Just bought an old Gran Tour II Ross Professional road bike off of facebook for $100. I know it’s an old hunk of junk, but I’m just trying to get my foot in the door. No clue how these gear things work though, can someone enlighten me?
by ShitImDelicious
15 Comments
While pedaling, and only while pedaling, move them. Left one probably controls the big gears in front, right controls back. As you go faster, move the gears in back to the smaller cogs. Going up hill, move into the bigger cogs. If you’re just cruising around on flat ground you might just need to find the best gear and keep it there.
Go slow. It’s gonna be trial and error
Think of yourself like an old fashioned bellhop where you have to manually adjust the elevator to find each floor. Like someone else said only hop the bell when you are pedaling
These are called friction shifters, they were the norm up until around 1986. There should be plenty of videos and explanations online about them. The left one controls the front gears, the right one controls the rear gears
Ah the good old fashioned DIY vasectomy special
Did you try literally anything first? Did you move them at all and look for what happens?
Did you try moving them to see what happens?
That bike looks 40 years old, man. The shifters move down and up, shoving the chain left or right.
Diiiiiid you try pulling the levers while cycling?
Yank
Cool bike! Congrats! I’d suggest practicing shifting gears on a nice flat area. You want to lightly pedal without much force while shifting. Then you can pedal hard when fully in the gear. If it clicks and makes noise you probably have to adjust the shifter a bit to get it fully in gear. I still have friction shifters on my road bike and it works great. Just takes a bit of practice.
The cable ends (nipples) look to me like they’ve come out of their housings, meaning your shifters will do nothing. Reengage the nipples and ensure the spring tension keeps them there
That’s all there was when I grew up. lol.
Downside is you have to take one hand off the bar to change speed and they don’t tell you precisely which lever to pull in which direction…however, they don’t break as easily as other kind of shifters and require less maintenance.
Some click, most don’t. It’s like the manual transmission of gears in the bike world. You gotta be a bona fide badass to use them properly. It’s done by feel.
To add on to the advice everyone else has given – There’s a good chance that the bike needs a tune up before it will shift properly.