How to Replace and Adjust the Front Derailleur/Shifter Cable on a Bicycle

so in this video I'm going to show you how to change the front derailleur cable on a bicycle so this cable here is the one which I was describing it's your front derailleur cable so what it does is it connects to your front derailleur which is this thing here and by pulling on this cable allows the shifter to move in and out and therefore it allows you to shift between the different chain rings that you have on your front sprockets here so on this bike the front derailleur cable travels upwards here and then it enters this piece of cable housing and takes a ninety degree turn and then it goes it's the center cable here with all these other cables along the top frame of the bike and then when I get to the other end it comes off into another piece of cable housing which comes around here and then it feeds into your your shifter for your left hand which controls your your front derailleur so as these buttons here which control your shifting for your front derailleur so it's basically three different reasons I can think of right now of why you would want to be performing this task why you would want to be replacing this cable or really why you would want to replacing any of the cables on your bicycle the first reason is corrosion so although this cable here is enclosed for you know a few different parts along the length of it like it has this piece of cable housing here which is you know protecting it from the elements there is still this big section along here which is you know completely exposed and it's exposed you know to the atmosphere to precipitation you know really to whatever conditions you happen to be using your bike in so you'll find that over time if you're leaving it outside or something or you're just riding it when it's wet and there's you know water that's forming on the outside of this cable here and just getting left there you may start to see this cable that will start to turn brown and you know get rusty on the outside of it and having this corrosion on here can be a fairly big problem because it creates additional friction for your cable to be pulled so when you're pulling on your cable when you're trying to shift you know it's harder for like cable to be able to be pulled through the cable housing because of this additional friction and it'll be you know much harder to shift between gears on your bicycle so if you're fighting that your cable is starting to turn brown and it's being you know really lot of friction to be able to change gears the first thing I would just suggest trying is to add some lubrication to just put some you know some chain lube or some oil or whatever you happen to use like on your chain just to you know put some all over the whole length of the cable to help reduce some of that friction however if that's unsuccessful you might as well just go and buy a new cable they're you know they're fairly inexpensive I got this one for about three dollars the second reason why you would want to replace one of the cables on your bike is if it became frayed along the way so somehow you know something's come in contact with your your cable here maybe is when you had it in the car and there's something else on top of it and it just caused you know these cables are like a wound a whole bunch of little fiber what your wound together and if it gets any sort of a nick in it or something then you're going to have these little things unraveling and then it's going to be a real mess and it's you know if that unraveled part gets inside of one of these cable housings and it's going to again cause quite a bit of friction and well really if you have a frayed cable you might as well just replace it because you know just going to get worse over time and well of course you know every fiber that you lose here you're losing strength in your cable so there's more chance of it to snap which brings me to my last my third of the three reasons of why you want replaces which is actually if your cable just happens to snap and that third reason is usually caused by one of the first two reasons if you know if it gets corroded and the corrosion gets so bad that you know becomes a lot weaker and then you happen to be shifting and you know you're pushing really hard on it because of all that friction obviously and then I'll just cause your your your cable to snap and of course you need a new cable in that situation and it's just the same with the the the frayed cable you know a frayed cable is going to be weaker and eventually will probably break so on the note of frayed cables this section right here where your cable connects to your derailleur is a place where it's really common on for the cable to become frayed over time the reason is because the way that this cable connects with this derailleur here is it's got this nut here which just basically just presses that cable and pinches the cable up against this section of the derailleur and you'll find that over time your cable is going to gradually get stretched a little bit so you're going to be having having to come back here and making small adjustments of this and you know moving the cable you know pulling the cable in a little bit and you'll find that you know every time you you you pinch it again on the cable you know you're going to cause that cable is going to come a little bit weaker because it's going to move the fibers out of the way a little bit so you may find that over time you need to actually replace this cable because it's broken off like right at the end and there's baton is like basically nothing for you to grip on to to be able to pull this cable and and tighten it on properly but if you're not actually in that situation where this cable needs to be replaced on your bike you may also find this video helpful because I'm going to cover basically explain how a front derailleur works and how to set it so if it's not set correctly you'll be able to see how to make the adjustments to get it set correctly so that you'll be able to shift correctly with your front shifter in my situation I really don't have very much of a reason to be replacing this cable you know it is a little bit corroded but not nothing too serious I would just be able to put some lubrication on it but I'm really just doing this replacement for the purposes of this video so the first step for replacing this cable is to remove the old one so you can see that this bike here it has one of these cable ends on it that was put on at the factory and to help the end from you know