Front shifter jammed

Derek Zoolander

looking for a little advice..out for a spin today and a some point the front shifter became jammed, stuck in the big chain. The shifter won't move either way. Novice at maintainence, so not sure if this is something I can attempt to fix myself. Becuase the shifter won't move I'm presuming its not a cable issue. Is this typically a quick fix or should I bring the bike into the LBS...its a tiagra groupset btw..

Quigs Snr

Try move the chain onto the smaller ring with your hand and see does the shifter start moving again. Failing that if the shifter is stuck because its mechanism is banjoed rather than because the chain is jammed then I am afraid its going to be painful for your wallet a the Shimano shifters are generally not very serviceable and usually require replacement.

DirkVoodoo

Is it a braze on or clamp front derailleur?

Derek Zoolander

I believe its a clamp on...I'll try moving the chain manually and see if that sorts out the problem..

cheers for the help

victorcarrera

1. Try applying a little more pressure to the B lever (the short one). Sometimes due to incorrect cable length or high stop adjustment it is possible to lock the derailer against the high stop screw when in the big chain ring. You may have to activate the B lever more than once to restore the chain to the small ring.

2. This one is a long shot but this actually happened me. A small piece of road chipping got trapped in the front derailer mechanism preventing it from returning to the small ring.

This happened to me before, I fixed it by releasing the cable clamp bolt at the front mech. This leaves all the tension off the cable and I was then able to get the shifter to click down again. On my shifter (105) the cause of the problem was that some shimano shifters are "triple enabled" and pushing the large lever again after a failed shift to the big ring causes the shifter to click up to the next gear, which isn't really there if your using a double, jamming the mech hard against its high limit screw and putting massive tension on the cable, jamming the shifter.

Derek Zoolander

Quigs Snr wrote: »

Try move the chain onto the smaller ring with your hand and see does the shifter start moving again. Failing that if the shifter is stuck because its mechanism is banjoed rather than because the chain is jammed then I am afraid its going to be painful for your wallet a the Shimano shifters are generally not very serviceable and usually require replacement.

This seemed to sort the problem out cheers...

DirkVoodoo

Ah, I had a problem when I didn't tighten the derailleur to the clamp enough, it stayed in the big ring on a spin and "felt" like the derailleur was broken.