Specifically a SRAM Force front mech?

F mech probably not, insufficient range. R mech yes, provided you don’t mind the mech cage being fully collapsed and noisy in every gear in the granny. The noise of the chain grating away against iself would drive me barmy though.

Thanks for that – I’m assuming that the front mech is narrower, seeing as roadbikes run double chainrign set-up. However, should be fine to run with a Middleburn Duo crank, I’m presuming.

are you talking with sti or road levers? if its a 9sp set up with a triple front road mech yes it will work fine – i’ve run an ultegra triple on a couple of cross bikes with an xt chainset no problems.

It’ll probably be fine with a duo yeah, though the shifting won’t be 100% as the road mech is profiled for ~53 tooth c/rings, whereas your duo probably runs something significantly smaller.

The mech cage isn’t narrower, the range the mech can arc through is much smaller. Which, IIRC, is irritatingly just too small to bodge it onto a triple.

I use a short (ie road short) rear mech on all my mountain bikes apart from my fs which came with a regular long cage and ain’t worn out yet. It all works, but you will not have the capacity to cross-chain big/big. Since that is a gross offence which we never commit that doesn’t really matter. I just set the chain length so that when in big ring you can only go down the rear gears to about third, and then you must drop to the middle ring because you run out of chain length. As pointed out, you’ll hear the transmission complaining at about that point.

Early Mavericks used a road front mech if I remmeber right. Might still do, actually.

ok – so………… would the following set-up work great/or just about?!

SRAM X9 shifter
SRAM Force Road front mech
Middleburn Duo crank 29/42 rings