diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
index 25cf3d5fc..dc058976b 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib/spiders/crawl.py
@@ -92,7 +92,7 @@ class CrawlSpider(BaseSpider):
             for link in links:
                 r = Request(url=link.url)
                 r.meta['link_text'] = link.text
-                r.append_callback(self._response_downloaded, rule.callback, cb_kwargs=rule.cb_kwargs, follow=rule.follow)
+                r.deferred.addCallback(self._response_downloaded, rule.callback, cb_kwargs=rule.cb_kwargs, follow=rule.follow)
                 requests.append(r)
         return requests
 
diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/http/request.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/http/request.py
index 444ef0861..07d060e47 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/http/request.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/http/request.py
@@ -36,11 +36,6 @@ class Request(object):
         self.meta = {} if meta is None else dict(meta)
         self.cache = {}
         
-    def append_callback(self, callback, *args, **kwargs):
-        if isinstance(callback, defer.Deferred):
-            return chain_deferred(self.deferred, callback)
-        return self.deferred.addCallback(callback, *args, **kwargs)
-
     def set_url(self, url):
         assert isinstance(url, basestring), \
             'Request url argument must be str or unicode, got %s:' % type(url).__name__