Remember "House?"

 In the medical drama "House," caustic genius Dr. Gregory House diagnosed mysterious afflictions that suddenly struck down the patient of the week, for eight seasons of often nauseating entertainment. The nasty genius used his mega mind, extensive education, and long experience to slice through the confusion and bring us the answer.

After the previous medical drama ER made patient -- and even doctor -- survival far less likely, viewers were trained not to expect a happy ending. House delivered pretty often, but sometimes the patient died. Also, House would be wrong several times in the episode before delivering the right diagnosis within a few minutes of the end. After you watch a few, you realize that early certainties never pan out. "Do this!" House snaps at his team. We look at the clock and go, "Nah, that ain't it."

Without all of the good-looking actors, life and death stakes, and medical bills that would bankrupt a medium sized city, bike repair has become like episode after episode of House. A patient comes in with weird symptoms or what looks like a simple problem at first. We diagnose and treat. It fails. We try something else. Thing is, no one has bike medical insurance, so we the greasy healers are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money on these false starts.

Bike shops have no medical associations in which we share our experiences and publish papers in a journal. We don't know what other mechanics are doing. Online videos show either idealized versions of various procedures or selected experiences of individuals who may be amateurs and inexperienced. And if the video doesn't cover the exact model in the exact year that you're dealing with, the information might not help at all. On top of that, who has time to spend hours trolling through search results in hope of finding a tutorial that might not even be out there.

Forums may yield some useful knowledge, but are just as likely to attract experienced misinformation or loud, confident, and wrong newbies. You have to sift carefully to find cases that fit what's in front of you on your work stand.

The manufacturers really don't care if you can fix anything. They just want you to buy it. Ancestral sources like Sutherland's and Sheldon Brown can't keep up. We're thrown back on our experience and education -- such as it may be -- to analyze the problem.

With every added cog in the cassette, mechanical shifting gets more and more temperamental. As the manufacturers abandon what used to be the state of the art, replacement parts for that number of speeds are made more cheaply. This includes shifters and derailleurs. You had fancy ten-speed when it was the best? You're just part of the rabble now. Eleven speed is rapidly going the same way.

Any repair could turn into a frustrating mystery these days. I like a challenge, but most of this crap is just an affront. Parts are disappearing for the old, reliable, simple bikes, while tech support barely exists for the new, throwaway bikes. I get it: to a racer, the entire bike is as consumable as chains, tires, and tubes used to be. As long ago as the 1980s, racing was already turning into a massive science experiment. It has only gotten more so. Rider and machine need a complex support system to eke out those hundredths of a second per kilometer.

Advancements in racing technology through the 1970s improved quality for all riders, because we all used similar mechanisms, shaped slightly differently for variations like racing versus touring, and, later mountain biking. As disciplines diverged, particularly off-road, there was a lot less cross-pollination.

People here used to complain from time to time about the level of detail I would go into, but less time was wasted diving right in as opposed to dithering around trying to figure out how to avoid it. Lately, though, it seems that diving in doesn't assure solid results. Too many things have to work too perfectly together.

The road bike that's giving me fits right now was built on a bare frame in 2017. The owner rides hard. He raced a couple of short seasons, mostly just a nearby training series, but it's a competitive series. He rides with people who never go easy. Over the years, we have replaced gear cables and housings as necessary to restore precise shifting, along with chains and cassettes. This time, though, I can't get it to behave.

The brifter seemed to be worn out. It needed too much lever travel to engage, which meant that it didn't have enough left to climb to the low gear cog. I changed the brifter. It was crisper, but still did not have the reach. The chain gauged pretty new. We'd already changed all cables and housings with tried and true 5mm. The bottom bracket cable guide can't be removed because the bolt that threads into an insert in the BB is rusted in, and the insert itself is broken loose from the bottom bracket shell. It's been that way for years. It shouldn't matter as long as the guide stays in position. Cable tension should hold it.

I rigged a brifter in parallel, using full-length housing, to test the derailleur itself. It shifts the full range. So something in the cable system is eating lever travel. I can see motion where the cable housing enters the upper end of the downtube. There's a bit more waggle where the housing exits the chainstay near the derailleur. Is that enough to cause the problem? Parts are all original, and very simple. But the hole in the downtube could be worn. After all this, is the answer something simultaneously stupid and difficult?

Possibilities on the whiteboard: Maybe I should drill out the frame and run full-length housing. That's a one-way trip, though. How about using carbon-compatible epoxy to shim up the frame hole? But I don't want to glue the cable stop into the frame. That might make future cable changes even more time consuming.

