Hi all, First, thank you all for your ideas and feedback, the Clem is now shifting/holding gear a *lot* better and any issues with getting to a gear are my own now. For posterity's sake in case some one does a search in the future, I just wanted to follow up with what I ended up doing.
To answer some questions, - the Clem is the complete-build medium, 52cm. - The trouble gears were pretty much in all cogs except for the big and the small, and using the big or small chainring had similar issues. I do feel like it might have occurred more around the apex of the shifter arc. Lets say if the big cog is 1 and the little cog is 8, then it was 6,5 and 4. I don't usually use anything less than 4. - Also to note, the issues were not so much on shifting, but riding in a gear for a good ways and then all of a sudden it would skip without warning, usually under load like a hill. Also it did not skip right when the load increased, oh no, it let me think everything was going to be ok on this hill. Then bam, a skip and then a fair amount of teeth gnashing and cursing. Also, the skip did not feel like when you are between two gears, but as if there was no resistance like when have no chain. Anyway, here is what I did: 1. Checked to make sure the cassette was tight. It was, and I have a new cassette removal tool to boot. It was tight... 2. Put the bike on the stand and tuned it to shift on the clicks like it was indexed. 1. Rode it for a number of commutes (around 7mi each way) and a separate 10mi ride. It was better - at least getting it into gear was not as fiddly. Alas, it was easier to get in gear, and held the gears more often, but would still skip randomly. Usually only when I was feeling very confident that it would *not* skip because things were going well. 3. Finally, I checked out Bill's SunRace pictures and noted the Ultegra bar ends would fit. (Thanks Bill!) I did not know if my issue was me not liking friction shifting in general or just the SunRace, do I did not want to risk the friction-only Silver shifters. So now I am running the "front" (left side) Ultegra bar end shifter on the "rear" (right side) SunRace shifter in friction-mode. Now any issues with shifting seem to be mine alone. I do get the occasional "slip" but it is that one where it is jumping between two gears, and it still give some resistance when it happens so it is not as jarring. Once again though, this highlights my inability to get to the gear correctly the first time and a quick trim fixes it. I am even being bold and shifting on uphills, downshifting and upshifting even. In the other long thread on the Clem (Clemming Around) there has been some discussion if it is the Altus/SunRace combo that is the issue. Who knows, but the Ultegra seems to be smoother shifting and does not have the issues. On the plus side, reusing the SR shifter bases saved $60-70 on a pair of Paul Thumbies. Thanks again for the help. - Bryan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.