How To Cable A Road Bike. The Correct Way!

hello it's been a long time about nine months maybe more i was told that by uh fellow phil who is a great youtuber i'm gonna link his video his most recent video in the description below uh because he's phenomenal he does these exquisite videos about rebuilding bikes um they are so beautifully filmed and so beautifully shot the camera angles are excellent the composition is beautiful the editing is perfect really puts me and everyone else to do videos like this to shame pardon my french and yes i i just have no no excuse other than i have not invested in the time or effort to improve this video quality yet but i will i promise you no i'm not going to promise you anything i may i may indeed do such a thing as to improve my video quality and the way i act on camera maybe so why the hell am i here what am i doing well like i say not made a video in nine months uh that's because he commented sorry on my video or i commented on his video and then he told me i had not made a video in nine months and i thought to myself has it really been so long um but yes life has been getting in the way i'm afraid i'm i'm a manager of a bike shop now i've got two guys who work for me i recently lost one and i've been retraining somebody else i'm married not not long ago i suppose but we've just moved house i built a new shop in the house um i'm in the house right now and the shop simultaneously this is the workshop behind me we i built this bench with my cousin my nephew and my nephew and i built this bench she did the basic structure and then i put in all the drawers and everything in the device and varnished it and added the coping and all this kind of thing and made a few minor modifications but um yeah he did a great job and i'm very happy with it i mean i've got an air compressor but ah let me try and get this off here homemade homemade air compressor yeah pretty good right um so yes it's a small bike shop we're in brunei brunei is not a big country if you don't know if you're brunei and watching this you know all about it um there's really like not a huge customer base here so as little bike shop like this is enough for now i want to expand of course i want to improve the business but you know this is where we are right now and uh i've just not been making the time to make videos um i enjoy making videos i want to make videos so let's make a video um today's subject is going to be relatively short 10 minutes or so and i want to talk about not including all this waffle that i've just done i want to talk about cabling on your bike and specifically british or french which style of cabling should you adopt why should you adopt a particular style and what are the advantages and benefits of adopting a particular style of cabling if you don't know what the hell i'm talking about let's go and show you on this video let's go right part two of the video i have here a beautiful bicycle which i'm going to use as my model this belongs to a customer of mine and i was working on this bicycle today when i asked the customer would you like your cables done the correct way or the wrong way and let me explain why i say that so let's do a little bit of history first we're talking today about french style cabling and british style cabling okay so on british style the right hand side shifter controls the front brake and the left hand side shifter controls the rear brake that is the correct way to do your breaks if you live in brunei or the uk or any other country that drives on the same side of the road as the british which i believe is the left-hand side of the road but if i got that wrong feel free to correct me so because we drive on the left we have a particular style of doing our brake cables which complements that type of riding and driving on british roads now the french however they have to be different because um well they were conquered by emperor napoleon or they were ruled by him from napoleon the famous corsican general who conquered most of europe and that is why the french and many europeans and many french colonies like vietnam for example more of that later um basically drive on the wrong side of the road because he was a nutty old general was napoleon and he hated everything about the british especially the way the british always beat the french in war and he could never invade britain and controllers so he basically dominated europe and changed all the rules in europe and made everybody use weird tough style measurements called metric system and basically invented a new way to drive on the road and the way the british drive on the road is the correct way because when the romans who were the people from the city of rome in italy who conquered most of the known world several thousands most of the known world several thousand years ago when they came to britain they built our roads and the road i used to drive down from nottingham to leicester in the uk was actually a roman road uh the foss way for example is a roman road uh they're usually very straight very level and beautiful roads and um the romans told the britons right you're going to drive on your car to your chariot on this side of the road okay and we just adopted that and we carried on doing that for thousands of years and we were never conquered by the french so we never changed basically french ignored the advice of the romans and decided to do their own thing and that is why certain countries in the world which were french colonies or influenced by the french like canada for example or vietnam or whatever drive on the uh the right hand side of the road