from getting frayed and getting unraveled so you could just cut that off but I prefer to just just just pull them off and the way that I do that is I use an addressable wrench and then I tighten it onto the cable like this and then I just pull on it and you know the cable should just the cable end should just pop right off like so and from that you can see why they put those on there because already you can see that the cable is starting to unravel itself a little bit so now you just remove this nut off here and the cable should come off of the derailleur so you could just use an adjustable wrench to do that but instead I'm going to use my nine millimeter socket I was a little bit more handy and it will you know prevent the nut from getting stripped at all just like that it comes right off and you can see right there that this part of the cable looks a little bit different than the rest of it because it has had that nut which has been you know pressing on it and kind of deforming it a little bit so that cable should come off like that and the moving up here I should just be able to pull on that cable and I'll pull through the housing like so and then it will go through this section of the housing so you can just kind of feed it through there and actually the cable housing will come off like that just by by pushing this way and pulling it up and then you should be able to pull this piece of cable housing off and just put it somewhere safe so this bike has one of these Shimano rapid-fire shifter system which has like a mechanism inside there which one you know you press these two buttons and what it does is it moves the cable the right amount of distance so it will go to all of the the three you know shift positions that this bike has if your brake has one of these older styles of shifter system they're quite a bit easier to work on all you have to do is really the cable just you know it just goes right in the end there that's the end of the cable right there so all you have to do is just pull that out and then thread the new one in but since we're working on one of these more complex systems what you first got to do is remove this top plastic cover so there's two screws Phillip head screws just put your screwdriver in there and loosen those off like so and then this thing should just lift right off like that and then with this cover off it looks you know fairly similar inside there is the other one looked all you got to do is just push on the cable here and there's the end there that's sticking out and you have to pull this through and now your old cable is completely removed from the bike so there's the old cable in the new cable you know side by side the ends are a little bit they're slightly different size but they should still work the size of the ends on shifter cables are much different they're even a different shape than the ones that go on a brake cable the brake cable actually has a different diameter of cable as well so I've got my brand new cable here and before I'm going to put it on the bike I'm going to put some lubricant on it I'm going to lubricate the whole length of the cable and that's going to reduce the amount of friction that it's going to have when you're shifting between gears and that's also going to help to protect the cable from future corrosion so the lubricant I'm going to use for that is just some regular you know some bike lube basically the stuff that using my chain I don't use anything really high-end on my scene I just you know use this stuff that comes from the department store it's like you know four dollars or something for this bottle and this last me for you know for a few years so the way I'm going to do is just have a rag in one hand and I'm just going to kind of hold it like this and that's going to kind of dribble some in there and then just kind of pull it through a little bit and just basically get lots of oil on the chain are on the the cable so it's going to be you know nice and lubricated and nice and protected so when your cable looks nice and shining like this one does and your you're probably done as long as it's you know nice and smooth and you rub your fingers along it it should be you know lisen nice and lubricated and it should do a good job for you but from here you be very careful you don't you know touch it against any of your clothing or anything because it is you know very oily and it good chance it'll stain now another thing which is good to lubricate as well while you're doing this job is your your cable housings so as you saw what I when I disassembled that cable there are two pieces of cable housing which go on that cable there so basically we have to do is you have to get you know lubricant on the inside of them and the way that I do that is I just take my my lubricant bottle and I just make a little bit of a drip inside the end there or make a few little drips and it should know eventually just sort of soaked its way down there a little bit and after it's moved down a little bit all you got to do or what I do at least if I just put my lips on the end and just kind of blow it a little bit and that just kind of you know helps get it moving down there I just you know be careful you don't get any on your lips and be careful you know the other end doesn't squirt out on you underneath and then I just make sure las gets in you can do the same from the other end as well and then I'll just do the same with this cable here and that should be good so now the first step for reassembly is take the end of your cable which doesn't have an end on it and it just threads through the place where the old cable came off and then it's going to go through through one of these things and then n should fit nicely inside of there and then you're going to take the end of your cable and thread it through the cable housing like this and it should just fit right in there like that and then this piece of cable housing goes in between these other two cables so it comes up through here and then this piece of cable housing should just fit into the part of the frame on there like that and then you thread the cable through your other piece of cable housing like this and from what I remember this cable gets rounded over on this side down through here and again the cable housing just fits into the part of the frame which is on there and then the other end of the cable housing goes on here and goes into this part on the frame here and this cable comes all the way down and connects onto there something that's important to note is that all models of