Oh god, is this a stupid question on rapid rise?

[feetabix]

i have it on one of my bikes and i quite like it......the only down side is that, after 30 years of built up cycling intuition, when your gasping for breath in oxygen debt 7/8ths of the way up to the top of the long mynd, its counter intuitive to put tension into a cable to change down a gear and needs 5% of free brain space to get it right each time.......thats sometimes 5% i dont have free!.....

 

[gtRTSdh]

RR is how it should have been from the start. It means that higher / lower gears are the same movement on each shifter. The whole point of changing the spring is that it takes less force going to larger cogs on the cassette than smaller cogs. How many have had the annoying grind as the normal mech struggles to engage the 11T, the same can't be said of RR mechs onto the big cog. I love them, but I still make loads of shifting mistakes!

 

[hamster]

The only problem is that the shift is entirely dependent on the strength of the spring. When the spring gets weak with age, the mech stops working or (worse) jumps to a higher gear as you rise out of the saddle.
How do I know this I wonder??? RR mech ownership.

Another supposed innovation by Shimano to bring about planned obsolescence.

In its favour, if you run bar-end shifters with drops, the RR mech means the shifter faces down when in bottom gear (and most likely to be out of the saddle) This stops you banging your knee on the shifter, which is why I fitted it on the first place. But 2000 road miles later the spring weakened and it got tetchy.

 

[gtRTSdh]

The only problem is that the shift is entirely dependent on the strength of the spring. When the spring gets weak with age, the mech stops working or (worse) jumps to a higher gear as you rise out of the saddle.
How do I know this I wonder??? RR mech ownership.

Another supposed innovation by Shimano to bring about planned obsolescence.

In its favour, if you run bar-end shifters with drops, the RR mech means the shifter faces down when in bottom gear (and most likely to be out of the saddle) This stops you banging your knee on the shifter, which is why I fitted it on the first place. But 2000 road miles later the spring weakened and it got tetchy.

As far as I know the springs are the same just connected at different corners, well the springs look the same to me. I've had a RR LX mech from new since 2005 on my RTS and it's still working perfectly to this day?

Ps) I always park my RR mechs in granny ring and middle of the cassette.

 

[hamster]

That is right, the difference with conventional mechs is that the chain tension helps the spring shift onto a smaller cog, whereas rapid rise means that the spring has to overcome it to shift to a bigger cog. A small difference, but critical.
Low-normal mechs existed in the past but were discarded as they never worked as well as high normal...