djb

I think this underlined part is a pretty realistic take on this whole topic. Properly setup brifters are super reliable (in general, touch wood) and frankly, I think most people wouldnt have the mechanical interest or skills to set up other shifters in the rare case that problems happen.

Tourist in MSN

I have been on one ACA self supported tour, one ACA van supported trip and two REI van supported trips in Europe, one van supported trip on the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands. None had a mechanic. On three of those five trips I ended up functioning as the mechanic as nobody else could fix some of the things that were problematic. So, do not get your hopes up if you go on one of those trips and have a mechanical. The ACA van supported trip had a bike stand, but I still needed to use my own tools as their tool collection was quite lacking. Fortunately I had everything I needed except one odd size spoke wrench that I lacked, someone else had one on a multitool that would work.


I occasionally hear of brifters crapping out but I also hear people saying they are super reliable. Maybe it just comes down to age of the brifters? That friend of mine that switched to bar ends when his rear brifter died, his was 10 years old or maybe older when it died. And I occasionally have seen posts on this forum that if you use some thin oil on your Shimano brifters every year, they can keep going like the energizer bunny.

Perhaps my concern is that some of my touring is far from any kind of help, which makes me more concerned about failures than most other bike tourists would have to be. I recall talking to a cyclist in the middle of Iceland that was worried about his chain, he had broken it four times and it was getting so short he was running low on gears. And on that same day I talked to another cyclist that had lost a couple bolts off of his bike and had used up his spare bolts, thus to make sure he did not lose any more he wrapped tape around every rack bolt on both his bike and his wifes bike so that it could not be lost if it came loose. (That story is why I now carry a tiny bottle of loctite in my spares bag on a tour.) And he explained to me that he had tried to help another cyclist that had a plastic ferrule disintegrate on a shifter outer housing cable, thus his outer housing was falling apart at the end causing shifting problems. These things always seem to happen at the worst possible times when you are far from help.

On the other hand, last month when I rode a brevet, a gal rode a fat bike on that brevet. Yup, she chose a fat bike to ride hundreds of kilometers on pavement for a brevet. And she beat my time (which is a bit embarrassing that I was slower with my 32mm tires than she was with a fat bike). And here is the most embarrassing part, her shifter started acting up and she often rode in higher gears than she wanted to ride in, and she still beat my time. So, maybe I am just a bit too concerned about a shifter going bad at an inopportune time as it certainly did not hurt her that much.

Happy Feet

Side bar:

Do you recall what type of tires she had or if they were knobby off road or street tread? I'm thinking of some more road centric ones for mine.

Tourist in MSN

I just remember how noisy they were, do not recall looking at the tread. But, noisy means bumpy tread, so I would say it was not a road tread.

djb

thats too funny about the fast fat biked lady. Good on her.

But yes, as you say, the most important aspect of this whole question is where you'll be touring and for how long. I knew with a certainty that I didnt want to set up my Troll with brifters, and went with the equivalent of bar ends.
But for lots of people, who dont ride their bikes thaaaat much, and even then maybe do a bike trip of a week or two or whatever on a bike in really good shape, the chances of a brifter problem are most likely very very low.
touch wood

staehpj1

I think the where thing may be the bigger factor. I can see an argument for either carrying some kind of spare or going with some kind of spare in some remote place in a third world country. Then again even mechanically simple stuff can break. In all of my touring I have had one shifter fail and strangely enough it was a down tube shifter, despite the fact that I have ridden far more touring miles with brifters. So even the simplest things are not guaranteed to never fail.

As far as how long you will tour. I see this factor the opposite way a lot of folks do.

I don't do really short tours, but I always figured the longer the tour the less of a big deal a day or more delay for a mechanical failure was. I've never done an overnight or weekend tour, but imagine a break down would pretty easily end the tour. When you get to a week to ten day tour that gets to be a little less true. When the tour is a few weeks long you start to be pretty unlikely to end the tour for a mechanical failure and more likely to find a way to continue even if it takes a lot of effort. On a multi month tour that has a specific goal it would seem most riders would go to some pretty extreme ends to finish a tour, maybe to the extent of searching high and low for parts and having them FedExed or possibly getting a different bike shipped to them if all else failed.

On my first TA I'd have definitely finished even if my bike and all of gear were stolen, so a broken brifter certainly wouldn't have stopped me. While I have not done week end trips, if I did I'd probably bail on a trip that short for a broken brifter if the hills were bad enough that it wasn't fun to ride with only one working brifter.

staehpj1

Reminds me of a ride I was on way back in the day when a dad on a MTB pulling a toddler in a trailer humbled some pretty fit riders (myself included) by staying with us on some super steep climbs. I think he eventually stopped and took a break, but he was pretty amazing.