I was working on my 1986 Trek 400 Elance-
The bike is in wonderful shape- it's such a beautiful bike- I assume it's a straight gage 531 main triangle with I assume 4130 fork and stays.
For a long time, I've had the urge to "bling" up the bike, over the past few months I've gotten a few parts here and there, and when Junior was home from college, he was complaining about a squeak coming from the back end of the bike- so I decided I was going to replace the rear derailleur- I've had an old Deore XT sitting around, planning for it to go onto this bike because I thought it would look cool. Since I was doing the Rear Derailleur, I decided I was going to replace the shifters with a set of Tri-Color 600 shifters I'd bought for exactly this purpose.
After I pulled the cable, I thought how on earth does this cable go through the chainstay? I tried for like half an hour to poke the cable through. I had the bike on a Park stand, had it straight up and down, a couple of degrees back and forth- and I could NOT get that cable out the exit hole of the chainstay.
I headed to Skip Echert's Vintage Trek site and found a link to a blog with a comment- and that was it for me:
Skip's Site:
http://www.vintage-trek.com/refurbish.htm#threading
The linked site (the tongfamily website):
http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2...ailleur-cable/
There was a comment from "Paul" mentioning a heavy needle and thread. I found the thickest needle I could and tied off a yard of thread and dropped it in. Doggone it if it didn't go right on through. I then tied the thread to the cable (about 2-3" up) and twisted the thread around the cable all the way to the end- carefully pulled it through (with the bike vertical on the stand), and it came right out.
I thought it odd that I didn't see a thread like this here (although someone will dig something up quite easily now), so I figured an easily searchable thread would be a good idea!