Wow, thanks Deb. That was silly easy and its working great now.

I had the same experience w bad advice from LBSs. Last time this happened and I asked the guys at my LBS what kind of lubricant to buy, they sold me new brake cables. They said that modern cables come with a built in lubricant, and that applying more grease will just attract dirt, and when they fail you had to change the cables, housing, etc.

This one of the reasons I started to work on my own bikes. My cables look fine, my housing looks fine, the only problem was there was inadequate lubrication between them. It was great to learn I could do this without even unwrapping the bars. The trick was to push the cable up first, to get that bally thing pushed up enough to grip with the needle nose pliers. Then first I dripped the tri-flow down to get into the part still covered by housing, and then rubbed some pedros solid grease over the length of exposed cable, then I pushed it the other way and did the same thing to the cable exposed on the other side of the housing (I couldn't just remove it from the housing, cuz of the cable disconnects on my s/s coupled bike). I pushed it all back and forth a few times, and then secured it back in place and it works great again! It took all of five minutes to fix.