How easy are dowwntube shifters and non-aero brake levers to fix ?

[mzjo]

With all the debate in another place about modern shifters and the difficulty of repairing, especially on a dark and rainy night, my ideas were brought up a bit short concerning downtube shifters. I was fitting an old pair of Sachs New Success dt levers to the Gitane (reason being the old stemhead shifters don't pull enough cable to cover eight sprockets and I now have an 8sp rear wheel to go on it). The Sachs levers have a lever design that hides the cable nipple inside the lever and lining up the cable and the hole can be a bit awkward if you aren't wearing the right specs. I ended up taking one off to see how it went, although that done the way was more obvious and the second one went  much more easily. Having suffered  already getting the cables into the CLB non-aero levers (I ended up taking them off the bars but this was at set-up and the bars weren't taped) I couldn't help making the reflection that at 2o'clock on a cold windy rainy night I would not much like to be replacing cables (which must be the most likely failure mode on this sort of equipment). 

Food for thought - just because the kit is simpler doesn't mean that you won't be up the proverbial creek if it decides to break at an inconvenient moment!!                                                           

[Kim]

Threading cables can be fiddly on anything (though there's a special place in hell for SRAM twist shifters).  As you say, it may be tricky in non-optimal conditions.  But I don't think anything cable-based is going to be immune to that, especially if you haven't had much practice to develop any special knack that may be involved.

The main roadside fettlability advantage of these simpler types of shifter is that if the cable breaks or severely frays at the nipple end, it's reasonably straightforward to get it out.  There's a secondary advantage in having the bend in the cable exposed so that (particularly with bar-ends) you may see or be poked in the finger by the first broken strand as a warning that it's starting to fray - greatly improving your chances of not having to sort it out at 2am in the rain.

Can't speak for brake levers - all my bikes with cable brakes use MTB-style levers, where again extracting a nipple with a frayed stub of cable requires little more than a bit of poking with a pokey thing, and everything's easy to get at.


Murphy's law applies, regardless.