Oval chainrings and electronic shifting

Hi all,

Does anyone here run oval chainrings on an electronic shifting setup? How often do you have shifting problems and/or dropped chains?

I recently installed Rotor Q rings on my bike and despite getting everything dialed in, I still have problems shifting up from the 34 ring to the 50 ring. I have to find a sweet spot to get the chain to shift into the big ring, otherwise it’ll make a horrible crunching sound and then drop back onto the small ring. I’ve had 1 instance where the chain dropped off the big ring and got stuck between the BB and little ring, scared me to death because I thought I destroyed the bike frame.

A mechanic told me that oval rings and electronic shifting don’t work well together. He said that with mechanical shifting, you can finesse the derailleur while electronic shifting is basically brute force shifting. Brute force works well when the chainring is round but can cause issues with oval chainrings; apparently he’s seen cases where teeth have been broken off oval chainrings with electronic shifting.

Does anyone have any experience with oval chainrings and electronic shifting? Is difficult shifting just the norm with oval chainrings?

Thanks!

I tried last spring with absolute black and di2. I gave up in the end. Bent a front derailleur and after all the time and money it ended up a no go. I have them on my mechanical set up still though and they work great! Was very disappointed we couldn’t get them to work on di2.

1 Like

I use oval rings and Etap on 3 bikes. No issues for 2-3 years. It was finicky to get setup to get good quality shifts, but once I figured that out, it was just as reliable as a round ring. Occasionally I’ll drop a chain, but that’s maybe once or twice a year in 10,000+ miles.

The key for me was finding the tallest point of the oval and getting the derailleur height as close to it as I could without interference. Once I did that the front ring shifts were fine.

1 Like

I used to have Q rings and Di2 on my bike. They shifted fine once they were setup. If I remember the hard part about the setup was getting the derailleur height above the rings correct. But overall they worked fine. You shouldn’t need to finesse the shift with mechanical derailleurs either. I went back to round rings when the q rings wore out. I didn’t think that they did anything positive for my riding.

I have Di2 and an oval chainring on my gravel bike and have had zero issues. It’s set up 1x, so I don’t have to worry about a front derailleur though.

I am running Ultegra Di2 6870 with Rotor Qrings (53X39) on Quarq Elsa cranks. I watched several videos on youtube when i first installed my groupset. The groupset was first installed on a Dengfu R05 frameset but I am now running it on a Moots Vamoots. Zero issues and shifts to big and small chainring on the fly.