Bike Maintenance – Re-routing gear cables

The rear gears on my Commencal haven’t been great for a while now. There’s been quite a bit of friction on downshifts and changing up through the gears has been a nightmare. Basically the cable hasn’t been slipping though on its own and I’ve been having to reach down and actually give the bare cable under the downtube a little tug. Not ideal when bumping over rocks and roots in the dark, but I just hadn’t got around to fixing it. Really I should have changed the cables when I rebuilt the bike on its new frame recently, but I didn’t.

I eventually got around to fixing this today by:

1. Getting new cables
I ‘splashed out’ on a decent set of quality cables from Goodridge.

2. Re-routing the cables
I re-routed the cables slightly to remove a couple of fairly tight bends that were in them before. They now take a slightly more direct route and hopefully there’ll be less friction. In the photo below (the bike is upside down in case you couldn’t tell!) you can see that I haven’t routed the cable through the bottom cable stop on the downtube so that it takes a straighter line into the swing arm. Before it used to loop down and around past the main pivot which was quite a tight bend.

Fewer Kinks

Fewer Kinks

3. Cable outer throughout
Rather than have a bit of cable outer between the shifter and the cable stop on the downtube and then bare cable along the downtube I decided to use a continuous piece of cable outer from the shifters right through to the cable stop on the derailleur. Hopefully this will prevent dirt and grime getting in to the cable quite so much and will reduce friction too.

Of course, this meant that I can no longer thread the cable through the cable stops (at least not without drilling out the closed ends -which I wasn’t prepared to do) so instead I cable tied it to the cable stops on the other side of the downtube. This actually works out better as it means there is less of a kink to get out and around the head tube too.

Down Tube Cabling

Down Tube Cabling

I fitted them today and immediately everything felt 100 times better. Super slick, easy gear changes both up and down the cassette. It has transformed the bike, the gears feel like new. The real test will be tomorrow though when I try them out at Penmachno in the rain and throw the best of Welsh mud at them. I doubt they’ll feel quite so smooth after that, but we’ll see.

I just need to bleed the brakes and get some new pedals and the bike will feel like new again. I might even treat the shock and forks to a full service soon.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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