bikes are a little bit different and doing this job will be a little bit different depending on the bikes that you happen to be doing it on for example when doing this job on this bike is a little bit different because the cable has a different routing pattern when the other one as you saw the front derailleur cable came out of here and then it went upwards and then it traveled along this top frame rail however this bike is much different that derailleur cable actually comes down and it goes underneath here and travels with the other derailleur cable and then they go up here and they come out there and then they go to your shift levers so just make sure that you pay careful attention to where all of your cables are routed before you start removing any of them so you'll be able to make sure you put them back to the way that they were when you found them so before we actually connect this cable there's one adjustment which is a good idea to make while we're in this you know we have this opportunity you'll notice that there's these two screws that are on your your front derailleur somewhere they're not necessarily going to be here but there's usually two screws what you're just kind of sitting side by side and they don't have anything to do with you know attaching the derailleur to your bike or anything what they are is they're actually going to called limiter screws and they're just for making small adjustments and the idea of them they're usually marked with an H and an L so this one's the low the L stands for low the H stands for high and what they do is they adjust how far in each direction your derailleur is able to travel so you don't want your drei ler to be moving too close you know too far inwards too low because what that's going to do is in the cause your derailleur to fall off of your smallest chainring and then you know your chains off your but you have to stop and put it back on it you know it's a real pain the high limiter screw is the same idea except that prevents the derailleur for coming too far outwards or the upper side the high side so your chain is not going to fall off of your highest chain ring and fall off in this direction so just to demonstrate when your derailleur is in this position where it has no cable connected to it if you happen to adjust this low limiter screw so I'm going to loosen it and what that's going to do is it's going to allow the derailleur to go inward towards the frame so you can watch it move as I do it you're just moving in gradually and now if I tighten it up it will go in the other direction and it'll move you know outwards towards the larger chain rings so while you're in this situation when you don't have a cable connected to your derailleur it's a good idea to make sure that your low limiter screw is in the right spot so in other words if I would just a pedal this bike with a chain you know the way that it is with nothing on here it should be able to just stay in the smallest chainring without falling off so to get that low limiter screw set right all you've really got to do is just take your bike for a little bit of a test ride and just try the screw in different positions and see you know how it how your bike behaves within the different positions basically what the way you want to set it is so that when it's in that small chain ring in your riding that your derailleur is going to be you know perfectly centered on the chain so that it's not rubbing on either side of it you know if it's rubbing on you know this rail here is rubbing on it then it's good chance that it's going to pull it off and you know you're changing to come off and if you find that it's rubbing on this rail then what that means is that your derailleur is not going you know farther than up in that direction and even when you have a cable on there it's not going to be able to go at you know far enough in that direction and it's always going to be rubbing basically so now that I've got that lower limit screw set correctly I can move on with reconnecting the cable we will deal with the high limiter screw but we don't really really need to worry about it right now so before we do anything over here we want to make sure that we have our derailleur or our shifter so that it's shifted or it's set in the first gear position so right like this I don't have that cover up back on yet I'll do that at the end of the job but you know there's a little window which is right about here which will show the one if I go you know if I shift up you know that was in two but that's the one position like that now another little thing here at the front is this little thing here which is called the barrel and what is designed for you know most bikes have these what they're designed for is you can make small little minor adjustments of the cable as you saw on the derailleur over there if you're going to adjust the the tension of the cable what you have to do is you have to undo that joint thing and your reap inching the cable every single time which is you know fairly fairly difficult in you know it takes a little bit of effort to do that and you know damage your cable so if you don't want to do that you can make small little minor adjustments just by twisting this in and out so what it does is it basically lengthens the amount of cable housing that you have so virtually you're tightening or loosening the cable so before I I'm going to attach the cable what I'd like to do is I'd like to set this barrel so that it's in the middle so I have you know so it's basically the very middle of the distance to travel that it has so I have the option of tightening or loosening it after I have the cable connected so as you can see now that I've loosened this thing off you've got this little plastic thing which is for gripping onto it and then you've got these threads here which thread into your your your shifter here so I like to set them sir it's about halfway through the threads so I'll just do that now so now with like that I've got you know about half the amount of threads which are exposed and half the amount of threads which are in there which will give me lots of mobility in either direction so now to reconnect this cable what you want to do is thread the cable so that it's between this little washer here and the little part where the cable connects to the the derailleur there and then you just kind of loop it around and then on this side you want to be pulling on the cable you know so that there's no tech there's no like slack in here because you really want it so it's in position one so when