finaly got one.

Question
Dear Michael,
I have finaly got a bike. Its a 47cm Marin mountain Hawk.
the bike is very light and realy confident on the road. ive decided to bring it off road so i had a ride at the river bank. Apparently its quiet difficult to handle on loose gravel but the tyres did handle it pretty well. ive concluded that cycling on loose gravel is not for mtb's i mean lots of loose stones at the side of the river. the rear wheel sinks and its hard to move forward but barely managable.So i decided to go to a bmx park to see how it handles jumps n bumps. when i did a jump the chain swings like hell and smacks the rear end of the bike is that normal?

Kind Regards

Justin

Answer
Hello Justin,

That's why a BMX bike has no gears aboard. A bike which has shifting gears has "space" on his chain to will shift.
When you shorten this chain it can break or damage your shiftinggears like derailleur and so on.
And when you improve your technical skills you'll see that a bouncing chain only happens when you rode of a hill.
One advice, don't shift when you have a bouncing chain, most of the times the chain will not shift on a other cog and will come on the chainstay or worse between frontderailleur and chainstay. In biketerms we will call that a chainsuck.

Have a lot of fun,

PS nice bike.

Greeting from the flatland of the Netherlands.

Michael