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A place to ask bicycle repair questions, and for bike shop monkeys to share advanced non commercial wrenching resources (no YouTube self promotion). This is only for repair related topics.

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Shortening shifter cable (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/bikewrench

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I've turned my Poseidon X into more of a road bike and swapped a 46cm bar for a much more comfortable 40cm. The microshift groupset has an externally routed shifter cable that was purposefully long to accommodate a bar bag, but it's now almost hitting my left hand. If I were to cut the cable shorter and feed it back into the derailleur, would I need to index my gears or can I just adjust the tightness with my barrel adjuster and be on my way?

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[–] tacocat 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Short answer, yes.

Excess cable length would be hanging past the derailleur pinch bolt. It sounds like you are talking about making the housing shorter. Specifically the housing closest to the shifter. Doing this will involve loosening the pinch bolt and pulling the cable all the way back to the shifter. Once the housing is chopped the process is going to be the same as installing a new shift cable. In fact using a new cable may be a good option. Once the cable is routed back to the derailleur and pinched, indexing the gears will be the last step.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Damn ok, time to dig into some YT videos. Thanks

My cycling subreddits are the only ones keeping me on reddit anymore so your reply is my first step off of the platform.