Peter and all,
I started with the stock Campy bar-end setup way back then on my PX-10, and ran the housing all the way to the stem. I never liked the bare stainless coiled housing. It seemed the grease bled out of it on the first hot ride, and with all the extra cable bends I ended up going minimalist. The Campy bar-ends are a pain in the a** to set up, but I still think they're the smoothest around when done right, and I really don't want to have to pull them apart unless necessary. So I went to covered housing, then lined housing at the first chance.
The sculptor Alexander Calder loved the way cables worked in tension and
I think there's a beauty to cables in compression. The minimum number
of bends, the flow of housing without a forced kink in it, the
minimalist approach. I run the housing out just above the straight
section of the drops to parallel the downtube and still have the minimum
length of housing and bends.
http://image03.webshots.com/
With the shifters set as loose as possible without autoshifting, there's more of a tendancy for the cables to move slightly when off the bike, but not a problem when riding. If you keep them as loose as I do, they also may start to slip in cold weather and have to be tightened slightly. Properly set up, I think bar-ends are as good a solution as down tube shifters and like modern shifters in the brake levers, a bit more to hand, especially on taller bikes, but just not as direct in feel.
My thoughts are that housing exiting near the stem adds just a bit of sponginess to the shifter's feel, but both ways still work fine. The important part is optimizing all the parts of the set up. The more exposed cable routing does still work with most handlebar bags too.
Happy trails,
Dan Artley in Parkton, MD
Archive-URL:
http://search.bikelist.org/
It wasn't my idea and I hate the things, but my '67 Holdsworth Super Mistral has to have bar-end shifters due to braze ons. Looking at pix of
the era, the racing custom seemed to have been to carry the cabling up the bars to the end of the bar tape rather than just up to the brake levers which seems to be the prevailing practice.
Several postings in the archives suggested that the "racing" arrangement
is not as satisfactory given the extra friction caused by the extra cable length, bends etc. Have any of you out there recently used this arrangement with better results? I ride "on the drops" all the time and this routing seems preferable as it gets the cabling out of the way.
Peter Kohler
Washington DC USA