It started with a £1.99 gear inner cable...

It started with a £1.99 gear inner cable.  Now I've spent on a new chain, and I'm subsequently googling replacement jockey wheels.

My winter bike hasn't been shifting properly for a while, so what have I done about it?  Well, the usual… I've ridden around the problems, clicking the shifter up two to change up one, then shifting back down so that the correct gear is selected in the index system for the corresponding cog on the cassette.  With winter coming up, it was time to sort this out, I've had enough of living like a second-class citizen, I mean, correctly indexed gears are a basic requirement for any cyclist.

So, the £1.99 gear cable arrived, then I started getting nervous about re-using the old gear outer, so another couple of quid went on a metre of Jagwire’s finest white outer. 

The outer arrived... it was installed... I tweeted about how difficult 105 is to index correctly.

The next thought went to how I’d fallen off last October, knackering my thumb in the process, and how the rear mech (which was less than a couple of weeks old) now bears the scars of that fateful day.  Conclusion: the mech hanger must be bent.  £13.99 for a new hanger, please! 

Mech hanger came... it was installed... I again tweeted about 105 indexing, this time my ineptitude at mastering the black art, and how I much preferred Sram.

Lubing the chain post-mech hanger installation, it looked a bit worn, so thoughts went to putting something fresh on it.  One of Shimano’s finest Ultegra specimens duly arrived and has just been flung on. 

This time… SUCCESS!  Sort of...

Everything’s shifting as it should, I’m not having to put so much tension on the cable that I can see individual strands breaking like something out of a Wile E. Coyote / Roadrunner cartoon, but there’s still something not quite right…

So here I am, googling for new jockey wheels, the ones on the mech look like wonky cart wheels, the total of this quick - “oh, it needs a new cable” – fix is much more than the original two quid, but at least I’m starting to get somewhere.