I spent a happy hour or two yesterday trying to help a friend on the far side of the world assemble a bicycle over Skype. This has been partially successful and she is pleased. However, we are doing badly on gear adjustment and I can’t really see what’s going wrong. It’s a 1×10 SRAM X9 set-up, 11-32T, not a huge wide ratio. Symptoms seem to be that the chain shifts up and down the block, but in everything except the smallest sprocket, back-pedalling causes the chain to go slack and grind until it drops down the block.

I’m thinking B-tension screw. Plausible? Which way are we screwing it? Anything else?

Crucially, the take-home from this post is that you can add “bicycle assembly” to the list of things that are tantalizingly good but nothing like the real thing when done on Skype. 🙂

Done the basics?
chain off, cable off & barrel adjust to the middle – set the limits on 1 & 10?
Attatch cable & chain
If it’s out the box then b-tension could be high so wind that in a bit, should be close enough to move off the biggest but not that much.