Nexus 8 speed shifter

[Tim Hall]

Mrs. Hall's bike has a Nexus 8 speed hub and SL-8S20 shifter.  For various reasons the shifter needs replacing.  Is there any difference between the SL-8S20 and SL-8S30?  Rose have the latter for eight quid or so but not the former.

[Wowbagger]

I see that Tm's request met with a deafening response.

I'm hoping to give a bike to a friend. It's a Ridgeback Nexus 8-speed which I bought new about 16 years ago for my daughter, but she rode it very little. It has the thumb shifter, but neither button is having any effect. The cable is clean and moves freely - I have proved this by simply grabbing hold of the outer and pulling it away from the shifter.

The bike has been sitting unused in my garage for almost all of its life. This is the type of shifter in question.

Has anyone worked on one of these? Have any useful tips? Thanks in advance.

[Kim]

I don't know the nexus one specifically, but a standard failure mode of trigger shifters is the ratchet gumming up and failing to engage.  Flushing the mechanism with GT-85 or equivalent may prove fruitful, if temporary - at Torslanda's recommendation it would sort the ones on my Dawes out for six months or so at a time, at which point they'd need re-doing.  This seemed like a reasonable trade-off against the faff of dismantling and re-greasing something that's clearly bursting with pingfuckits.

[Wowbagger]

Bugger. I've dismantled it. I know I have all the parts, and I know the order I got them out in, but I'm buggered if I can work out how to get them back together. I think the simplest soution is to buy this:

[Paul H]

All the 8 speed shifters work with all the 8 speed hubs, but at some point Shimano reversed the direction of pull (Which might have been the difference in the original question) I doesn't really matter, other than the numbers being the wrong way, but it can catch you out when the change isn't as expected.