bonsai171

Hello,

I bought a Salsa Warbird last year, and it has a 1x Sram Apex drivetrain. It shifts perfect when it is on a stand in my garage, but out on the road, it shifts slowly on maybe 1 or 2 gears in the middle of the cassette. Shifts to low gear are perfect, but a few of the shifts to high gear are slow no matter what I do with the barrel adjuster. How can I fix this?

Dave

oldbobcat

First, make sure your hanger is painstakingly straight. Wide-range cassettes like this are very intolerant of misalignment. Second, see if you can loosen your b-screw to get the jockey pulley closer to the cogs. Also, shifts to the smallest (fastest) cog are helped by loosening the high-limit screw about a quarter turn beyond dead center. Loosen, test it hard in the stand. If you can't get the chain to drop off you're good to go.

woodcraft

Check the cable for fraying at the lever, and for dirt, corrosion, kinks, & poorly shaped loop at the RD.

And of course, hanger alignment.

cxwrench

SRAM doesn't really have cable fraying issues like Shimano and older Campy. All shifts are the same so having problems ONLY in a couple of cogs in the middle is weird. Probably a cable/housing issue, like a kink in the cable close to the end of a piece of housing. Or maybe a hanger alignment issue and the OP isn't describing it correctly. If the hanger is bent in from the bike falling on the derailleur the shifts will continue to get worse as you go to bigger cogs, that's the only thing that can happen. Or a couple of those middle cogs are really worn from constant use.

bonsai171

Thanks for all the responses, I'll check out the cable first, and take it from there.

Dave

bonsai171

How does this loop look, maybe a little tight? Should I go with a longer piece of housing?

Dave

cxwrench

I'm a 'big loop' kinda guy but I don't think that should cause any problems like you're having.

bonsai171

Shifting is good now. I fiddled with the barrel adjustment again, and it's nice and quick. Guess it wasn't quite there before.

Dave

Camilo

There's a technique I use on the repair stand, or on the road with the rear wheel elevated. It never fails to translate good indexing from the repair stand to the road - I didn't invent it, there's probably many here who use it too. It takes longer to type this in than to do it.

Once you get your high and low limits, B adjustment and decent cable tension set, and your shifter shifts all the way up and all the way down, the indexing should be pretty good. To make it perfect:

Shift onto one of the middle cogs.

While turning the crank, tighten the cable with the barrel adjuster until the rear derailleur shifts inward to the next bigger sprocket. Stop as soon as it shifts to that sprocket.

Next, while still turning the crank, loosen the cable, counting the barrel adjuster turns (in terms of quarter turns, "click", whatever makes sense) until the derailleur shifts back outward to the original sprocket, and continue loosening until it goes past that and settles on the next smaller sprocket. Again, stop as soon as it gets to that smaller sprocket. Remember, you've counted the turns of the barrel adjuster.

Finally, re-tighten the cable with the barrel adjuster, exactly 1/2 the number of turns you counted. This should bring it pretty much exactly between the larger and smaller sprocket, right at the middle of the original sprocket, making the indexing accurate.

Apologies if this is a "duh", but it was really a great lesson when I learned about it.