Getting Jiggy with the Jab

The Wired Rebellion

Madrone’s Jab derailleur hit the market last year at a time of great uncertainty for cable operated shifting. The two drivetrain giants – SRAM and Shimano – had both openly acknowledged that electronic shifting was going to be the way forward with their flagship products, and it looked very much like the century-old cable and spring method of dragging chains from cog to cog was going to end up consigned to budget bike purgatory or the scrap heap of sentimental nostalgia.

Amidst the hand-wringing and pearl clutching of the battery-averse, the new Jab heralded a welcome note of hope for riders who wanted an electronic-free, high-end shifting experience. Here was a beautiful assembly of machined aluminum parts, assembled into a derailleur capable of eating whatever size cogs it was tasked with shifting, available in either short or long cage options, with either a gravel or mountain clutch, and 10 different cable cams to choose from – offering compatibility with just about any 1x SRAM/Shimano/TRP road/gravel/mtb drivetrain. Dovetailing with Madrone’s existential ethos, every single part of the Jab is available aftermarket, replaceable in the event of wear or damage.

The horizon has brightened somewhat in the interim between last summer and now. Shimano just released a new XT cable-operated drivetrain, and alongside SRAM’s Eagle 90 drivetrain is proving that the big players have not entirely abandoned the traditional landscape. The Madrone Jab, meanwhile, occupies a unique place in the market. It’s a high-end mechanical derailleur that is modular, upgradeable, and fully serviceable. But it is not cheap, and the serviceability is not as numbly plug-and-play as pairing a shifter to a derailleur and calling it good. At about 300 USD, it’s at least 50% more expensive than either the new XT8200 or the Eagle 90 rear unit, but is similarly about 50% less expensive than either a Deore Di2 or GX AXS battery-powered derailleur (let’s not muddy the water by bringing in the price of shifters here).

Inevitably, this raises some questions: Is the Jab 50% better than the competition? How do you measure that better, in terms of qualitative performance? Is it lighter? Is the shifting smoother, quieter, or faster? Is it stronger? What value do you put on repairability or adaptability? Can the lower cost of a premium, rebuildable, adaptable cable-operated derailleur be enough to sway purchasers away from the lower maintenance (battery charging aside) of a wireless setup?

I’ve had some time to ponder these questions. Last November, I took delivery of a Madrone Jab, set up with a long cage, MTB clutch, and optional stiffener plate. That setup runs 356USD. This was installed on a Kona LBF test bike, and then I rode that bike exclusively for the next four months. We clocked up somewhere around 700 very dusty miles, shifting via SRAM Apex drop bar shifter.

Was it “better”? From a click-by-click perspective, that is hard to say. Side by side, the Jab is actually bigger than the Apex it replaced, visibly and on the scale. It costs more than twice as much. The Jab feels more robust, the cage and parallelogram are less prone to flex or twist, but when banging through the gears via the Apex drop bar shifter, I would be hard-pressed to say that the shifts were faster or more precise. They are both clutched derailleurs, and they both kept the chain pretty quiet except in the smallest three cogs when the steel chainstay (protected by nothing more than one of those clear plastic decals) was so close that a small amount of chainslap was basically unavoidable. New derailleur versus new derailleur, they shift very similarly. But, four very dusty months later, the Jab was trucking along like a champ, shifting as crisply and smoothly as it had the day it was installed. Big points for consistency there.

I didn’t crash on it during that time but did manage to get a finger-thick stick wedged in the cage with enough force to bend the cage. In spite of the reinforced stiffener plate, or maybe because of it, the derailleur hanger needed a slight realignment after that. The aluminum of the cage was just soft enough to flex around the stick and was relatively easy to bend back into the right shape afterward. UDH hangers are pretty beefy, so a good degree of force must have gone through the Jab to bend the hanger. After the fact, there wasn’t any discernible play in the link plates or knuckles, and we just kept on clicking through the gears like nothing had happened. So, points for toughness as well.

