At 9:47 AM -0600 3/28/04, jerrymoos wrote:
>It's a bit hard for me to believe that this is a common occurance. Were you
>using aero cable routing? With traditional routing where the housings arch
>over the handlebars, it seems to me these loops of housing would provide
>more than adequate stress relief by deforming the curve of the arches long
>before a housing would rupture. Aero routing constrains the housing much
>more closely so I guess it could happen there. I must confess, this is the
>first time I've never heard of a brake cable housing failing it this way.
It is very uncommon to use indexed shift housing for brakes for two reasons:
1. It's well known to be very dangerous.
B. Indexed shift housing is generally twice as expensive as brake housing.
>Something else that doesn't make sense here is that the mail order places,
>including Nashbar and Bike Tools Etc. sell exactly the same housings for use
>with brakes and derailleurs.
That's brake housing, which also works for derailers, though with
very slight degradation of shifting. Low end bikes, Huffys and the
like commonly use brake type housing for the shifters as well as the
brakes.
>One presumes they must be compressionless to
>work with indexed shifters, and in some cases they are explicit stated as
>such.
Could you provide a URL for this?
>In a society crawling with product liability lawyers it seems
>impossible a company as large as Nashbar would risk selling these as brake
>cables if there was any evidence that they are prone to failure.
There is a type of hybrid housing intended to serve both functions,
see: http://harriscyclery.net/
Since this stuff is half again as expensive as regular index cable, it has never made a lot of sense to me so I don't stock it.
Sheldon "Danger!" Brown
Newtonville, Massachusetts
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| Do not needlessly endanger your lives |
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