[HollyBoni]

I built my first 1x setup a few days ago. It's on a hybrid gravel, road bike with straight handlebars. My setup is Zee RD, Deore 10spd 11-36 cassette, 10spd XT chain, 10spd XT shifters, Ultegra 10spd normal road chainring.

I'm loving it so far but I have a few little problems. I know you can't maintain a perfect chain line on 1x setups. Everyone is always told not to cross chain, but i'm wondering how bad it is in reality with the flexible 10 and 11 speed chains we have nowadays.

My drivetrain is pretty noisy and not very smooth in the two biggest cogs. In the biggest cog the rear mech also flexes a little bit towards the outside, even though the hanger is straight. In the biggest cog there is also some noise coming from the chainring.
When I backpedal in the last two smallest cogs it sounds like the indexing is off (it's not), when I pedal forwards in these two cogs it's pretty smooth, only a little bit of noise

Is this noise and roughness normal for a 1x setup? Because most of the time the chain line is not perfect, will my cassette and chain wear down really fast compared to a 2x or 3x setup or I shouldn't be worried?

A few pictures about how the chain looks. My chain line is around 44-45mm, and of course it's a road frame with 130mm dropout spacing. The crank is a double and I put the chainring on the outside because I mainly use the smaller cogs.

Pictures:

https://s30.postimg.org/6hpsnakqn/P1240505.jpg

https://s30.postimg.org/l3gtbjhj5/P1240519.jpg

https://s30.postimg.org/buen1f8n3/P1240509.jpg

 

[Slash5]

Put the chainring on the inside and try it. The large cogs are always worst because the chain from ring to cog is shorter and more teeth engaged.

 

[HollyBoni]

I put the chainring on the inside when I put everything together first, but it barely made a difference on the larger cogs.
However it was much much more horrible on the lower 3-4 cogs.

When the chainring was on the inside there was a lot of noise coming from the chainring when I was on the 3 smallest cogs, also on the 11T it sounded like the indexing was off, even when pedalling forward.
When the chainring is on the outside I only get noise from the chainring when i'm on the largest cog, and everything is quieter especially on the 11T.


What happens on 1x11 setups with a 42 or even a bigger cog? :eekster:
If I know correctly 11 speed cassettes are even wider by about 1.8mm.

 

[Harold]

A few things.

Yeah, chainline is important for noise/wear. But it's not going to blow up on you or anything like that if your chain doesn't line up well or run silent the whole time. Especially for gears you use less frequently.

I had my road/commute/touring bike set up as a 1x for awhile (135mm hub spacing). My chainring was in the middle position on a triple crank. It was noisier in the biggest cog than my 1x 10 mtb. I think part of that at least has to do with the shorter chainstays on the road bike than on the mtb. And your bike has shorter stays than mine, more than likely. Shorter stays mean a sharper bend that the chain has to make from the cogs to the chainring at the extremes. 1x specific chains are made to handle this bend a little better. SRAM seems to do them better than most anyone else.

I have since moved my bike to a 2x drivetrain for more gearing range.

My mtb is now a 1x11 with a 46t big cog. It's still quieter than the road bike ever was, but it's still noisier than any multi-ring drivetrain because the chainline is more extreme at the bigger cogs. BUT, here's a big caveat, my reason for going to the 11-46 cassette was so that I could spend LESS time in the biggest cog, so my chainline wouldn't need to be so extreme as often. So in the long run, there's less wear on the system.

 

[HollyBoni]

Thanks for the help.

My chainstay is around 40.8cm. Right now, because it's an old steel frame with those almost horizontal sliding dropouts. Interestingly if I slide the wheel further back in the dropout, when shifting from 13T to 11T the chain would sometimes get stuck between the derailleur and the cassette around here: (ignore the blue arrow)

Which could be catastrophic if it happened while riding. I guess Shadow is not designed for 30 year old road bike frames.

Not sure how my chainstain length compares to MTB stuff. To be honest i've never measured chainstays before.

So it'll be fine as it is. I changed a pretty low end 1x8 (I barely used this setup so I don't have any experience with 1x wear) with a 12-30 cassette. I don't think I had this much noise in the biggest cog so I guess that 6 teeth difference matters a lot.

SRAM has road specific 1x11 groupsets, I would be interested how they perform in terms of noise.

 

[HollyBoni]

I don't get it.

I compared the shifting and noise to my dads bike. It's an ancient full suspension with a SRAM X9 9 speed groupset on it, a triple in the front, 11-30 SRAM cassette and SRAM chain. Everything is completely worn out. I don't think any drivetrain component has been changed in the past 10 years, every teeth on the cassette and chainring are like shark fins, the chain is really stretched, and everything is super dirty.

Yet even when cross chaining it's so much more quieter and smoother than my brand new drivetrain. Even when I compare shifting and noise when on my bike the chain is dead on straight, the X9 is quieter and smoother.

When the chain is straight on my bike, and I just pedal forward, don't even shift there is quite a bit of constant noise at the back. It's not the noise when the indexing is off, it's just a constant "gear noise". It also feels a little bit more rough, and there is more resistance. It feels "notchy". On the X9 bike this is barely present. I recently serviced both hubs and both the hub and freehub body are in great nick so they're not the problem.

I understand that the 11-30 cassette has smaller jumps, but in the smaller cogs the 11-30 and my 11-36 are quite similar. The chainstay is around 2cm longer on the X9 bike.

What could possibly be the problem? I always work on my bikes, I can't think of anything I did wrong when setting up this bike.

 

[Slash5]

It's quiet because it's worn in. All the parts mesh perfectly, all worn in together. In my experience 1X drivetrains always have a bit of noise. The same tightness that keeps from dropping chains also causes a bit of noise. As the NW chainring wears in I find it is quieter but there is always a tiny bit of rumble.

 

[HollyBoni]

Yeah since i'm sick I only had a couple of short rides so I hope everything will quieten down. While riding the bike it's not so noticeable but it's still annoying.

Even without the clutch the spiring is much much more strong in the ZEE derailleur compared to the X9 that's for sure, but i'm running a regular road chainring, not a narrow-wide.

I'll give it a few longer rides and we'll see.

 

[J.B. Weld]

Have you checked that derailleur hanger with a tool? Looks a bit off to me.

Is the front chainring new?

 

[HollyBoni]

I did, it's straight. Probably just the photo.

The front chainring is not new, but not that old either. Slightly used. I never used it with even a slightly stretched chain. The teeth are in perfect shape.
The noise is definitely coming from the back end, and if that completely worn out X9 with garbage chainrings is quieter than my setup I doubt that the slightly used chainring would be the problem. The chainlinks fit perfectly on the teeth.