I like to keep a spare derailleur hanger for each of my bikes. These consumable parts connect your rear derailleur to the frame. They are designed to bend when your drivetrain is impacted, instead of your derailleur or frame getting damaged.
The derailleur hanger that shipped with my bike was always kinda bent and I could never quite get it straight. These aluminum ones are hard to bend too much before they snap. I also find these thicker aluminum ones are hard to make fine adjustments on. Although, that might just be my skill with a hanger alignment tool. Anyway, the new one is perfectly straight and the old one is good enough but I figured I would install the new one and carry around the old one as my spare.
Here’s the old one with the wheel removed from the dropout.
And the shiny new one.
This is the most similar derailleur hanger that Wheels Manufacturing sells for a Kona Dew-E. You can see they’re not quite the same though! But it’s close enough and gave a slight but noticeable improvement in shifting. The new one has more material around the derailleur threads which means that the flange of my Pitlock skewer doesn’t quite fit. That just means I have to take the skewer all the way out each time. No big deal.
I had the wheel out so Kat popped it in the truing stand and fixed up a bit of lateral wobble at one spot in the wheel.
All fixed up! I love these raw brass spoke nipples that Kat builds a lot of wheels with. The piece on the spoke out-of-focus here is a magnet for the speed sensor on this e-bike.
