Old 12-04-12, 09:27 AM
  #6  
sekaijin
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Posts: 1,142

Bikes: 2000 Litespeed Classic, 1984 Schwinn LeTour, 1998 Gary Fisher Marlin, 1969 Hercules, 1977 Sekai 5000 Superlite, 1993 Koga-Myata TerraLiner, 2013 Trek Farley.

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Checking back in ... I did it! Thanks for the advice.

The fact that it took me two months, should give you an idea of the pace at which I work. Actually I did a fair bit of other wrenching first, before I got to the cable replacement. It was not first in order, but it was bugging me most at the outset.

What I did, and lessons learned:

I removed the old cable, inserted the new cable, then removed the old housing and installed the new housing over the new cable. That advice from Ciufalon and wrk101, not to remove both the old cable and old housing at once, was really valuable. Thank you.

Randyjawa, there was no internal tube joining the two cable holes inside the frame.

The other tricky part was, the little black plastic collars in the cable holes. I needed to remove one, to thread the new cable housing through it on exit, and it was not easy to remove. There was swearing.

What I learned is: hidden inside the top tube, the plastic collar has a large, sturdy plastic flange securing it in place. If you rotate the collar piece 90 degrees, the flange can be jimmied out of the oblong top-tube hole. If you just pull on the collar piece in the direction of the TT and cable route, it stays stuck in place. By the time I figured that out, I'd done some puilling on it with a pliers - tried to do that gently, but still put some pliers teeth-marks in it. There already were some, now there are some more. Proof that I was not the first idiot in this bike's 19 years, to figure that out by trial and error.

So now we've gained this obscure piece of knowledge - how to replace an internally routed top-tube cable on a 1990s Koga-Miyata without damaging the cable hole collars. I hope someone in the BF C&V community can benefit from that, in a future reading of this thread.
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