Over a period of 40+ years and tens of thousands of bike miles on all kinds of rigs and several good hard crashes, I have had 2 irreparable shifter failures. The first was my Shimano 600 downtube shifters (right 6-speed) the notches for indexing simply wore out. Thought I have to admit I was living in a cascade rainforest at the time and driving to work, so a lot of my riding on this bike was on rollers and the downtube shifters (and headset and stem bolt) ended up with salt corrosion from my sweat, so I think that contributed. But I also hear these particular shifters were prone to failure. The second failure was last year when my front 105 brifter died in the middle of a cross race.I tried flushing with copious amounts of Triflow and all kinds of tricks, but the catch mechanism was simply broke. Again, I've heard from others that this particular Shimano 105 "double/triple" left brifter fails commonly. All in all, like many things bike related, I'm mostly amazed at how well even inexpensive components continue to perform.
On Aug 3, 2:29 pm, Michael Hechmer <mhech...@gmail.com> wrote: > This thread seems to have divided into two parts, but I want to respond to > both. > > I have broken two pairs of Ultegra STI shifters in crashes, fortunately not > irreparably so. The first one went down hard on a dirt road and was so > filled with dirt it would not work. I needed to flush nearly a whole bottle > of wd 40 through them to clean them out. The second was an endo through an > old style parallel sewer grate, which cracked both of the little plastic > caps and Shimano charged an ungodly amount for replacements. I have crashed > with BE and never had any problem, in fact it's hard to think what could > break. > > Unrelated, I used Campy NR DT shifters and then the first version of Chorus > DT 7 spd shifters and I never found them "vague". Both of those, mated to > Campy derailleurs had a very definite overshift, which requires a very > slight backing up with the shifter. Once mastered it was second nature. > > michael -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
