Re: Extensive article on Rivendell and Grant Petersen

On 9/26/2024 3:48 PM, Wolfgang Strobl wrote:

Am Wed, 25 Sep 2024 18:00:21 -0400 schrieb Zen Cycle
<funkmaster@hotmail.com>:
 

>
A down-tube system is even simpler - no ratchet mechanism

 But still not failsafe. My Peugeot PR60/L from 1978 had only friction
shifters (indexing didn't exist then), but my Peugeot PR3000 from 1995
can be switched between friction and indexing.  Quite a hassle to find a
replacement, after one of both broke, years later.  Found a compatible
replacement from SunTour by asking the owner of a somewhat obscure bike
shop during a business trip to Berlin.

First, I'm quite amazed you managed to break a downtube shifter. I'm very curious about details, both how it happened and what specifically broke.
(The difficulty finding another is more a condemnation of the bike industry's "churning" than anything else.)

What can go wrong? How easy is it to repair?
 

... my current
focus isn't on repairability when being stranded somewhere in the
Sahara, but on convenience under our current conditions, meaning single
day trips around where we live, or somewhere in Europe, do single day
trips during our vacation.

Ease of repair is still important to me, even though I'm not planning any long tours in the near future. I know most people just toss out what's broken and buy a new one, but I almost always at least try to fix things. See https://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto

That's a big if.  Well, the broken part was a tiny spring deep inside
the ratchet mechanism, as I found out much later, after I had partially
disassembled the broken brifter after a shop sold and mounted a new one.
Found out that, while shimano sold most parts of that specific brifter
via their distributor, they didn't have a part number for that spring.
After looking into the disassembly instructions later, just out of
curiosity, I was quite sure about the reason for. Mounting that tiny
spring not only needs complete disassembly, there must be a specific
tool used in production, to mount it inside. In short, it's not
repairable, when broken.

Yep. That's why I don't use those things.
--
- Frank Krygowski