[tartosuc]

Originally posted by JAB
In my experience as a former XC racer the deraileur is not as important as the shifters. You have better shifting with a high quality shifter and a crappy deraileur than with a crappy shifter and a bling-bling deraileur. Personally I would never buy a XO or XTR der. for my DH bike since all the places I ride are the habitat of a special breed of tiny deraileur-smashing gnomes.

i totalyy agree with you...run a top of the line shifter with a ordinary derailleur and you will be amazed!

i run an xtr shifter with lx derailleur and it works nice... either shimano or sram will break under impact...

 

[crashing_sux]

Originally posted by Jm_
Ok..but what will you be busting instead, since all of that force has to go somewhere?

While you're not outright saying it this statement could lead people to believe Saint deraileurs are designed to be stronger and that impacts from them could be pushed through to other parts of the bike.

Quite the opposite, instead of taking the path of a big oak tree in a storm which when subjected to enough force eventually breaks they are taking the path of the willow, which just bends, then snaps back.

The Saint deraileur positioning is controlled by a centering spring (at least that's how I understood it). Regular deraileurs have a return spring so they can be pushed in one direction but if you push them in the other direction they are relatively solid as they are held in place by the cable tension which will result in something bending, stretching, or breaking. In a Saint deraileur the deraileur would just move and then spring back into position. That makes it better able to take hits but less likely to send the impact force into your frame, or in this case the axle.

I agree with the through axle mounting even though it doesn't seem popular with a lot of people. The idea of a replaceable dropout is to flex and absorb the impact so the force fed into a rigid deraileur (made rigid by cable tension) has someplace to go. Making the deraileur flex instead of the dropout (and then making it automatically spring back into place even) makes perfect sense to me.

Eventually no matter how well designed stuff is going to break and when it does it's going to go at the weak link. A deraileur hanger was designed to be the weak link and while there still needs to be one it should no longer be the deraileur hanger or you haven't improved the strength of the system as a whole.

Using completely bogus numbers here say someone thought a traditional deraileur broke with a force of 10lbs so they decided to make the deraileur hanger bend or break at only 8lbs to prevent breaking the deraileur. Seems reasonable to me.

Now you come along and design a deraileur that can withstand 20lbs, unless you take it off the deraileur hanger your weak link will still be 8lbs. Replacing it with an axle that breaks at 16lbs would double the strength and if worse comes to worse you're replacing an axle instead of a deraileur (providing they made the end of the axle weaker than the deraileur). Not sure if that's the way it works but if I had to run a deraileur I'd rather carry a spare axle around in my camelback than a deraileur and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

Yeah, we'll have to wait and see to be sure how well they work. While I won't just assume they fix everything I'm not going to assume they cause a bunch of new problems either. The present system sucks, I'm willing to give any company who tries to improve on it a chance to prove themselves before I start wishing for everything to stay the same.