Originally Posted by
RCMoeur
And then I started volunteering regularly at Rusty Spoke and Recycle Your Bicycle in recent years, and began to understand the animosity. What I had experienced for decades as "low end" was orders of magnitude better than the stamped-steel carp I was being asked to try to fix. Shimano had carefully designed these parts to hit a precise price point in terms of materials and workmanship, and that did not include durability or performance. The word "Tourney" began to elicit subconscious (and maybe even conscious) revulsion once I dealt with the Sisyphean task of carefully adjusting these derailleurs, only for them to bend when sneezed on and go out of adjustment in microseconds. And deal with customers commenting on how my mechanic skills must be deficient if I couldn't keep their bike in adjustment.
One way to avoid the problem of complaining customers is to make them do the work themselves. That’s what my local co-op does. We aren’t
supposed to do the work but to guide the customer in how to do the work. It doesn’t always happen but, for the most part, the customer works on their bike and they learn all the wonders of trying to make a piece of crap work properly.
It's hard to believe the same company that produces Dura-Ace also manufactures and puts their name on these nightmares. But at least I have working on nice older bikes with actually functional components as a form of therapy.
In my experience, there are also levels of Tourney that are bad and
really bad. The ones that are showing up more and more often on $600 bikes are the former. They are actually a bit functional and can be made to work for at least a little while. The other level is what you find on the $100 HellMart bikes and are simply too floppy to work even new. I strip them off any bike that they are on…mostly kids’ bikes…and put on one of the nearly endless supply of Alivio or Acera that we have in the parts bin.
Funny thing is that retail Tourney is 1/2 the price of an Acera ($9 vs $18) but the Acera is about 100 times better.