I tried every combination of cable housing, including 4mm, 5mm, and mixing widths in case the flex characteristics of the 4mm handled the bends better than the 5mm we can get now. I'm happy to say that 4mm did nothing to help. Eventually, I put on a new brifter, new cassette, and the 5mm housing we had installed first when we thought it would be the routine repair we had completed successfully several times over the bike's life. I got it to hit every gear from the 39, and every gear but the Ned -- the full cross 53-28 -- from the big ring.

Given the option of taking the bike with the gears we could get or making permanent modifications to install full-length housing, the rider opted to take the bike as it is. He even said that it hadn't been getting the Ned for a while, and he was fine with that. We'll see how things go.

Nothing is a sure cure anymore. Every fix is temporary. Who needs another metaphor for life when we just want reliable machinery? I hop on my primitive bike, day after day, and just go. I can change a cable on the side of the road in about 15 leisurely minutes. If I get a flat, I put in a new inner tube, pump it up, and ride on.

And on to the next dream...

 After finishing the e-bike stretch cruiser it was time to replace the shifters and crank on a beautiful late-1990s Dean. The bike might actually date from right after the turn of the century. We've been seeing it in the workshop nearly every spring or summer for a long time. I built those wheels more than ten years ago. Maybe so long ago that we looked up parts in a printed catalog and placed orders by phone.

The picture above shows the bike after its recent changes. Originally, it had a Campagnolo Chorus crank, Record 10-speed brifters, and Centaur derailleurs. I vaguely recall that we had already upgraded it from 9-speed to ten-speed by the turn of the century, but we did work on a number of Campy-equipped bikes. Campagnolo actually provided instructions for changing some internal parts in a brifter to change the number of speeds. And, of course, the internals were completely repairable. But the shifter bodies and so many internal parts on this bike were now so worn that repair would have cost a lot more than a new set of brifters.

A lot of years had passed, but Campagnolo had always been the leader in backwards compatibility. You can buy quite a few parts for a 25-year-old shifter, although some of them are being phased out. During that 25 years, the parts fit models that spanned more than eight years, which is phenomenal in the post-Shimano era of technological hyperactivity.

The rider wanted lower gearing than the 53-42 chainrings on his existing crankset. Campy's 135mm bolt circle limits how small a ring you can fit, and they have to match that proprietary bolt pattern. Back when Campy's BCD was 144, other manufacturers copied it. Then Shimano and the Japanese makers brought in the 130 bolt circle diameter, and the industry shifted to that. This meant that you could put on the 53-39 combination that became the de facto standard for road cranks for years. You could even get a 38 for the inner ring, but few did.

When compact road cranks came in, they used the 110mm BCD that mountain bike chainrings were using. Mountain bikes still used triple chainrings. Road compact cranks were designed for just two rings up front. While the young and strong would combine the new little 50-tooth big ring with an 11-tooth cog for the hardest one on the cassette, the 50-34 combination that was most common served as sort of a secret granny gear for riders who were starting to feel a little faded as age took its toll.

So many years had passed before the owner of the Dean felt the need to gear down that a nice compact double for ten-speed was tricky to find. I also recommended trying to match the aesthetic of the old steel frame rather than sticking some aerospace monstrosity on there. I suggested, and he agreed, to get a Velo Orange Grand Cru Drillium crankset. It was actually a little more retro than the bike, but it's also fairly affordable and distinctive compared to the monotonous hellscape of soulless modern componentry.

It's actually made by IRD. But Velo Orange has their Grand Cru badge applied to it, and they deserve support for being such a friend to the retro rider.

The owner dropped the bike off in late March, 2024. I was able to get the brifters and bottom bracket right away. The crank was shown as out of stock for a month or so. The customer was willing to wait. That ETA got kicked down the road a month or two at a time, all the way to the end of the year. We nearly lost the job entirely, but I had contacted Velo Orange directly by that time, to confirm that they were still going to have the cranks at all. We got the customer to hang on. The crank finally arrived a week or two ago. We were still in ski mode, so I didn't start the job right away. We were also buried in the stretch cruiser project, which had been plagued with its own spec problems, but those had resolved more quickly.

As I dug into the Dean, I discovered that the slop in the shifters had been masking slop in the derailleurs. They were very floppy. That led me to look at what we could get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs.

Nothing. That's what we can get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs. Not a zippin' thing. Zippity doodah. Zilch. Nada. Campagnolo has abandoned their faithful long-term customers actually worse than Shimano. Shimano at least still makes some 10-speed road derailleurs for mechanical shifting, with brifters to match, for those who are addicted. For the friction shifters, the truly free, we can buy whatever derailleur we like the looks of and can afford. But for the brifter-dependent, the company that launched the industry into technofascism still has a little lifeline hanging out for the laggards still nursing their older stuff.

