Help! - snapped real derailleur cable

FrankGrimes

So I finally got round to cycling into work today and halfway here the poxy rear derailleur cable snapped right where it goes into the brake/shifter (DuraAce model from 3 years ago) - i.e. on the front of the bike, not actually where the cable joins the derailleur at the back. Is that a fairly handy one to sort out or is it complicated?

If I bring it down to Joe Daly’s at lunch do you reckon they could do it on the spot or that if I buy the cable I could do it on the spot? Any tips or suggestions of other bike shops (I work in Sandyford) to try are much appreciated. Tonight was to be my final mountains spin before the Wicklow 200 and I'm woefully undertrained as it is so could really do with getting this sorted ASAP (it's stuck in the 11-tooth cog at the moment).

Thanks.

bcmf

Hard to say. I believe NiceOneTom dismantled a DA not so long ago as it had the same problem and I dismantled an Ultegra with the same prob. Its time consuming and awkard and a lot of patience needed.

oflahero

Doesn't Joe Daly's still close for lunch? If you can't get there before 1 or after 2, there's both FitzCycles and Hollingsworth on the Lower Kilmacud Rd.

seamus

Yeah hard to say without looking at it. You could get lucky and there's enough cable there to push the head out. Or you could spend an hour poking around with a paperclip and a snipe-nosed pliers before realising that you have to strip the shifter down.

Replacing the cable is a ten-minute job.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for the heads-up oflahero - Joe Daly's does close for lunch (which was a surprise as I thought that'd be a good time for trade), so thanks to your post I got down there before 12.30. They're swamped with pre-Wicklow 200 maintenance and repair jobs so couldn't look at it until tomorrow, but were careful to say they couldn't guarantee they could fix it given the risk of internal damage/not gettign the cable anchor out.

As I was hoping to get out tonight, I took it down to the UCD bike shop and have to say the guy there was very proactive, tried to sort it on the spot and then agreed to look into it this afternoon when it became clear there was something stuck in the shifter. He called back this afternoon saying when he opened up the shifter it looked damaged inside and wasn't shifting the full range. He said another guy more familiar with those shifters would look at it tomorrow and then call me back.

At this stage I'm reckoning a replacement shifter is the most likely outcome. Even online they seem to run to very large amounts so I reckon it's gonna cost me a fair whack at retail here. Going for DuraAce would seem to cost over €350 as you have to buy the pair. It'd be a pity to have to downgrade components but that's a whole chunk of change, would Ultegra be a good compromise?

GTDolanator

so let me get this straight,cable snaps inside the brake/gear hood now hole unit is shagged?

how?

FrankGrimes

Yeh that's pretty much it. I was riding along at speed on a slight incline at the time and didn't realise that the cable had snapped (it was still sitting in the housing), I just thought cable tension had loosened so I turned the screw on the gear cable below the downtube a few times and tried changing the gears up and down a few times. I hadn't thought there might be a round piece of metal floating around in there. It is a bit odd alright, but I can understand if the metal ball was being pressed into the inner workings churning it up a bit and doing damage.

The guy in the UCD bike shop strikes me as a decent guy and was not out to do me to make a sale - it was me that brought up the possibility of buying replacements but he said he hoped it wouldn't come to that and that this other guy looking at it tomorrow was more experienced with shifter inner workings to hopefully could figure it out. Fingers crossed.

FrankGrimes

Thankfully this worked out very well in the end: took a few hours but the UCD bike shop were able to take the shifter fully apart and found a surprisingly large lump of cable and cable anchor had worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the shifter and when they took that out it's now back working fine. That's one hefty bill avoided!