Don’t ask me how this happened. My oldest son got a new bike and so he handed down his old bike to his brother. On the inaugural ride, he came back saying the chain fell off when in reality the chain was bent and the derailleur was broken in half.

What I have learned in this pandemic world is that not only are bike parts scarce, but upgrades are expensive. Sometimes upgrading parts cost more than the entire bike would cost new. Fortunately, this repair only cost about $30 and I could get the parts so I went ahead and did it.

I plan on talking more about bicycles in the future because it is something that I am interested in and I have a old, but very nice bike that I would like to make some changes to. A story for another time but I want to make it more comfortable to ride as it is a very aggressive configuration.

Tools required:

  • Metric Allen keys (3 and 5mm)
  • chain breaker
  • Metric nutdrivers or wrenches or adjustable wrench (8-10mm)
  • cable cutter
  • needlenose pliers
  1. Break the chain. I will have a picture later in the sequence to show what a chain breaker looks like.
  2. Remove the derailleur. First you must disconnect the shifting cable which is one nut. Then, the derailleur can be removed which is also one bolt.
  3. Replace the derailleur by tightening the same bolt as you removed on the old one.
  4. In this case, the new derailleur was a slightly different configuration and the existing shifting cable was too short. I had to re-string a new cable from the shifter
5

5. Roughly tighten the new shifter cable

6. Check the new chain for length against the old chain. If necessary, cut the new chain to length.

7. Reconnect the chain. In my case, I bought a new one and it comes with a special link to make this process easier. But it can be done by re-inserting the pin that was removed in step one. It is a bit tricky and may require some extra hands.

8. Finally, you will have to tune your shifting. That is beyond the scope of this post today. But this operation is best done with a bike stand. I dont have one personally, but there are several ones throughout my city. There are also a number of Youtube videos that are pretty good on how to do that.

End Your Programming Routine: This took me about an hour to complete. Now that we no longer have any local bike shops, this would have taken days at the shop and hours going back and forth to get it done. Generally speaking having bike work is fairly inexpensive but I like knowing that I can do stuff if I want to.