you're your shifter at the front is you know when it says number one that it's going to be in that very lowest position that we set using that limiter screw there so well the way I get into this just to pull pull tightly on here something about all this little all those extra cable out here I'm just going to wrap the cable around my hand like this and then just pull on it and then using my other hand I'm going to use my socket over here and I'm going to tighten that nut back on however you know if you don't have as good a grip on it as I do like this you know if you're having trouble holding on to it maybe you don't have this quite as long a cable to deal with then you can just use a pair of pliers or even better than that you can use a pair of vise grips just to grip out of that cable and just just pull on it so yeah I'm just going to do that now I'm just going to pull on it like this you know have lots of tension on it so this is nice and tight no no like slack in there and then we're going to tighten that on like so and you want to get that fairly tight on there not so much that it's going to completely you know squash your cable but you also want it tight enough that your cable is not going to slip out of there so I got that I think where I want it so now I'm just going to take the bike for a little bit of a test ride and see what happens when I use the shifter at the front and I move it into position two in position three hopefully it'll be pretty close to the right amount of shifting from getting to two to three but if not we've got that little bail at the front which will do a few little minor adjustments to to get it so it's perfect and I'm not going to cut this into the cable off quite yet so I'm just going to wrap it around up here so it's not going to get caught on anything so from my test actually concluded that this cable is a lot tighter than it actually needs to be when I shift it into position to my chain actually came all the way up into the large chainring here which is gear number three so we're going to want to loosen this cable off so it's in the right position so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to put the chain so that it's on that second chain ring I just manually using my hands getting you know nice and dirty in the process and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust that front barrel so that it moves in far enough so that this is going to be centered on it it's not going to be rubbing on either side so now we've got that barrel set all the way in there and it looks like that derailers pretty well centered when it's in the second chain ring position I'm just going to take it for a little bit of a test ride and see what I think so answer my little test ride I'm really happy with where this position of this derailleur is you know just in that barrel to where it is right now it was pretty much perfect when you're doing a test like that you want to also try different positions out of the back derailleur back there because when you're shifting between different gears what tends to happen is your chain is coming at a different angle so for example when your chain is in the smallest chainring back here you know it's coming on an angle like this and there's a high out possibility of the chain rubbing up against this side of your front derailleur by the same verse you if it's in this the biggest chain ring back here there's a better chance of it rubbing on the inside of your of your front derailleur there so it's a good idea to make sure that you try a different position so you can get this thing set so that when you're you know you're doing both extremes it's not going to be rubbing on either side so now that I got this thing set properly for the number two position from the middle chain ring I'm going to try it in the number 1 again and then try the number 3 and see if it's set correctly so unfortunately when I did my test of the largest chain ring my derailleur was too far out it was always rubbing on the inside no matter you know what what gear I was in at the back which means that my cable is still too tight and I've you know as I said I've already the barrel all the way in so I don't have any more adjustment I so unfortunately you have to redo this thing here so I have it now set back in the smallest chainring here and as you can see there's actually lots of slack in my cable up here so what I'm going to want to do is in the loosen this thing off and actually put a little bit more slack in here so the cable will be looser so when I'm when I'm trying to shift into my largest chainring again I'm not going to have issues with that so I just do that with my socket again and then just pull a little bit more cable through and before like that and then tighten it back on again unfortunately getting one of these derailers set correctly is a bit of trial and error so now if it said like that I'm going to take it for another little test ride a little bit of trial and error my test rod I got this thing pretty much set where I want it to go I just by using the barrel up here just you know trial and error just tightening in a little bit loosing a little bit trying all the different speeds but I just want to say I really dislike you know these kind of shifters of course they're you know they're very user friendly they're very good you know for someone that's just kind of getting used to a bike just to just do not just be able to click it to whatever gear it goes into but from a mechanics point of view they're really a pain to work with because they're just like so touchy like the way that they work is when you shift the cable moves you know a set amount of distance but unfortunately that set amount of distance doesn't always correlate correctly with your derailleur so there's always error in there so it seems like you okay if you get it set to the cable tensions right for when you're in you know gear to possession when you go to gear three position is a very good chance that it's not going to be you know set correctly and it's not going to be exactly the position where you want it personally I've always preferred the older style that are on older bikes that are just you know a simple friction paddle something like this where all you've got to do is you just got a you know you can swing this thing and put it in any position where you want it you know every time you shift you can set the cable so that you know your derailleur is in exactly the right place so although these systems are like a little bit less intuitive and a little bit