MEATengines

A Suicide Shifter Story

It all started with a broken cable. A broken shifter cable. With the cable end left floating in the shifter. With the rest of the cable seized in the housing. All on a bicycle that needed to go to work and be pedaled 100km the next day. 

Simple right‽  Disassemble the shifter. Remove the cable head. Cut a new section of housing. Run a cable through the whole shenanigans and pedal off into the sunset. Well, not the sunset because it’s night time. On my front stoop. 

And not ‘simple’ at all it turns out. At 10pm when the shifter cable came up a bunch of centimeters short of the rear derailleur, well, the solution was obvious. We needed a tandem-length shifter cable.  Right. And, though I do have a decently well-stocked toolbox, or two, we came up short (ba dum tss). 

What we did have is a few random bins of widgets, a box of cold beers, and two tired dads (oh, and one sassy mama for running commentary). That, and the basic assessment that the only workaround was to move the shifter closer to the derailleur. Time to make a suicide-shifter clamp. 

The hinged SRAM MatchMaker clamp bolts to the frame. A Magura I-Spec ShiftMix bolts into that. The Thomson seat post bolt goes through the ShiftMix and thread
The hinged SRAM MatchMaker clamp bolts to the frame. A Magura I-Spec ShiftMix bolts into that. The Thomson seat post bolt goes through the ShiftMix and thread’s into the shifter. A chopped brake housing ferrule acts as a spacer and the shifter clamps around a Ti handlebar trimming left from Claire’s trailer bike.
My friend Matt
My friend Matt’s bike taking a little break the next day at work. Note the lack of any kind of motor-assist. 100km days. Pulling his two kids around the rest of the week. I feel so soft with my one mini-me and my 50km days. (Thanks for the daytime photos, Matt!)

Years ago, I was looking up Mighty Riders‘ phone number on their website and was struck by this fantastic, flourishing, paragraph breaking down all that they do. It’s gone now, but – word for word – this was the one sentence that stuck with me:

“We consider it an embarrassment to be defeated by bits of metal, plastic, and rubber, so we work hard to solve whatever problem you’ve got with your bike.“

At the end of the day, bikes are adult-lego, and given an infinite number of pieces, you can almost always just make something work. Whether it’s stacking two +20mm brake adapters and a couple of washers to fit that 203mm rotor on a fork. Or, sleeving a 29″ tube to fit a 20″ wheel. Or combining two 4mm hex keys to tighten an 8mm bold on a trail. Or, any other number of bodges, there is sometimes a big difference between the best-practices and going for a ride. And in those cases, if I can make it safe, I’ll always choose to go for a ride. Even if I have to take my hand off the bar to shift.