Prior to my trip to Durango last fall I brought my bike in to have the brakes bled and pads replaced.  I also asked them to give it a once over to see if anything else needed to be taken care of.  Everything looked in decent shape, the only item was the chain which would need to be replaced soon.  And with that I needed to look at my cassette and chainrings to see if they were worn as well.  Oddly enough a simple chain checker is the one tool I don’t have and something I really should pick up.  Not wanting to take on all these repairs at once, I put it on the to-do list for over the winter.

I knew already that I needed to replace my middle chainring - I noticed it was missing a few teeth and I wasn’t sure how that happened.  It made sense to go ahead and replace the small chainring as well and it was relatively inexpensive for both new parts.  The big chainring was fine in terms of wear and condition as it sees the least use.  Going back in my records the cassette was the original one I installed when building the bike, so it looked like it was time to replace all these items at the same time.  Which is really what should be done if possible to insure even wear across the different parts.  If the chain is replaced with more frequency, you can go longer before needing to replace the cassette and chainrings.

So over the Christmas holiday I did some e-shopping at Amazon.com for a new cassette and chainrings and stock piled the parts.  I recently brought my rig down to the Fat Tire Farm after installing the new cassette and chainrings to have a new XTR chain put on and to make sure everything was dialed in.  When I picked up my rig they told me that the thin spacer for the crankset was on the wrong side of the bottom bracket shell (oops . . .), so they made sure the front derailleur was properly adjusted with the crank offset due to the spacer now on the correct side.

Now that the drivetrain is shiny and new I’m all set for spring and can’t wait to hit the trails.  At a minimum inspect your chain and see if it needs to be replaced.  Ghost-shifting or any type of skipping may be a sign that other parts need to be replaced as well.