There’s only so many ways you can stop a chain from falling off the chainring. Yet a good chainguide seems to be a hard thing to find, the biggest issue is not so much if it will keep the chain on, but if the guide will fit your bike and continue to work over time. The Evil/E13 guide changed the way we looked at the chainguide, they are easy to fit on allot of different bikes and they work bloody well. The guides began to pop up everywhere and at one stage were quite a 'hard to get' item. So, of course it was only a matter of time until someone came along and did their take on Dave's e13 design.
Enter Raceface. The Diablous range of gear upped the anti for Raceface in 2004, big beefy cranks and super sexy bars, stems and posts. But such a sweet setup was hardly complete without a chainguide. I mean, has anyone in the history of the world run a set of Diablous cranks WITH double chainrings? Common! It’s a good thing they have that extra 20mm of bb cup thread for extreme hucker hill climbs! With the E13 kicking butt and no-one yet to mimic the design principles, Raceface was smart enough to jump in and 'design' the new Diablous guide.
I'd like to point out early in the game that I paid for this guide; it was not given to me to review. So perhaps my opinions expressed are more in line with actual consumers than say, a magazine review. Opening up the box the first big difference to the e13 is the pre-assembled guide. E13's come in a model like plastic frame work that require cutting out and trimming before assembly. While this job takes only takes a few minutes, I'm sure many mechanics and more so, bike companies, will be glad to skip this task. The guide also comes with an alloy bash guard
instead of the plastic e13 bashy. As you can see in the pics, it’s of a decent width- about 5mm and is quite nicely machined. The back plate of the guide is the real business end though, and the Raceface looks solid. It's basically an e13 with flames and a little tweak here and there.
Installing the guide I was able to see how these small changes would affect the setup and performance of the Diablous versus the e13. The 'dry run' started well, the guide can mount on both ISCG mounts and under the BB cup. I was running an e13 on the frame before this, so I set up the guide basically the same and used the ISCG mounts. A 1.5mm gap is recommended between the top plastics and the bashring. I quickly worked out that 2mm of spacers were required to get the gap needed. For 06 the e13 guide uses a single spacer of different widths instead of washers to space the back plate, it would have been neat to see that system here also, as the washers are quite fiddly.
With the spacing worked out I was able to move onto setting up the top guide and lower roller. With the chain installed the first issue popped up. The lower roller plastics can only go so far on the bolt slots in order to meet up with the bash guard, and this isn't quite far enough for the 36 tooth version, nothing a dremel can't fix, but a bit of an oversight none the less. The next problem also came from the jockey wheel setup. On an e13 the two plastic halves of the jockey wheel housing have raised lips to space the bearing. The Diablous uses two 1mm washers which sit between the bearing and the plastic. When I did the housing bolts up the bearing bound up. The reason being that on of the 1mm washers had buried itself into the plastic. I added another washer to fix the problem. This is a bit of an eye opener to the hardness of the plastic used on this guide compared to the e13. I guess time will tell if it’s really an issue, but my guess is that those flames won't
last very long.
Speaking of flames, the upper plastic is a little over designed. There’s so much plastic that doesn't need to be there. The jelly bean shaped adjustment bolt is somewhat useless, adding about 100% more adjustment over the e13. While it works well, there’s no need for such a large block of plastic to be sticking out. I also found the top plate plastic has a pretty harsh memory unlike the e13; it’s very flexible and quite springy. The e13 is a harder plastic you bend to shape to match your chain line. The Diablous is more designed to flex when/if the chain rubs. There is one good feature here though! You don't have to take of the crank/bashy to get to the adjustment. This means you can get it perfect, I think e13 top plastics are often setup 'good enough' as it takes a bit of time uninstalling and readjusting to get it right.
Now that I've had my little bitch, let’s talk price- the often deciding factor. The Diablous guide should retail under $220 in most shops. Making it a few cartons cheaper than the e13, but as I've outlined- it’s no e13 and it does have a few little issues. There’s also the cost of spare parts that needs to taken into account, especially if the plastic proves to be quick wearing. At the end of the day though, it's a good enough guide that should do its job quite well and following the e13 design it should fit most bikes without to much effort. I had the guide installed in around 15 minutes, now to go ride it hard.
Want one? Talk to your local bike shop.