Funny: fascism was actually invented in Italy, and the Italian company was the slowest to adopt technofascism. But they're racing to catch up now. Be sure to shell out massive bucks for their 12-speed electronic stuff. It's kind of nice to see them back to duking it out for pro team spec, but the game has no soul anymore, so what are we really winning?

Way way back, in the 1970s and early 1980s, you could actually get every part of a Campagnolo derailleur, separately, to replace what might have gotten bent or cracked in a crash or a workshop mishap. It was treacherously easy to strip the threads on a front derailleur swing arm when tightening the cable anchor bolt. Good thing you could buy just the arm, install it, and pledge to use a lighter touch after that. You could also crack the clamp band, tightening the derailleur on the seat tube. Again: press the rivet out, replace the band, put on the new one and be more sensitive, you clod. Do you caress your lover with those awkward, loutish hands?

Well yes, yes I did, which explains my long spells of monkish solitude, but anyway... You can't get parts to rebuild a derailleur anymore. Long gone, though I do recall seeing them as late as the early 21st Century. I'll have to dig into my archive of Quality catalogs. QBP's print catalogs used to provide such complete tech information that we could figure out a lot of repairs and compatibility puzzles just from what they included about each product.

I had recommended that the customer stick with Campy because of their legendary durability and product support. Seems like I should have investigated them a little more deeply before charging ahead with this job. The customer and I were both trying to extend the life of existing parts rather than junk stuff and start over. Now, if he isn't satisfied with how this thing shifts, we have no option that doesn't cost him a chunk of change to take a different tack.

These shifters seem less substantial than they used to be, and the upshift thumb lever impedes removing the rubber hood to mount the brifter or run cables.

They also only fit 4mm shift cable housing, which means that we can't fit them with the easier-running 5mm which cures so many shifting problems.

Just like Shimano, Campy declares that their shifting systems and drive trains have to be completely matched, 11-speed with 11-speed, 12-speed with 12-speed, end to end. While I would be inclined to test them, trying to graft in 11-speed derailleurs with these 10-speed brifters, the lowest priced front derailleur retails for about $60, and they don't even list an 11-speed rear derailleur. So then we're experimenting with a 12-speed rear derailleur costing more than $200. Or we go on the hunt for good used, and new old stock.

If we talk him into friction barcons, he either eats the cost of the 10-speed brifters and buys some nice brake levers on top of the barcon price, or he uses the brifters as brake levers only, which looks kind of weird and accentuates our defeat at the hands of the technofascists. And all of this is just so that we can graft in whatever derailleurs he wants to try. Whatever derailleurs he wants to try includes pretty much anything on the market if he shifts in friction. They just have to have the gear range and chain capacity to match what he has. And friction shifters will be much more forgiving of the slop in the old derailleurs. He could just keep running those until they totally flop off.

I'm insanely loyal to old machines that I've grown to love. Aided by my own mechanical knowledge, friction shifters, and access to parts, I will keep my own stuff going for decades. I provide the same service to any customers or friends who want to cultivate and maintain the ancestral riding skills. It bums me out deeply when a customer decides to euthanize an old bike because they fall for the lure of the new and exotic, or just decide that something old isn't worth spending money on. I can't afford to rescue any of them, let alone all of them. And I always feel guilty if my enthusiasm for bike immortality and persistence in the face of a challenge leaves them with a result that they're not delighted with.

The industry makes it increasingly hard. Any of us interested in the deathless bike need to pay constant attention to keep track of something that might have been replaceable that has now turned into a vital organ to be preserved. Friction shifting can cover a lot of situations, but it can't work around systems that the industry completely abandons, like certain chainring sizes, or cassettes for proprietary freehub bodies. I'm looking at you again, Campy. While it's contemptible on one level that the entire rest of the industry adopted Shimano's Hyperglide spline pattern, it does create a de facto cassette standard that makes mix and match a lot easier.

I do have a Campy-equipped carcass in the shop basement that might yield donor organs, but it might be 9- or even 8-speed. It's that old. I have defended it against many a clutter purge over the years. Vindication would be sweet. I'm not into losing to the industry and the throwaway mentality.

Brifters are the low flow toilets of gear shifting

Riders frequently complain to me that they "push the shift lever and nothing happens." While there are multiple potential causes for this symptom, the inherent design of index-only shifters leads less experienced riders to suspect a malfunction.

Index shifters were designed by people who know very well how derailleurs work, to make shifting easy for people who don't know how derailleurs work. The plan went wrong because a rider benefits a great deal from knowing what the shifter is supposed to accomplish, and now whole generations of riders have never experienced friction shifting or lever-type shifting of any kind. They just learn how to push things to make the bike pedal easier or harder. It's magic. Don't ask. When it doesn't work, they ask a friend, or look at a YouTube video, or, as a total last resort, go to an actual bike shop to speak to someone they hope will know. Some of us do. Most of the time, these efforts lead eventually to a working bike, but probably not to an understanding of what it was trying to do in the first place.

