CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
So how easy/hard is it?
I have Sora STI on the Cotic but have got a set of new)ish) Tiagra to replace them. Is it easy to do the change over? Is there an online guide? Anything I should be aware of before I start like tightly coiled springs which might fly off to the other side of the garage and never be found again...
Cheers,
Dave C
Dave,
it's pretty easy to be honest from technical point of view but is a bit of a chore - the hardest bit is the retaping job.
First off I would undo the cables and remove them. You'll have remove the end caps off the cable (carefully so as not to crush/fray the cable) To do the brake cables, release them from the bolts on the caliper / whatever sort of brake you have, pull the lever in and the cable will push out the top of the lever. You can see the bullet if you pull your lever and peer inside the expose top.
Shifter cables a bit trickier (and I'd look this one up) but you have to put the shifter in a certain gear to expose the head of the shifter cable through a little hole on the outside face of the lever. You can then push it out and through. If it's in the wrong gear, the head won't be exposed and you won't get it through.
You'll then have to peel off all tape to the point where you have exposed the band that holds the shifter on. Remember/ mark where it is located. Undo the screw that holds the clamp on.
Put the new shifter on, reversing above process. Be careful if you are re-using the existing cable, if there's any kink or fray in it it can foul inside of shifter / cable outer and be hard to get through. Once they are through, lightly clamp them to their respective derailleur / brake and operate the shifter / pull brake lever to take up the slack. Then go about setting up the brakes and gears again.
Then do up the bar tape. That can be a pest.
The only bit that I found is likely to go a-wandering is the free-floating bolt head that retains the head of the brake cable. It's a little plastic and metal cylinder that is held on by magic, a bit of grease and mainly the tension of the cable. Once you take out the latter, it is want to stray, and takes tweezers and a delicate hand to re-position it.
There is no need to undo any of the screws or other part of the shifter. That's where things will go horribly wrong!
It is a LOT of faff for not really much benefit - unless you really hate the thumbshift on the Sora I'm not sure how much you will increase your user experience that much! Decision is yours of course!
I've done this a couple of times, I would recommend new inner cables, simply because it's quite often tricky to get the old ones back through, and if they're even slightly damaged/squashed it can end up adding a lot of friction to the line. But, you may as well try the old ones since they might be fine - just a note.
Re the gear cables, if you just pop off the rubber housing opposite where the gear outer enters the lever body, you can change gear until you see the head of the inner, at which point you just push it out (withdraw the outer and push the inner through at that point, is easiest). It's not tricky.
IMO the hardest part of the operation is getting the bar tape on nicely afterwards, FWIW.
DaveC, as well as the sage advice you have above, go to the Shimano website, where you'll find you can download a pdf of the instruction manual/sheet thingy that you would have got if they were new.
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts