Full set of gear and brake cables on the Streetmachine. This is fairly involved, and I'd been putting it off all winter in the hope I could get past the worst of the shite weather before putting nice new ones on, but the front gear cable frayed and started stabbing me in the finger on yesterday's ride, which forced the issue.
Lessons learned:
- Dremel good for trimming brake cable outer neatly, but wire cutters with a bit of sacrificial inner in place are better for gear cable outer. The heat of grinding will make a mess of the outer plastic, hindering ferrule attachment.
- Basically zero schmoo had accumulated in the brake cables, suggesting that my experiment with covering the slot on the front of the (vertically oriented) MTB lever with tape to keep the rain out is surprisingly effective.
- I hadn't touched the parking brake (V-brake on a friction thumb-shifter) cable for years, on the basis it worked fine and was non-critical if it failed. On inspection, it turned out that it was in similarly good condition, with no evidence of fraying in the shifter. I suspect the weakest link may be the noodle.
- About a year ago, as I wasn't going anywhere interesting due to the pandemic, I'd replaced a fraying front gear cable inner with one of my accidentally purchase galvanised ones. Predictably, this was a manky rusty mess. But it still worked fine, presumably because I'd used brake cable outer (I bought a 50m roll some years back, and it's a friction shifter) which gave it a bit more room to move.
- I'd installed an oiler in the middle of the loop of rear gear cable, in an attempt to provide a drainage route for accumulated water. All this really seemed to achieve was another set of ends to bed-in and make the indexing vague. Didn't reinstall it, as I've got a oil port in the barrel adjuster, and have basically resigned myself to replacing this entire run whenever I can't get the indexing to behave, which is approximately once a year.