrude through a ferrule or stop pinching the wire.

Lastly it could be something in the lever itself or how the wire is threaded into it. the sevret to working through these issues is to isolate areas until the problem is pinned down to one place.

You can check to make sure the cable is threaded through the shifter correctly by removing or at least pulling up the lever hood.

Have you ridden SRAM force before?

It DOES take a considerable amount of force to actuate the front derailleur, compared with the standard campy/shimano brifters. This is even more aggravated if you don't have a zero-loss front shifter. Shifting from the big-> small ring should be relatively effortless though -

The other thing is that SRAM road shifters take a 1.1mm cable - not the 1.2mm that is spec'ed with shimano cable kits.

nope this is my first foray into sram, i used the cables that came with the shifters, so that should be alright. i have a zero loss from w/2009 force*

uh... yeah shifting down is fine, albeit loud as hell, maybe it's something to get used to, i do like how mechanically crisp it is.