and the british drive on the left and brunei was a british colony or influenced heavily by the british and that is why we drive on the british side of the road here now the majority of bicycles in brunei are actually cabled in the french way which is as i said left hand front brake right hand rear brake so the reason for that is most of the bicycle imports we get here into brunei come from countries where they drive on the french side of the road and when bruneians first started getting into bicycles god knows how many years ago um the bike shops here and everything just assumed that that was correct and they just carried on doing it that way and nobody ever decided to actually do it the proper way which is the british way seen as well we kind of ride on the bridge side of the road here and there's very good reason for why you should do your cables in the british way so let's get on to that now and try and bang through that and explain it all so number one if you notice the cables on this bike look very neat indeed and tidy originally this was done in the french style i've now done it in the british style now it makes more sense this way it's more logical to do it this way and why because if you notice the right hand shifter the right hand cable here comes after the shifter the brake cable follows down here along the handlebar pops out here and goes straight down into the front brake of the bike now the front brake of the bike as you'll notice has a little tail on it that tail houses the port in which to put the cable through and i think you'll notice something interesting what you notice is that it's on the right hand side of the caliper why is that because the japanese designed it that way it's a japanese component it's ultegra and so the japanese decided i think the japanese drive on the british side correct me if i'm wrong um that that is the correct side to put your gear cable so it comes out the right hand side and it goes into the right hand side and to illustrate my point further if you look on most bike frames the cable lug is on the left hand side for the rear brake that means you take the cable from the left hand shifter and you come down the left hand side as you can see the left hand side of the bicycle and head off directly to the rear brake it is the shortest distance and as we all know the shortest distance is always the fastest distance okay so this is the fastest way to cable a bike but not just that look at how neat and tidy this looks if we were doing this the french way we'd be taking the left hand brake cable pulling it around the front of the head tube and down into the opposite side of the brake caliper here and we'd be doing the same thing with the right hand side taking it around the front of the head tube and here in brunei people make these really big loopy cables that go right around the outside and stick out like this if you look at some of the um the specialized alice bikes in brunei they're hideous because they have these great big bulgy cable loops in the front of them which just look totally ridiculous like dumbo ears and it's because they're doing the cabling the french weight and they want to make these big loops around the front of the bike and then that cable continues to follow down the left-hand side of the bike so what you do is you end up with this big ugly mess of cables right in front that cross each other and you can't even see your head too bad you know the lovely head tube badge on a very expensive bicycle you paid a lot of money for is completely obscured by criss-crossing of cables coming across the front they get tangled with the gear cables it's awful whereas look how neat tidy and this is possibly more aerodynamic okay so not just more logical but also potentially more aerodynamic and faster and another thing is because you're going left to left right to right the fastest possible route the fastest distance or the shortest distance you use less cable how much cable less do you use um well i cut a load of cable off this today when i redid the brakes on this bike and redid the gears for that matter and i managed to save this customer drumroll 28 grams of excess cable and housing as a result of switching from french to british style that's crazy to put that in perspective the lightest carbon bottle cage i sell in this shop currently is 24 grams so you could have for the amount that i've saved this customer he could have a free extra carbon fiber bottle bottle cage and still have two grams is it eight four twenty four yeah whatever you can still have like four grams remaining leeway to put elsewhere on his bike so i basically saved him that weight that way now he can use to spend on other items on the bike and it's weight that he doesn't have to carry up hill now i know it's only 28 grams but still why would you want that extra 28 grams if you don't have to that could be the difference between a bite that weighs 8 kilograms and a bite that weighs 7.9 something 7.9 something sounds a lot better than 8 kg if you if you ask me i'd rather have a 7.9 something bite than an 8kg bite okay 28 grams and another thing because you're going a shorter distance because the cable is resting in less housing you've got less friction the cable pull on this is smoother it feels better it will last longer because even when it gets dirty okay the french time when it gets dirty because the cables are so long they get friction fast and so they feel gritty and horrible really quickly these ones will last longer and because there's less friction your shifting and your um your braking will feel smoother and nicer