Eventually, the LBF had to go home, so the Jab was pulled off and aimed toward another project. This project (another gravel bike) will be based around an 11-speed Shimano GRX group, so I emailed Aaron at Madrone and requested the correct cam for that shifter/cassette combo. No problem, he said. How about we send you out the new, upgraded link plates as well? They’ve got bearings in them instead of bushings now. We’ve upgraded our jockey wheels too…

Right To Repair

Now we get into the “right to repair” part of this piece. THIS is where I think the true value of the Madrone Jab is found. Madrone came to life as a way to repair your expensive mangled or otherwise slopped out GX, X0, or XX1 derailleurs (or Force or Rival), by way of replacement link plates, pins, bushings and shims. The brand’s core ethos is “you can fix this.” So it stands to reason that the first derailleur from the brand would also hold to that ethos. This is a good thing. There is not enough of this kind of good thing in the world these days, and Madrone deserves kudos for this alone.

At no point thus far has the Jab performance degraded in any way that would warrant the work that comes next. It has been shifting flawlessly, even after the finger-thick stick intervention. There was no play in the link plates, nor was there any gritty/crunchy stiffness. The jockey wheels were spinning along smoothly on their cartridge bearings. Much of the following “right to repair” stuff is, in my use case, unnecessary. But I did need to swap out that cam, and Aaron did send along a box of shiny new parts, and working on teeny things is always good for the brain, so it came time to break out the itty bitty wrenches.

Madrone offers thorough instructions for anything you might need to do to your Jab, either in video or graphic step-by-step format. These instructions are lucid and easy to follow. The tools needed and the justifications for the lubricants or locking compounds are clearly spelled out at the beginning of all these instructions. Since I am more of a 20-ton press and big hammer kind of guy, I managed to start completely on the back foot. I didn’t realize until too late that my socket set only goes down to 6mm, and my itty bitty Silca torque wrench doesn’t offer the clarity needed to accurately measure down to 8 in-lb. And I was leery of red Loctite on such tiny screws, so I used Permatex Orange instead.

You will need a 5.5mm socket, says so right there in the instructions. I made do with a teeny Knipex wrench, but the correct socket would have been A LOT more convenient.

You will also need a torque wrench that can read down to 8 in-lb. My baby Silca wrench’s finest reading is 2 Nm, which is 17.7 in-lb. I fudged it to hit the reading between 0 and 2, but that’s a pretty bush-league way of going about things. Don’t be like me.

Red Loctite was what appeared to be on the threads upon disassembly, and nothing broke when I tried to take it apart, so it’s probably just fine to use, and Madrone almost certainly knows better than I do what kind of threadlocker is the best call. Also, the bit about either acetone or isopropyl alcohol to clean all the threads upon reassembly? Crucial. There is absolutely no way to avoid getting some grease on the threads of those little screws when putting it all back together. Reassemble, then clean, THEN Loctite, then torque.

Other than that, follow the instructions, don’t get too far ahead of things, and it all makes sense. Naturally, I stopped following the instructions, jumped too far ahead of things, and found myself wondering why I didn’t have enough stainless steel bearing shields to finish the job. Backtracked, realized I had placed bearing shields beneath the new steel top caps when there is no call for them to be there, and unbolloxed myself before any harm was done.

The Madrone instructions call for complete removal of both link plates at the same time. That is the only place I otherwise intentionally (as opposed to accidentally or circumstantially) deviated from their instructions – I found that by replacing the link plates one by one, the nested derailleur springs were less inclined to try and jump out of their recesses in the knuckle bodies, and that the general “shape” of the derailleur was easier for me to keep track of.

I’d say replacing the link plates as a first-time endeavour is a two-beer job. One if you’ve done it before or if you’ve spent a lot of time working on RC cars. The jockey wheels took about five minutes. The cam plate was a two-minute job, as was replacing the cable pulley with one with a barrel adjuster. Everything fit together precisely. And now the Jab is back together, like new, transformed from SRAM to Shimano compatibility, and ready for its next phase of life.

I have always considered derailleurs to be disposable products. They get crashed on, mangled with sticks, smashed into rocks, overshifted into spokes after being crashed on, and generally suffer dismal, thankless lives fraught with catastrophic failure. Hence, disposable. With fancy derailleurs, that fragility often does not seem to be the kind of thing worth investing in. With fancy electronic derailleurs, the exorbitant cost of replacement feels like a cruel joke rubbing sand in my already evident battery-hating wounds.

The Jab has me reconsidering the notion of derailleurs being disposable. Not only does it work very well, it can be repaired when it gets mangled. It can be refreshed if and when it gets tired. It can be adapted to different shift environments. It can be moved from bike to bike, tailored as needed, and can be expected to live a long, long time. Looking at the initial purchase price now, it seems well worth every penny. Death to batteries!

Madrone Jab