Which rear derailleur for loaded touring?

[froze]

As someone who has toured and shopped without problems on a 1994 steel Marin with well greased but standard bearings and a basic Shimano derailleur, I wonder if you need anything more than a reasonably stiff frame to sort the problems you've had.

Even with a full load of shopping, or of concrete slabs for the garden the gears change fine on my old bike.

I'm only running when camping and touring with about 60 pounds of gear and water, 35 pounds of bike including racks, and 173 pounds for me, so the total weight is around 268 pounds total; when the bike shop owner rode it he added about 50 of his pounds to the bike so then it was carrying 318 pounds; of course that is an estimate of weight, plus or minus 5 pounds. They told me at Haro before I bought the bike that it could handle a total weight of 370 pounds and at my weight specs it should have easily handled it.

I had been playing with the position of the load for a while and found out that if I put 90% of the weight on the rear the speed at which the shaking would happen went up by 5 mph. Also, the shaking seems to have gotten worse the longer I've owned the bike, when it was new it shook a little, but now it's a lot worse, probably 3 times as bad as it was when it was new. This is something I told the bike shop guy about too.

 

[HobbesOnTour]

@froze can you clarify please:

The 2019 frame had horrendous flex and has been exchanged?
The 2023 frame has just arrived?
You want to know the best derailleur to use on this new (2023) frame?

If the answers are "yes" to all of those" I'd take whatever is supplied on the bike (while trying to "keep" as many of the old components as I could )

If I was in your shoes my priority would be to stress test this new frame asap.

A bike that behaves like this is not a bike I'd want to tour on.

Also, the shaking seems to have gotten worse the longer I've owned the bike, when it was new it shook a little, but now it's a lot worse, probably 3 times as bad as it was when it was new.

Good luck!

 

[Jameshow]

That's quite a thin tubed bike and if your tall as well as heavy I can see the frame being quite whippy?

Older English frames sometimes had that in larger sized frames, where the standard tube sizes weren't stuff enough to prevent flex?

Perhaps something with oversized tubes might help??

 

[froze]

@froze can you clarify please:

The 2019 frame had horrendous flex and has been exchanged?
The 2023 frame has just arrived?
You want to know the best derailleur to use on this new (2023) frame?

If the answers are "yes" to all of those" I'd take whatever is supplied on the bike (while trying to "keep" as many of the old components as I could )

If I was in your shoes my priority would be to stress test this new frame asap.

A bike that behaves like this is not a bike I'd want to tour on.


Good luck!

When I bought the 19 bike it was fully equipped and ready to ride, Haro, under the warranty provisions, replaced just the frame and fork with no components except for rear and front derailleurs.

And I don't want a bike that behaves like that either! I'm with you and everyone else on that. If this new bike flexes like the old one I will make a demand to get my money back because neither bike wasn't be built for touring on and thus they not only falsely advertised it, but falsely told me over the phone TWICE, once just before I bought the bike 2019, and again in this warranty process that the bike is capable of touring on. I doubt, or I least hope, that they would not falsify such a thing, I think, and hope, that what happened is like what the bike shop owner said, that somehow the 19 frame and fork were not adequately heat treated if it was heat treated at all, it may have missed that step in production accidently, because he said the only way that frame could flex that much is if it wasn't heat treated. So we'll see what happens. The bike shop guy is going to do all all the parts swapping but it could take a month to do, Haro is paying for the labor.

 

[froze]

That's quite a thin tubed bike and if your tall as well as heavy I can see the frame being quite whippy?

Older English frames sometimes had that in larger sized frames, where the standard tube sizes weren't stuff enough to prevent flex?

Perhaps something with oversized tubes might help??

I'm 6 foot tall, the frame is a large which fits 5"10 to 6"2, which puts me right in the middle for the size. I weigh 172 as of today, so I'm not overweight. I carry about 60 pounds of gear and water, the old bike weighed 35 to 36 pounds with the pannier racks installed. The bike shop guy that test rode my bike with all my gear in place, minus the water weight, weighs about 50 pounds more than I do, he's the one that got it to move, what he said was a foot in each direction, I think all I could get it to do was 2 to 4 inches which is significant.

The Giramondo is not a thin tube bike, my prior touring bike was a 85 Schwinn Le Tour Luxe, that was a thin tube bike, and it only weighed 26 pounds compared to 32 pounds (without the racks) for the Giramondo, and the Schwinn never shimmied with the same load.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Heat treatment affects yield strength, not modulus.

It means the frame is much less likely to fail, but makes zero difference to how much it flexes.

 

[froze]

Heat treatment affects yield strength, not modulus.

It means the frame is much less likely to fail, but makes zero difference to how much it flexes.

What if it was over heated?

 

[roubaixtuesday]

What if it was over heated?

Same. Only strength affected, not stiffness by heat treatment.

This is a wider principle; pretty much all variants within a material have the same stiffness but vary in strength.

eg here's a randomly googled list of material properties (from MIT)

Take a look at the three different steels: radically different yield stress (strength) by a factor of six(!) but identical Young's modulus (stiffness)

https://web.mit.edu/course/3/3.11/www/modules/props.pdf

 

[froze]

So what was causing the frame to flex like that?

 

[roubaixtuesday]

So what was causing the frame to flex like that?

No idea. But you can exclude heat treatment.

 

[MichaelW2]

Is it the frame or loaded luggage rack that is flexing?
Photo of your setup needed.