While modern Shimano 105, Ultegra and DuraAce shifters route the shift cables under the handlebar tape, some other Shimano shifters route the cables perpendicular to the lever. This cable routing can be problematic if you want to mount a large handlebar bag to a bike with Shimano Sora or similar shifters. A customer had this problem today, but I knew about the trick of using a V-brake noodle to put the right bend in the right place to make things work. The Crazy Randonneur had a great post on this subject just about a month ago and you can read that at:
http://thecrazyrandonneur.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/how-to-have-a-large-handlebar-bag-with-sti-shifters/
Below are a couple of pictures of the bike I worked on today. A couple of V-Brake noodles and a bit of cable trimming and the shifters are now peacefully coexisting with the big handlebar bag.
Keep 'em rolling,
Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson
Issaquah WA USA
8 comments:
This is definitely a good, not to mention tidy, fix for Shimano shifters with that routing. The shop I used to work at helped out a lot of randonneurs and tourists with this trick.
It works very well, with little to no change in shifting.
The noodles almost look like they were made for it.
Brilliant Kent.
I know little about wrenching bikes, but know I have drunken many beers and cursed our Holy Father(forgive me) many times attempting to solve similar problems with the mismatched hodgepodge of crap I have lurking inside the designated Rubbermaid in the shed.
Thanks for figuring this one out.
Cheers and I am looking forward to another ride,
Cheers,
Matt
Great idea. I am going to try a hack version of that for the short term: run cord from and back under the brake hoods, to bend the cable out of the way of a bag.
I've set up a few bikes this way with no issues until the last one. I couldn't get the bike to stop ghost shifting on rough roads and sharp bumps such as curbs. After installing fresh cables and housing with no success, I finally removed the noodle and it stopped happening. My guess is that, since the noodle is made for the fatter brake cable, there is just a tiny bit of play in there which can lead to sloppy shifting under heavy vibration.
Thanks Kent!
One thing I neglected to mention is that it looks good when the bag is off the bike too. I had thought it would look a little strange, but to me it looks great.
Another thing is the noodles shift and change direction as I turn its, the cable go up and down as they go to either side of the bag. Just a nice little aesthetic bonus.
Ty
I wonder if you could use the noodles that have built-in adjuster barrels (usually used when connecting v-brakes to levers that don't have barrel adjusters)... that way, you'd have a handy way to adjust indexing on the fly, assuming you didn't already have adjusters at the downtube stops, of course.
Either way, a nifty hack -- not the first time I've seen it, but I'm impressed by the ingenuity every time I do.
V-brake noodles may be more fun than V-brakes. I'm using a noodle to feed cable to a Universal side pull brake behind the fork crown of an upright trike. I ditched the STI on my tandem for bar-ends. Otherwise, I'd be running noodles to get around my Arkel Big Bar bag.
I put heat shrink on the end that goes into the brifter so that it'll fit tight enough when you pull the slack out that it won't rotate.
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