This is going to sound bizarre, but a part of me wants to attach a pre-indexing derailleur to my stumpjumper drop bar conversion.
An aspect of modern derailleurs that is extremely helpful to indexing, and which never gets talked about, is that the jockey wheel has a small amount of lateral "play." It'll naturally try and track to whatever gear is closest.
If you have an indexed setup where the shifter is constantly trying to place the derailleur into a position roughly around one of your gears, this is great. It means that your cable tension can suffer quite a bit of alignment badness before it actually causes problems.
If you have a friction setup and your shift happens to land pretty close to one of the gears, this is also great. Couple it with a light shifter and, even with a cheap long-cage derailleur, it feels just as light and snappy as decent not-really-long-cage stuff like 5800 105.
BUT, if you shift and the lever lands right between two gears, when the jockey wheel play is coupled with the smooth chain release of modern freewheel cogs, you can wind up with the rather interesting situation that the chain starts hopping between cogs depending on your pedal torque. And by "interesting" I mean "hmmmmmmmmm."
And because the derailleur always slides itself into place, there's not much feedback to help you learn or feel where the gears are.
With a fully-vintage setup, errors in shifter placement result in clacking. It means you have to be more precise, but it also constantly tells you what "being more precise" means.
Or I could just index the rear shifter, because it turns out it
is totally compatible. But that thing feels stupid heavy in indexed mode, the clicking action being very tight. In friction mode, the shifter rides on a cloud like it's some kind of Simplex retrofriction shit, and I don't want to give that up.
Or I could just ignore the quirk and deal with it. And tell myself that it's an anti-theft device, because someone trying to ride off who isn't aware of the issue will suddenly experience a massive number of ghosts shifts while trying to ride on the unintentionally boeshield-smeared crappy platform side of the pedals and thus fall off the bike.
Oh well.
Now, the question is, if I change my mind and decide to commit, what derailleur should I use? I don't have any actual vintage components.
Although, I do have something that
might provide a similar kind of jank. Thinking that I might build the Bridgestone RB-T (that I've used for parts) back up into a bike to get rid of, I picked up a $9 rear derailleur new.
Yes, $9. New.
Check this out.
Wow! It looks like a cheap claw knockoff of something from a 1960s catalog!
But it gets better.
Cheapo derailleur causes cancer, apparently.
Of course, it also isn't actually pre-indexing, so it might wind up being too fancy to solve the quirk.
I think I'll just HTFU and learn to shift better. That twig that for some reason I haven't bothered clearing out from the second-to-largest cog might be contributing to the problem, too.
Some fucking cunts tried to steal my bikes
Terrifying.
