I have two road bikes with SRAM Rival and Shimano 105 rear derailleurs but I love the trigger shifters on my mtb. I'd like to know if Shimano Deore 9 speed trigger shifters will be compatible with these road rerailleurs or if the indexed distance is too different.

Your help will be much appreciated.

The indexed distance is to different, it like 2:1 ratio. as with the road groups are 1:1 ratio.

It'll work fine with the 105.

It will work with the rear, but not index with the front unless you put a mb derailuer on.

Do you still want to use drop bars? Unfortunately, drop bars have a larger diameter than flat bars and very few flat bar components (like shifters and brake levers) will fit on them.

A mountain bike front shifter will not work correctly with a road triple crankset, don't know about a double.

It's my understanding that most shimano RD's have the same pull ratio. (Excluding certain models of Dura Ace). Meanwhile the FD pull is different.

I hear tale of Shimano making some FD's that are meant for crossing the gap, but someone else would have to chime in with their model #'s.

This is why Bar end shifters are usually used when converting between the two. The front shifter is friction only.

Essentially correct.

Shimano mountain triggers work fine with Shimano rear derailleurs except for some older Dura-Ace stuff.
Shimano mountain triggers don't work well with road front derailleurs due to different pull ratios.
Mountain front derailleurs are designed for smaller chainrings and wider chainlines than road cranksets have.
The brake levers will also lack sufficient leverage unless you install something like a Problem Solvers Travel Agent.

However, Shimano makes a flat bar road trigger that is compatible with a road front derailleur in addition to having the proper leverage for road style caliper brakes. So, changing the handlebar and finding a set of those shifters is about the only way to go. Don't be surprised if the stem needs to be lengthened by a cm or two as well.

Thanks so much guys. So as I am converting to flat bars and I only have a rear derailleur my options are:

1) to try out the shim 105 with mtb trigger shifters which are cheaper (anyone else done this? How'd it go?)

2) to splash out on the SL-R440-9 flat bar road shifters

Some touring folk, who are generally unconcerned about less than crisp shifting, claim to have gotten it to work well enough to suit them. I'd plan on spending plenty of time tinkering and be prepared to accept some chain rub and similar compromises.

I'm not that sort. I tend to immediately make the leap to what I'm sure will work. Life is too short.

If the FD does not matter to you, the 105 with MTB shifters is the way to go. All recent Shimano RDs have the same cable pull ratios, so whether you go with MTB or road trigger shifters, it is the same.

PS The flat bar road shifters do in fact use the SAME cable pull as the MTB trigger shifters- they are interchangeable. What is important for flat bar shifters on a road set-up is the FD you use- the FD-R443 and FD-R453 are FDs which are designed for use with road cranksets, but have the same cable pull as MTB FDs. Right now I am using SLX trigger shifters with an FD-R443, and the shifts are nice and crisp.

Appreciated. I'll have to verify this. My LBS appears to have been wrong.

Correct. The only exceptions are 6-7-8 speed Dura-Ace (not really recent) and the XTR 10-speed shadow series. Another exception is the low-normal "Rapid-Rise" system (if you mismatch these you'll pull the cable the wrong way.) Everything else is compatible. To the OP, you should be fine to run your Deore shifter with your 105 derailer. I'm not 100% sure if SRAM uses the same cable pull as Shimano, but I think they do.

This is the setup I've been using for 8 years on various recumbents: FD-R443 front derailleur, "MTB" and "flat-bar" shifters, "road" triple cranksets, and Shimano rear derailleurs. They have always worked perfectly.

They do not. SRAM's ".0" series shifters pull twice as much cable as Shimano, so they must be paired with a SRAM rear derailleur.

fwiw, i built a bike for a friend with a road double crank/ca 1990 105 front derailer and lx triggers. using the limit screws and some tweaking, the front set-up worked fine, but with one click on the front shifter doing essentially nothing at all. I wouldn't normally do this type of tomfoolery, but he had this frame and a mishmash of old parts, and he was trying to build a bike with as close to $o outlay as possible.

Jeff Will's recipe is the best for a shimano set up;SRaM stuff is just as doable, but you'll need to match the ratios in the rear. I suspect that the fd-r443 front derailer would fit nicely with your rival rear derailer, a triple crank, and some x-7 (or similar) triggers.

-rob

Yeah, and I'll muddy the waters even more. In my basement my wife has a 1999 Specialized Crossroads Pro. It has rapid fire shifters with a road crankset and a Tiagra front derailleur. The front shifting indexes just fine. At around that time that was the common spec for higher end hybrids and for flat bar road tandems.

I haven't had the occasion to try a similar set up using more modern parts so I wonder if it'll still work. If I were building a bike and I had similar components in my parts bin I'd definitely build them up and see if I could make it work. If I were buying new parts, however, I'd get the flat bar road shifters that Shimano sells today.

Rapid ride with STI is pretty cool. When I first started using STI, I thought that it would make more sense that the pull should shift to a higher gear. When I helped someone install a rapid rise derailleur at my school bike shop, I thought it was weird because I had already become use to the standard. However, I could see myself enjoying that set up. Just some thoughts.

Rapid Rise.

When I got my first double, I kept shifting the front derailleur the wrong way. I went from a 5-speed single to a 6-speed douple although we called them 12-speeds back then

I was considuring using Rapid Rise with Downtube shifters, that way on both levers forward would be lower gears and back would be higher gears. In the end I went with normal derailleurs. I didn't want to have to relearn how to shift (again).