Cable wonkiness

[Owlie]

I tried the barrel adjusters today to address some of the derailleur problems I've been having. It worked, to a point.

For some reason, I now have a ton of slack in the front shifter cable (and therefore I can't shift into the middle or large chainring). I've tried loosening the bolt that holds the cable in place and manually pulling the cable taut, but there just isn't enough cable there. The same area of the cable (I marked it with a sharpie before I started) ends up at the screw every time. Yet there's still slack in the cable!

Any ideas?

[OakLeaf]

Do you have the shifter at the lowest gear position before you start?

[Owlie]

Do you have the shifter at the lowest gear position before you start?

Yes. I was using the directions in the repair book as a starting point (and proceeded to accomplish little more than getting grease all over the book. Horrifying!)

[OakLeaf]

Holding the cable with a pair of pliers? It can be hard to hold it taut with fingers while tightening the bolt. If you're going by the book, I assume you tightened the barrel adjusters all the way short before you started, also. (Make sure the pieces of the barrel adjuster are engaged - I've screwed them all the way apart before, and it can be a little tricky getting them back together.)

Also, a service manual without grease on the pages is no service manual at all.

[Owlie]

Thanks for the tip on pliers. Not that it did anything in this case, but made it much easier to grip!

The fact that I can keep turning the barrel adjusters clockwise (I assume that's "tight" because that's how everything else is) to no effect is a bit worrying. I don't think there's THAT much extra cable normally.

(Seriously, there's enough slack that I can touch the cable to the frame!)

[DebW]

Is the cable frayed? Look inside the shift lever. Is the housing frayed, wires sticking out of it, or the ferrule worn through? Could the cable anchor bolt on the deraulleur be stripped? Is the cable not running under the bottom bracket correctly?

[Owlie]

Holding the cable with a pair of pliers? It can be hard to hold it taut with fingers while tightening the bolt. If you're going by the book, I assume you tightened the barrel adjusters all the way short before you started, also. (Make sure the pieces of the barrel adjuster are engaged - I've screwed them all the way apart before, and it can be a little tricky getting them back together.)

Also, a service manual without grease on the pages is no service manual at all.

Uh...there may be a non-zero chance that I've partly unscrewed the barrel adjuster, and it isn't sitting in its threads properly...

[Sky King]

ok Owlie, I want an update on the cable saga!

[laura*]

Yet there's still slack in the cable!

A while back at the bike co-op, there was a patron who was installing brand new low-end Shimano brifters. One of them just wasn't shifting right. It turned out that the head of the cable had popped out of it's little pocket in the brifter. This likely happened while the cable was loosened from the derailleur - the slack traveled up the cable, the head disengaged, and the brifter design kept the cable from self reseating. The solution was to take a little cover off of the brifter, reach in and reseat the cable, and then keep some tension on the cable until it was clamped to the derailleur.