by Calnago on Sun Feb 17, 2019 1:29 am
I woke up this morning, feeling for movement in my wrists and fingers, wondering how on earth they could still be functioning after years of contortions trying to shift those confounded Campy levers. How could it be that I'm not riddled with arthritis. Or dementia from the madness each shift was slowly driving me closer towards with each sweep of a lever or push of that damn thumb button. I was truly perplexed. So, why not make a little video to analayze all the madness closeup and see where I'm going wrong. First of all, I wish I could show the actual chain and how it's moving between the cogs and chainrings at the same time as I'm showing the shift actions, but for now let's just concentrate on the mechanics of shifting the levers on a Campy Ultrashift Mechanical drivetrain...
Oh, as an aside I don't know how many of you had a chance to look at David Arthurs blog video of his SRAM event down in Tuscon for the AXS release, but you should check it out, especially the "interviews" with the SRAM reps, if you can watch it long enough to get there. They like to describe the shifting of the front chainrings as a "catastrophic event". I spit up my coffee when they said that.
Anyway... so couple of points of note in my video below... note how easy the "catastrophic events" are with Campy, same with Shimano... I think the catastrophic part of front shifting is pretty limited to SRAM. The other thing to note which I did in this little example, and would likely never do in real life but wanted to show it anyway was when I move up to the lowest gear (small chainring/biggest cog, where I mention I'm spinning out), then my next shift is to the big ring, so that I'm completely crossed big/big. While normally I would be going down the cassette a few cogs before hitting the big ring, I just wanted to show how easy it was to complete that particular shift (moving to the big ring while in the small/small) and ending up totally crosssed. No rubbing anwyhere of the chain on the front derailleur, and no trim necessary across the entire range of the cassette (Campy 11sp 2015+). Of course, shifting like that also requires perfect setup, but that's another topic.
Last edited by
Calnago on Sun Feb 17, 2019 1:56 am, edited 1 time in total.