so more aero tidier less weight and better braking okay better braking excuse me better braking feel but that's not the end of it there's even more advantages than that having your front brake on the left hand side in the french style is actually dangerous okay why well if you're driving particularly if you're in a country like um brunei or britain or anywhere else where they drive on the british side of the road the majority of your stuff is done with the right hand you're drinking you're signaling you're pointing out potholes to other people in your group your left hand remains on the left hand brake and that is the case with brunei riders that are using the french style as well they're still using their dominant hand to drink they're still using a dominant hand to indicate traffic that's coming up behind them because in a country like this the traffic is on my right hand side okay and if i need to move into the traffic i need to use my right hand to indicate i very rarely indicate with my left hand only maybe when i'm turning a left hand junction and it's rare because the danger to me in turning left with the car behind me is minimal the danger to me moving out in front of traffic or in front of that car is quite extreme so my right hand is really important and if i decide to brake for whatever reason because something steps out of me in the road and i need to slow the bike down i can still apply pressure to the rear brake with my left hand while my right hand has not yet reached the uh the right hand shifter i can drop my bottle and i can go for it as fast as i like but i can still start to apply pressure with the left hand to the rear brake and that's important because i had a crash many years ago when i was a kid a teenager i hit a pothole or a speed bump in the road and it startled me and i grabbed hold of my left hand break and because it was a mountain bike i was riding which tend to be cabled in the french star because mountain bikers tend to use their rear brake more than their front brake but they shouldn't be riding on the road they should use a road bike for that and it was the front brake that i squeezed and my bar just turned and i went straight over the handlebars because i locked the front wheel up i can lock the rear wheel on a bike up no problem and still be absolutely fine that's why kids when they mess around on bikes they're constantly locking up their rear brake because they can do all these cool skids and perfectly control it it's really easy to control a rear wheel skid it's not easy to control a front wheel skid or when a front wheel completely loses traction or when you lock up a front wheel if you lock up a front wheel you go over if you lock up a rear wheel you just slide a bit it's fine so basically you can still apply braking force to your bike even if your right hand is off the bike whereas if this is the french style and i'm drinking or i'm signaling and then something happens that i happen to squeeze my left hand break i will crash 100 you will go down okay so it's really dangerous for bruneians and british people if you're in the uk to for you to be riding with the french style you really need to switch to the british tower because obviously you get all the advantages of lighter more aero better looking nicer braking feel but also it's actually safer and finally just talking about front and rear braking your right hand if you're right-handed and most of these are sorry if you're left-handed and you want to do it differently that's fine your right hand is your most dexterous means the most sensitive and it's also the strongest hand because it's your dominant hand just like your right leg is stronger than your left leg that's why your right leg is in a car given the task of breaking and your left leg which is kind of your dumb leg is giving the the task of just stamping on the clutch and that's why if you've ever tried to break with your car manual car with your left leg the car just stops dead it's really hard to do carefully because your left leg is too stupid to apply force carefully your right hand is very good at that so it's important to keep your right hand on your best brake because this will stop you faster if you're slowing down in the road yeah and you apply your front brake your rear wheel will start to lift off the ground so your rear brake becomes less useful under an extreme situation it's your right brake which does most of the braking and most of the control so you really want your best hand on that job basically it's the strongest hand for giving the most braking force but it's also the most careful hand for applying that force with um what's the word moderation so you know the old saying with great power comes great responsibility this hand isn't capable of being responsible with the front brake this hand is so for goodness sake if you're in brunei come to my shop and get your cable switched to the british way don't you don't even have to come to my shop go to any shop in brunei and beg them please stop cabling our bikes in the french way we're not french we don't live in france we don't live in vietnam we live in brunei and brunei we drive on the british side of the road the better side of the road the more sensible side of the road and we want our cables lighter more aerodynamic better feeling okay and safer there you go that's my little presentation thanks for watching and as always stay safe you

Channel: Reginald Scot

Views: 9,433

Keywords: Bike, Bikes, cycling, cycle, ride, cars, cable, cables, british

Id: YClMGdOfROM

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021