Originally Posted by
Random11
I once thought that one advantage of mechanical shifters is that you don't have to be concerned about your battery dying. But yesterday I had a shifter cable break. It's the second time I've had this happen on a bike I've had less than three years. So, that advantage isn't so much of an advantage after all. A cable break prevents you from shifting almost as much as a dead battery does for electronic shifters. (Only one cable breaks at a time, so some limited shifting is possible.) Yesterday, it was the cable to my front derailleur. Previously, the cable to the rear derailleur broke. This is far from a tragedy, of course, and I was able to complete my ride, albeit at reduced speed because I was stuck in my small chainring. It got me to thinking that it might be worthwhile to change the cables periodically before they break. Does anyone do this? I can manage a broken shifter cable every so often, but I was wondering if others replace the cables as preventive maintenance.
I've had cables start to fray, but they always give me plenty of warning (my rear shifter cable lasts ~1 year before the fraying at the shifter starts to affect shifting and stray strands start to poke my fingers). I keep a spare on hand and can thread the new one in without disturbing the housing or the bar tape - takes maybe 15 min to replace the cable and tweak the indexing. Once I had a set of Gore Ride-On cables that worked perfectly for ~10 years, and I only replaced them because I thought it was "about time", not because they were malfunctioning. That was a mistake - I bet if I hadn't touched them, they'd have worked for another 10 years.