you know harder to get used to you know they're very much easier if you're doing the job we're doing right now we're replacing the cable and you know they're very much easier to maintain and keep them you know working the way you want them to work so while I was doing my little test ride of the bike I did observe a few times this chain came right off came off of this side it came off of the large chainring so what that means is that my high limiter screw my eight screw is not tightened enough so the way you're going to want to be able to go ahead and test that is just you know take a screwdriver with you and ride and then just adjust it so it's you know it's going to be set correctly you know you might you might just find that it'll it'll shift out of it'll come off just by shifting into it but if you want to simulate that problem the way you can do it is just by riding with it in three and then pulling on the cable that you have the cable for the front derailleur so as this one here the middle one and that's going to pull it out as far as it possibly can go and you want that farthest out position so that it's in a position where it's not you know so far out that it's going to pull it off so basically you want to tighten this screw up to the point where it's not falling off you know consistently so now that I got my high limiter screw set in the correct position now my shifters shift pretty much correctly the way that they're supposed to so now I can go and put this cover back on that's why I tighten those two little screws back on so now your last step here is to cut off this extra bit of cable that you had here on the end and generally I think it's a good idea to cut it about two inches from where it connects to the the derailleur there you don't want it to be too long that it's going to be you know getting caught and it's going to be every time your crank goes around it's going to be you know pressing up against it but you also want enough distance on there so you can get a pair of pliers in there and grip on to it if you need every need to be making adjustments on it in the future so to cut it what I just used is a pair of side cutters that look like this you know fairly sharp pair and the main main technique the main thing to focus on when you're actually cutting it is to just make sure you press you know really firmly and really like one solid action you don't want you know cut part way through it and then you know oh it's not kinda then you press more like you wanna one solid action to cut through it because what will happen otherwise is it won't cut you know very evenly and it'll just start to you know fray out and all that different every different direction already so what I'm going to do is just put the the side cutters on there like that and then I because all of a sudden it's going to push really firmly on it hopefully it'll just clip right off so let's give that a go just like that so you can already see that the end there is you know starting to come undone a little bit if I just left it there over time it would you know start to fray and it might you know unravel itself all the way back to where it connects which would not be a very good thing you have a few different options for protecting that the way that the bicycle shops do it and you know when the manufacturers advice to use those special little aluminum cable end thinks we're just a sleeve it just slips over top of there and then use a pair of pliers and you just basically just crimp it on there so if you wanted to you could go to a bike shop and you can buy those you know they're fairly expensive for what they are there may be like 25 cents they'll charge you for every single one of those I guess you can buy in a bigger pack but realistically how many times are you going to actually be using these things so that's one option another option I've heard I've heard like lots of different you know suggestions you can use solder you can solder the end just put a little drip of solder there I'm just using a soldering gun and that'll do it but I'm outside right now I don't have a net let close by I don't want to wait for my soldering iron to get heated up so I'm not going to that option an interesting one I read somewhere online someone said they used like the nipples from from like an old wheel and you know they're do basically just a sleeve a metal sleeve you know from your wheel and they just put those over top of there and then just use in the same way as a cable and then crimp those on there that's another option but the option that I'm going to use today is just to use a little strip of duct tape and just Ravel it around there a few times to keep it from unraveling alright so all you need to do this just a strip of regular everyday duct tape and just you know rip it off a little bit and then we're going to cut about a one centimeter strip out of this something like that doesn't need to be that long maybe you know put two inches or so and then there's going to put that duct tape on here now you'll notice that when they coil these fibers together they coil them in a certain direction and you want to be wrapping your duct tape in the same direction so as that so that you know the adhesives not going to pull it and start to unravel it so I'm just going to put that on here there we go and once we got it wrapped around just squeeze it a little bit and make sure that it all that adhesive in the duct tape sticks properly and something else you can do to make sure it stays there a little bit better is you can use a lighter and you can melt the duct tape a little bit and it'll help it shrink a little bit around that cable so it's not going to fall off this concludes my tutorial showing you how to change the front derailleur cable on a bicycle I hope you found this video helpful and interesting if you have any questions please let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching

Channel: cjhoyle

Views: 219,270

Keywords: cjhoyle, Chris, Hoyle, Christopher, CJ, Bike, bicycle, maintainance, Mountain, Biking, How-to (Conference Subject), Riding, Cycling, shift, shifter, cable, deraileur, derailleaur, derailer, front, sprocket, chainring, chain ring, gears, lever, how to, replace, maintain, adjust, pull, tighten, maintance, tutorial, explaination, lesson, demonstration, teach, install, take apart, casette, chain, tension, spring, limit, limiter, screw, loosen, change, idle, idler, pulley, guide, lag, lagging, leading, lead, test, tune

Id: OCJqdHxlUfs

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2013