That looks pretty nice. I have a coupled travel bike that I had previously though of doing something with wireless, all those cables are a hassle. But, since planes started falling out of the sky and travel pandemic, air travel now is off the table.
With all the different pull ratios for the RD/road/mtn, that unit looks pretty handy.

 

That's kinda cool.

 

I remember seeing these when it was a prototype or Kickstarter. It's definitely a cool concept with lots of potential. Hopefully they can get enough sales to do more refinement. It's still a little clunky looking.
I assume the buttons are just toggle switches. It's be cool if they could adapt them to work with a Di2 shifter.

 

I read somewhere that someone opened up one of the Archer shifters to wire in one or two of the sram Blip (or shimano?) remote buttons, which can be mounted anywhere. I've though about doing the same, placing the blip on the underside of the brake lever grip. The thumb is OK for one of the buttons, kind of like Campy's upshift lever which is thumb operated. But it would be nice to use the index finger to blip the shifter underneath. Have to investigate what kind of momentary switch they use here and with the Blips - whether it is push-on or push-off type (push-on as in closing the circuit)

I'd like to see Archer engineer another remote casing fitted to some common cable-brake lever. Thing is I can see it needing to be a non-gearshifting lever and there are not too many of those around on the market any more. I remember seeing Bob Roll installing a brand new non-shifting Shimano brake lever on his bike build a couple years ago though, as he prefers using bar-end shifters.

 

I have been calculating some other things to move all the way to a 1x12 system.

• Sunrace 11-52 cassette. 12 speed.
• Wolftooth 42T 1x chainring for my Ultegra crankset
• lose the front derailleur and cable and breakaway connector (they make rattling noise on the frame)
• remove the brake cable breakaway connector as well, as it is fairly trivial to remove the rear brake cable from the aft frame section for travel (solder the end of the cable to avoid fraying)
• Box One or SRAM NX rear derailleur to deal with the wide ratio cassette, and gain the chainslap-cancelling clutch

I'd retain the same lower gears as I have now - from 34-42 now to 42-52 with the 1x system. We have some 20% ramps here to deal with, esp with bikepacking loads I like that low gear once in a while.

I'd lose only the top gear ratio equivalent of 50-11 I have now and rarely use as my racing career ended in 1994 lol. I could regain this top gear with a change to XD freehub and Sram 10 tooth cog cassette, though this may not be possible on my current rear wheel which has a Shimano hub. Also would lose a couple or 3 of the mid ratios of the 22 speed system.

That leaves one main concern: chain alignment?

 

fuuuu 4km into a longer ride today... shifting stopped. might be a defective shifter remote, or might have been something I missed about charging the remote. Archer seems to have 0 instructions on operting this drop bar remote. I was able to change gears with the phone app, and changed my ride to a flatter route using the front chainrings for 2 gears.

It's also really slow shifting, so much that it disallows the Shimano chain and ramps to do their slick magic, and instead results in ka-chunk ka chunk shifts.

hmmm

 

OK after another week I am figuring it out. Shifting lasted 2 hours without quitting on one ride lol. I figured out it was a conflict with the app on my phone. I guess if I leave the app open on the phone and somehow the remote loses contact for a bit, then all connection with the remote is lost and you're stuck with connection to the phone app only. weird, but OK I can do that.

I changed settings to add in 5 units of over-shifting, so it changes gear with more authority past the gear and back each shift. Now the only bakly shifting was down to the 17 tooth, but this was fixed with some fine trimming of that gear in the app.

It still changes gear with a bit too much of a Ka-chunk compared to the same setup with Ultegra mech levers. I think this is a product of slow derailleur movement. You can see how much faster the AXS electronic derailleur moves compared to an Archer setup in this video:

. AXS is pretty impressive there.

So how to solve that? Well let's consider pull ratios. In the video they are using a SRAM Eagle rear mech, with a pull ratio of ~1:1. But typical road derailleurs operate at a pull ratio of 1:1.3 to 1:1.9. So they are showing the slowest possible derailleur movement for the Archer wireless shifting, at 1:1. My current Ultegra derailleur is about 1:1.4 ratio. I can also add in a mullet-pull-ratio device like a Jtek or Wolfbike TanPan to multiply the derailleur movement by another 30 or 40%. So I ordered a Tanpan to see if this can speed up the shifting substantially and make it smoother too. That should make it about double the speed of the Archer/Eagle combo in the video. If not there is the idea of using a 26 year old Dura Ace derailleur with pull ratio of 1:1.9 plus the Tanpan. Or even doubling up with the Tanpans lol to get to 1:2.7 lol, 2.7x faster than in the video. Can also gain some shifting speed by going to a 12 or 13 speed cassette, as the cog spacing is less and thus derailleur travels to the next gear sooner too.

Also ordered a 42 tooth narrow wide chainring from Wolftooth to try out running it as a 1x11 system (I have 11-42 cassette on there). A 10-52 12 speed cassette gives me the same range as my 50-34x11-42 gearing, albeit the gears spacing is wider. If I go to 11-50 cassette then the gears spacing is similar to what I am used to and I will just lose a bit off range off the top and bottom gear which is probably fine for my riding terrain. The Wolftooth narrow wide chainring is offset to dead in between where the oem 50 and 34 rings were, so the chain line should be great. I notice some of the other narrow wide rings are not offset which could be a big problem.

 

update. I just got in a Wolftooth narrow wide 42T chainring and a Wolftooth Tanpan pull ratio gizmo.

I got the Tanpan to speed up the derailleur movement. It certainly does this. I was hoping this would mean smoother shifts, but instead it just adds in that much more sponginess into the shifter-derailleur system for a derailleur which already had a 1.4 shift ratio. And that means really lousy shifting in both directions. This was off-label use of the Tanpan of course, so I did it to myself.

I am close to sending back the Archer system, as they have a 30 day satisfaction policy. I could just put it on one of my mountain bikes but seriously I don't think I want slow shifting on those either! Will consider doing an AXS system instead on this bike.

As for the narrow-wide chainring: Wolftooth say it should work with Shimano 11 speed chains. But it most certainly does not with my Dura Ace 11sp chain! Not even close. I had to cannibalize a 11sp SRAM chain off one of my mountain bikes to get it to work.

 

I now have my first 12 speed since 1988, lol. Surprisingly the Ultegra rear mech can reach all the gears with just a basic Roadlink dropout extension. But it doesn't track the wide range cassette worth a darn. So I have a new Deore 12 speed rear derailleur on order. But it all works now, no front derailleur and wireless shifting. 11-50 cassette and 42T narrow wide up front. A little less range than the 22 speed I ran before, but decent gear spacing, similar to before the 1x changeover.

 

Why didn't you mount the d1x on the seat stay?
Is there some reason you expect the Deore to track better?
It is hard to believe the RD will wrap that much chain.

 

Seat stay may not have as much clearance from the spokes. The Archer is pretty porky - wide. Though mounting on the seat stay would definitely help with accessing the batteries which have to be removed for charging. Right now I find I have to mount the bike on a stand, remove the rear wheel and use a long screwdriver to open the hatch for the batteries. There is the optional bottle cage mount which some folks use with the Archer system, but I do not want to give up my 2nd bottle cage.

I expect the Deore to move on a steeper angle as it is meant for 1x12 applications with 50 tooth + cassettes, while an Ultegra is more for 11-32 max normally.

This setup seems to function fairly normally in all gears, it's just that at the higher gear cogs the RD is a long ways from the cassette so doesn't get a firm influence on the chain for gear changes. The Archer's overshift settings helps with that though.