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.
Mark, was the black tape placed over the bolt head at the factory or would this have been done by Calfee? Just curious!
Factory…
Calfee was frame only back in 2007. I did the build.
I just had the same issue on my 2012 Cannondale RT2 (Ultegra shifters). Make sure to fully tighten this bolt and not get tempted to leave it a bit loose to keep shifting more crispy. That bolt seems to loosen very easily.
…also, the shifter only blocks up under tension when this bolt is loose. Once and as long as tension is released you can shift down again