Originally Posted by
Jammastersam
Hi all,
...I took the bike in and straight away the mechanic wasted no time telling me what he thought of Clarks brakes and that they were beyond repair. Now I know they might not be as reputable a brand as Shimano, but they've been on the bike since I've had it (5 years) and I've never had a problem.
So I pick the bike up ...and everything seems fine....whilst changing gears my rear derailleur fully extended and locked up, totally preventing me from pedalling. This has NEVER happened to me before, .....So I call up the shop and explain and the mechanic offers to look at the bike.
I dropped the bike off and the mechanic had a look, within seconds he told me the chain was too short and proceeded to cut my chain off the bike. There was NOTHING wrong with the chain except maybe some wear, but the chain had been on the bike it's entire life and was definitely not too short. I mentioned I had the bike serviced about a year ago and the mech blamed the incompetent mechanic at the larger bike shop who put on a short chain (chain wasn't changed). The mech then went into a very long winded explanation about gear ratios and proceeded to demonstrate examples of cross-chaining, telling me I shouldn't be using certain gears. I had never heard of cross chaining until googling it later, so I now know it exists, but believe me this had never been a problem prior to him looking at my bike. After a lot more explaining and him fitting a new chain, the mech told me the issue was that I had a Shimano Alivio front derailleur and SRAM rear derailleur and shifters, which apparently should not be combined (another blasting here to the incompetent mechanic at the big bike shop, again the front derailleur has never been changed).....
Sorry for the long winded post, but the bottom line is. I dropped my bike off to have the brakes fixed and when I picked it up, it had a new problem with the gears. In my opinion this is his problem to fix, not mine. Now he agreed to fit a new SRAM front derailleur for free if I covered the cost of the part, which wasn't much, so I agreed. He also gave me the new chain for free, which wasn't that appreciated since I doubt there was a problem with the old one. Now will the wise people of this forum please give me their opinions, is this new mechanic talking sense, he is incompetent, or is he just trying to get some money out of me?
From a maintenance perspective, working on a bike that’s seen considerable use is like working on a time bomb - you never know when the next part will ”go off”.
Not entirely sure about ”Derailer fully extended”.
If your chain was indeed too short to allow for big-big cross chaining, and you, by sheer luck hadn’t ended up there until now, then that can certainly cause problems.
IME, pedals locking up and stretching the derailer fully out is more likely to be caused by chain suck than cross chaining. But you’d have to be real lucky to fix a chainsuck bad enough to lock the pedals only by working the shifters.
And drivetrain wear can certainly cause chain suck.
So it’s entirely possible that this part was unrelated to what the mechanic had done.
Front Shifters and rear shifters are separate systems and do not have to match each other.
They do need to match ”internally”. Shifter needs to be compatible with derailer, number of speeds, chainline etc but that’s it.
Blaming a rear shifting issue on brand of front derailer has no technical merit.
I’ve never worked on Clark’s hydraulics, and I have no idea what you did to yours prior to taking them to the mechanic.
And entry-level Shimanos are cheap. It doesn’t take much tinker time to overshoot the cost of some entry-level Shimanos.
My guess would still be that if the Clark’s worked before, and all you did was mess up a bleed, then bringing the Clark’s back should have been economically possible. But maybe you’d popped popped the pistons out or something like that.
I’d say you got a mechanic that’s strongly opinionated, (anti-Clark’s) not very diplomatic (all others are hacks) and perhaps not a great communicator.
Whenever working on a worn bike - and a new customer - it’s important to define the accepted work so that the customer knows what to expect.
Can’t see that you actually needed the new fd. But whether that was down to money-grabbing or a mistaken belief that it was functionally required, I can’t tell from here.