Shifter Update

As you may recall, when I last wrote we’d finished a very nice tandem ride from the house riding our Calfee as a 10-speed after the shifter for the front derailleur suddenly stopped working.

Back at the house I was able to get everything working again after partially removing the derailleur cable and, for good measure, washed the internal parts with a little silicone spray and then blew everything out with some compressed air.

Before we headed off for a 25-mile ride from the house on Friday I decided to remove the lever and check the torque on the bolt that runs through the shifting cogs and springs inside the lever.

When I initially removed the lever and looked at the underside of the lever body I didn’t see the bolt head that I expected to be there.

The only bright bit of metal was the female bolt that mates the lever to the handlebar clamp post. However, as I looked a bit more closely at the lever body I noticed that it looked like there was a black cover or piece of black tape and son-of-a-gun, the bolt head I was looking for was hidden under that tape.

 

With the tape removed I inserted a 2.5mm allen head wrench in the bolt head and guess what: no torque! It wasn’t falling out of the housing, but there wasn’t any load on the bolt. I applied what seemed to be an appropriate amount of torque with the very short wrench and then checked the shifter function: it was vastly improved. Back went the tape and in about 15 minutes the lever was back in place, the bars were re-wrapped and we were ready to ride. The shifting on the ride was fully restored.

 

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