Campy shifters and frayed/broken cables

[wasfast]

I had yet another instance a failing cable inside the shifter housing last night. I had bought a cable kit 6 months ago, noting that the shifting on my 2 yr old 11 spd chorus was not as crisp as it originally was. Pulling the cable showed several broken wires in the cable bundle. Thankfully it wasn't fully dead.

I've seen this now on 3 bikes with 11 spd that while ridden quite a bit, had issues in less than 2 yrs of use. The bend inside the housing of the wire appears to be no more than 10 spd by casual observance.

Do others experience this? The 2nd time this happened, I got to ride home on the smallest cog with a 15% grade in it......that was a walking event.

[ultraman6970]

My 1st suspect would be the cable spooler, campagnolo redesigned the cable spooler a few years ago. Cheap and easy to fix btw.

[macaroon]

What do you mean by "shifter housing"? The yellow/beige coloured piece of plastic with two slots in it that the inner cable runs through when exiting the shifter?

I always run my cable through the slot that lets the cable exit from "the rear" so it runs round the back of the handlebars, as I figure this makes a smoother curve.

[macaroon]

Something else I do is file down the ends of the cables to make them smaller, as in the past, I had one catch on the inside of the shifter body which resulted in poor shifting.

[wasfast]

The "issue" area isn't inside the spooler or ratcher mechanism. I'm talking about the area near the yellow/beige inserted piece. I do exit the cable out the back and along the side of the bar.

[ultraman6970]

If its at the exit of the cable then Im clueless... Never had a cable to just split into pieces inside of a campagnolo brifter ever.

[kramnnim]

Mine have been lasting at least 10k, if not a lot more.

[lhuerta]

I have consistently experienced cable splintering/fraying about every 4K miles (equivalent to my yearly average mileage) for as long as I have been using Campy ergo shifters, beginning in early 90s. My regular route is hilly/rolling and involves LOTS of shifting, so YMMV with regard to when/how often your cable frays. In other words, the cable fraying has nothing to do with how long ago you installed new cables, nor does it have anything to do with how many miles u logged, instead it has more to do with how often u shift (assuming cables have been installed correctly).

[kramnnim]

Yeah, I don’t shift a whole lot. Local friends with 6800 and 9000 levers have frayed cables much more often than I do, at least 4x.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by wasfast

I had yet another instance a failing cable inside the shifter housing last night. I had bought a cable kit 6 months ago, noting that the shifting on my 2 yr old 11 spd chorus was not as crisp as it originally was. Pulling the cable showed several broken wires in the cable bundle. Thankfully it wasn't fully dead.

I've seen this now on 3 bikes with 11 spd that while ridden quite a bit, had issues in less than 2 yrs of use. The bend inside the housing of the wire appears to be no more than 10 spd by casual observance.

Do others experience this? The 2nd time this happened, I got to ride home on the smallest cog with a 15% grade in it......that was a walking event.

?
Where exactly and in the same place each time? Which inner wires also.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by wasfast

The "issue" area isn't inside the spooler or ratcher mechanism. I'm talking about the area near the yellow/beige inserted piece. I do exit the cable out the back and along the side of the bar.

I put a wee bit of grease on that delrin ramp..and it could be the inner wire type you are using.

[dddd]

One thing about shift cable fraying that I never seem to read anything about has to do with how "tight" that the low-limit screw is adjusted, and to a lesser degree how ham-fistedly that the rider makes shifts up to the largest cog.

I would even say that perhaps the biggest setup mistake that I encounter with customer's bikes (serviced elsewhere, or as often by the bike's owner) is that the lo-limit screw isn't properly adjusted [I]after[I] the cable tension adjustment has been finalized.

It's probably down to a certain paranoia about the derailer possibly moving far enough inward to contact spokes or derail the chain to the inside, but I so often find an over-tight lo-limit screw to be causing premature cable fraying inside of the shifter. I know that this is the case, because after tensioning the new cable for best indexing, the lo-limit screw then needs to be backed out a bit. The evidence is still there.

With the cable properly tensioned with respect to the index shifting, the limit screw must allow some small bit of inward movement of the derailer when the chain is on the largest sprocket(!).
Without such free inward movement, the cable not only suffers tension overload with each shift to the largest cog, but literally with each pedal stroke as frame flex is conveyed to the cable's exact tension in real time.
So a cable that should last perhaps ~10k miles of normal use may instead suffer metal fatigue and begin to fray inside of the first 2k miles!

One frequent cause of such misadjustment has to do with any wheel-swapping that the rider does, after which they perhaps end up making a "small" tweak to the cable adjuster(s). Rarely it seems does the rider then follow up with a needed readjustment to the limit screw, since the adjustment seems so minor as when simply taking up slack due to normal cable housing compression (aka "cable stretch").

I should add that this sort of failure is definitely not brand-specific. Also, that the service interval of needed cable adjustment may be drastically shortened by an even slightly over-tight lo-limit screw.

Lastly, as this problem can occur with either the left or right shifter, Shimano's latest racing gruppos have incorporated rigid "upshift" (to largest sprocket) travel stops into the shift levers themselves, to limit the possible overload of the cable's tension as the largest cog or chainring position is selected.
And further, at least with their newest front derailers, there is no hi-limit screw at all! Instead, the "hi" screw is a booster screw that one tightens to give the derailer a greater outward throw for any given cable tension setting.