I recently acquired a nice set of retrofriction shifters at a pretty reasonable price (though not a steal by any means). I put them on my PX-10, figuring that since I'd already spent what I consider to be big bucks on a long-cage SLJ rear and a matching front, I might as well go the limit.

Went for a short ride today, and I do like the way they operate. But as I think others have observed here before, cabling them was a little bit of a trick, because the holes in the shifter that accept the cable heads are a little undersized. I had to take off what I'd guess is a couple of thousands of material on the cable heads, via the crude method of dragging the heads across a piece of fine emery cloth while rotating the cable between my thumb and forefinger. It was a pain in the butt, but worked out fine, mostly because there's no need for an extremely precise fit in this area.

What gives, do you suppose? Were French cables really a couple of thousandths of an inch smaller back when these shifters were made? That seems insane even for the French. I suppose I could attack the cable fitting in the shifter levers with the appropriate number-size drill bit to adapt the size to standard modern cables, but it would be all too easy to make a mess of the job. Easier, I suppose, to customize the cable heads as needed.

Or do head sizes vary slightly from one manufacturer to the next? Given that no great precision is called for, you'd thing that the rational approach would be to size them on the small end of the range.

It just now occurs to me that it might have been worth trying a number of different cables (I have a whole box of them) to see whether they varied in size enough that a couple of them might have fit without modification. They're standard road shifter cables from SRAM, for whatever that's worth.