After only mountain biking for a decade I’ve taken the plunge on a road bike. It has Shimano Sora 9 speed gearing with a compact chainset and I’m confused at how the front gears work. They seem to have 4 clicks on the shifter/brake lever so which two clicks am I supposed to use to change rings?

Something I read about trim as well but dont understand?

Help please!

Trim is the half clicks in between the main clicks that move the front mech a small amount to stop the chain rubbing as you go up or down the cassette.

Big push goes from small ring to big ring.
Another push to trim for smaller cogs at back.
Small click down to trim for bigger cogs at back.
Big click down to drop to little ring (proper roadies don’t use this one 😉 )

Thanks, that makes sense. Thankfully the man in the shop set it up otherwise there would likely have been swearing.

Boy, am I glad I have 1x Sram Doubletap. Small click, big click.

Boy, am I glad I have 1x Sram Doubletap. Small click, big click.

I’ve got SRAM Force 22, 2×11 and no trim. Note to Shimano: it is possible!

As an aside I never realised that there was also a trim on the small cog, I’ve only ever used the half shift down from the big cog, never the other way. I’m rather excited to get back on my shimano bike to experiment with it now!

Took me three years and sporadic adjustments of cable tension to find the trim function. RTFM.

Also didn’t know about small ring trim, but why would you? If you’re down the small end of the block, get back in the big ring!

That’s a nice picture someone has drawn, bigyan, but seems a bit pointless to go to the trouble when a near-identical version (but with sprockets numbered) is included in Shimano technical documents which anyone can download.

Anyway yeah trim clicks. Campag doesn’t have a trim position for the outer ring, which confused me when I first got my current summer road bike. The approach seems to be that on an MTB people can put up with a bit of rubbing, but on road (where you’re in the same gear for longer, generally) you want to be able to tune out the mech rub.

Also didn’t know about small ring trim, but why would you? If you’re down the small end of the block, get back in the big ring!

It depends though, you might be on a flat section of a climb, don’t want to have to jump between the rings all the time.

Thanks all, I haven’t had a front mech for years coming from 1x so I’ll need to retrain myself to pay attention to cross chaining and such.