Will It Shift? Part 1

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, allegedly winter is coming. I try not to get my hopes up down here in Detroit as winters are rarely the snowy beauties that I remember as a kid [I think the climate might be changing?], but nevertheless I figured it was time to put the REEB in snow mode.

When it comes to the bikes in our household there’s a bit of an order of operations, or put differently, a Hierarchy Of Jank. My wife doesn’t get down with friction shifting, which generally means the bodges and jank are kept to a minimum with her bikes. That being said, stay tuned for the next parts of Will It Shift? to highlight some indexed madness I have pulled off with her bikes.

Also towards the top of the hierarchy is my Starling Murmur, which I more or less refer to as my Super Bike. It doesn’t have any wireless anything, or Kashima stanchions, but it is my highest performance bike that I ride the fastest on, and it that takes the most abuse as it’s the one I smash into technical chunder on the hardest. I want it to be dialed with no room for error. I’ll be the first person to suggest you run a friction shifter, but I consider it pretty foolish to not run indexing on a bike where you’re attempting to shift gears while getting bounced around a rock garden, or up a punchy climb. That being said it has a very comical cockpit that shifts and brakes incredibly well, to be highlighted in another future part of Will It Shift?

Much lower on the hierarchy are my Stooge Rambler, Centurion Pro Tour (still under construction), Specialized Hard Rock, and REEB Donkadonk. The Donk has been setup single speed since spring, and it’s been a ton of fun. But since I was swapping out the 27.5+ wheelset on it for the 26 fat wheelset, I figured I may as well put some gears on it so I could put out 500 watts to go 3 MPH in the snow.

In the past I ran a Shimano Zee 10 speed shifter paired to an 11 or 12 speed Shimano Deore derailer with a Microshift Advent X cassette. But during this summer I would occasionally put gears on the Donk, either for friends or just because it’s fun, and I was getting annoyed by the Zee shifter’s lack of a hinging clamp. So I sprang for a Paul left side thumbshifter mount mount to run the Microshift left side thumby I took off my Stooge’s Gevenalle brake lever upside down on the right of my flat bars. The Microshift thumby was laying around because I had replaced the pod with a 3D printed dropper lever and switched to 1x12— another Will It Shift? for another day.

All of my nice lightweight alloy spider Advent X cassettes are currently on bikes right now, so I popped on the Box Prime 9 Three cassette I picked up for $30 from The Pro’s Closet. I had hoped that the Prime 9 cassette used a spacer behind it to move it outboard, hopefully giving me the ability to run a bigger tire without chain rub, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. For $30 though it was a cheap experiment. I’ve heard you can use a SRAM 1:1 shifter with the the Box cassettes, and I actually have an 11 speed GX derailer in the parts bin that I figure I could limit out, but I decided to go back on my friction shifting bullshit, mostly because it’s fun and the Paul mount has a hinge clamp to easily remove if I wanna go single speed again.

But here’s the problem: while right-side-up right side thumbies exist in both road pull and mountain pull (the mountain pull barrels are bigger, see below), left side thumbies are all the smaller diameter road pull barrels. So if you try to shift a mountain derailer, the only derailer that will clear a 48+ tooth dinner plate, you’ll only get about 7 gears. This is why Russ from Path Less Pedaled came out with the Uno shifter, which is basically the current Ene Ciclo thumby with a bigger barrel.

see how the barrel/body on the MTB shifter is bigger?

So per my bike guru Dr. Welby’s advice I tried a couple strategies to change the cable pull.

The first, and jankiest, although it made it through all of RAGBRAI and then some on the Randy Herse, is the hose clamp method. Attach a hose clamp around the arm of a Shimano Dynasys derailer (in this case a Shimano RD-M786 GS), run your cable through it, and then clamp it to the derailer. My hunch is the rough edges of the hose clamp will eventually cut the shift cable, although I didn’t keep it that way long enough to find out.

Then there’s “Werdna” routing. Werdna is Andrew backwards, and Dr. Welby and I named it after both Andrew Major and a guy named Andrew in the Path Less Pedaled Discord. This is simple, and elegant, and I honestly am not really sure why I didn’t try it on this particular build [blame my currently COVID-sick brain].

But what I’ve settled on is basically a refinement of the hose clamp method. Instead of running the hose clamp you just drill a hole in the arm of your Shimano Dynasys derailer in the place you’d put the hose clamp, and run the cable up and around backwards in the derailer. It’s clean, it’s elegant, there’s minimal jank, and I’m pretty sure it has more pull than even a MTB thumby. Note that I have no idea if this will work with indexed shifters.

So why not just use a mountain pull thumby on top of the handlebars? Yeah, that’s a fairly easily solution, but A) I reckon it would interfere with pogies a bit, B) running thumbies on the bottom of your bars is far more ergonomic and intuitive, just ask Rivendell, and C) that would be a boring blog post eh?