# Front Derailleur on a Modern XC Race Hardtail?



## RideFaster (Dec 18, 2004)

Are there any light weight carbon hardtails anymore that can still accept a front derailleur? 

I have 1x on many bikes and it's fine but 2x still has a place for some unique circumstances.


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## RideFaster (Dec 18, 2004)

Pivot LES apparently


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## richj8990 (Apr 4, 2017)

Some of the older bolt-on cranksets have room for a smaller chainring but the frame may or may not be setup for a front derailleur. I guess it doesn't matter too much if you can get the braze-on kind but it really depends on the frame and how much room there is to put everything. Personally I don't mind running 2x without a front derailleur since I'm doing 11-speed and the 11-52t cassette is an OK but not perfect 4.7x range. It sounds barbaric but with wide-range cassettes, 95+% of the time you are going to be in the large chainring, steep hills you just manually switch over to the smaller chainring. Takes 10 seconds. Obviously you can't 'race' that way, the smaller chainring can't shift to the highest gears because most modern RD's don't have that wide of a capacity even with a long cage. The cage in the smaller ring will bend all the way back and the chain will start touching itself somewhere between gear 7-9 out of 11. So the smaller ring is just for steep slow climbs. And of course you switch back manually to large at the top of the hill. But it would add the equivalent of 3 non-overlapping gears to 14 and provide around 6.2x range or more. Which is way more than even 5.2x 10-52t right now. 

I've done 26/38t front and 11-52t back; the XT 8000 RD could only shift into the 2nd gear and could not hold first (we'll see about M5100 later), but you can still get 6.2x range even without the granny gear (high is 38/11 or 3.45; low is 26/46 or 0.56. 3.45/0.56 = 6.17x total range). If M5100 can hold all 11 gears in the large (it does) and most in the small chainring including the granny (have not put on the small ring yet with that RD), the range goes up to 6.9x. That's enough for me!


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## Spoker (Apr 8, 2017)

That is what I was considering! Just manually changing front ring. Probably can downshift with foot.No chain catcher needed?


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## Pedalon2018 (Apr 24, 2018)

Spoker said:


> That is what I was considering! Just manually changing front ring. Probably can downshift with foot.No chain catcher needed?


Get a titanium frame and set it up from a SS to a triple up front. Whatever you want…


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