shifting a chain reaction

A slight mishap with the bike created something of a chain reaction. I managed to break the shifter cable to the back wheel - and it was on the very messy bike too. I already had the spare cable, so it should have been an easy task but I'd miscalculated for the complexity of removing the old cable from the shifter. I looked it up on youtube from my iPhone and it explained which screw to unwind.

Boing!

All the springs and clicky things fell out of the shifter. It'll teach me to pay more attention to the picture on youtube. I can say with some certainty that it was impossible to rebuild the clicker. And the lesson: On my iPhone, it was quite difficult to see what was happening, but on a bigger screen, it was clear that the shifter was differently oriented and that I needed to unscrew the other side of the case.

One £17.00 shifter purchase later and I was back in business. The shifter actually came with a cable pre-threaded, so I didn't even need my spare. I'd saved the two pieces of external cable routing and so it was a case of threading the cable along the bicycle.

Except.

I noticed that to get the old shifter off and the new shifter onto the handlebar I'd need to dismantle the handlebar and remove the brake. Kind of Alice walking towards the castle. Fortunately, it was a straight handlebar and so the end handles just popped off, without any tape to unwind.

Then I put everything back together and looked towards the derailleur which was oily, to say the least. Now to re-index the gear changes. I'd have to put the wheel back and put it onto workbench where I could spin the wheel.

Luckily I'd bought some non-latex gloves to handle the messiness. I still managed to get the glove fingertips caught in the gears and the gloves gave a realistic sensation of oil covered hands, but magically when I removed them my hands were clean.

I'd used the back screw on the barrel adjuster to re-index and the gears were now singing.

A shame I'd managed to award myself a huge time penalty, but at least it's all working again.

And, yes, I did clean it. Pass the Swarfega.