Once cable-operated derailleurs were common, and the general configuration was basically standardized, there followed a couple of decades in which the derailleur-gear rider would haul back or push forward on a lever held in place by a set screw, to make the derailleur -- front or rear -- move laterally to place the chain in line with the desired gear combination. Even the most casual rider would figure out eventually that the lever pulled the cable and the cable pulled the doohickey that made the chain move. They might ride with the chain rubbing on the front derailleur cage until it wore through, but they could at least shift well enough to get around. If it didn't shift, pull farther and harder. There was an obvious correlation between lever movement and derailleur movement.

Given that not everyone has a good innate sense of spatial relations, companies did try to simplify the biomechanics. An example would be Suntour's notorious backwards-acting front derailleurs of the 1970s. Presaging Shimano's horrible Rapid Rise rear derailleurs, Suntour applied the principle to front derailleurs, so that the rider would push or pull the shift levers in the same direction, rather than opposite directions. The resulting devices not only shifted like crap, they engendered even more confusion in a world where the majority of derailleurs did not operate that way. Suntour also had a set of downtube shifters that bolted to a special mount. It slid up or down as the rear shifter was moved, to automatically trim the front derailleur. I missed Suntour when they went under in the 1990s, but remembering stuff like this makes me wonder why I did. I focused on the nice things they made. The Japanese component companies were always masters of the mixed blessing.

With any return-to-center shifting system, whether it's under-bar or brifter or barcon, the shifting movement has to include the degree of overshift any derailleur system needs in order to move the chain to the next cog or chainring. The derailleur has to travel a little "too far" and then settle back, to displace the chain from the gear it's on and climb or drop to the new selection. This is particularly true when moving the chain from a smaller diameter cog or ring to a larger diameter cog or ring. You have to push the chain up and make sure it gets a grip. Dropping the chain to a smaller diameter takes little or no overshift, because gravity is helping you. If you're unfortunate enough to have Shimano's Rapid Rise, then very little helps you, either way. Get rid of it as soon as you can, and avoid it like norovirus in the future.

When everything in a drive train is new, the system usually functions unobtrusively if it was properly set up and adjusted. But the more cogs you cram into the cassette, the more sensitive the shifting systems become. It all depends on the balance between cable tension and the power of the derailleur return springs. When things get dirty and worn, that balance gets harder to maintain. Buy a new bike! (A public service announcement from The Bike Industry). This is when you get the low-flow toilet syndrome.

You've probably become familiar with low flow toilets, given their proliferation. In the olden days, when toilets sent enough water down to flush a dead guinea pig with one pull, you could push the lever and walk away, confident in most cases that no leering zombie of a turd would be lying in wait when you opened the lid again. And no bloated, floating carcass of a guinea pig, for that matter. With a low flow toilet, you have to push and hold the lever until all the flushing noises have completed their cycle if you want to be somewhat sure that  everything has left the bowl. And forget entirely about guinea pigs, or even smaller rodents. 

With index-only systems, riders accustomed to other push-button devices in their lives just push to the click and expect the device to do the rest.  This isn’t even entirely true of electronic shifting systems, let alone cable-operated systems.

For a cable system to operate with click-and-forget precision on the trip from smaller diameter to larger diameter, cable tension has to be high.  If it’s too high, the derailleurs won’t want to move far enough the other way. Some systems currently in use already require ridiculously high tension. At their showroom best they might shift with something close to click-and-forget precision. Gradually, that will erode. A rider usually evolves with it, learning to push the lever fully past the click, and stay on it a little longer and a little longer.  Eventually, the lag becomes too obvious to ignore.

Actual malfunctions will also show up as slow shifting in their early stages. These malfunctions include cables fraying inside the brifter and fraying inside the frame, if you have internal cable routing. Good luck finding a high end bike these days that doesn’t have internal cable routing. Of course you want it! Housing failure will also cause sluggish shifts. If the linear wires are failing at the end that plugs into the brifter, they can also burrow into the brains of the shift mechanism and cause damage.

Fully enclosed cables, with a continuous piece of housing from the shifter to the derailleur, will require a whole new length of housing  just to cure a bit of fraying at the end, unless the housing was cut a bit long to begin with. Using a junction ferrule, you can sometimes add in a section, but every joint is a potential source of slop that can cause inaccurate shifting. You have to have room to make the connection and still get a smooth line for the cable to flow more or less unimpeded. Of course the currently fashionable and largely mandatory 4mm housing is a built-in impediment, but that’s just more value added by  the bike industry.