Well, now I've gone and done it.... I just don't what I've done! lol. I obtained some yellow cable housing that I thought would look good on my bike and proceeded to change things out. The cable for the front derailleur needed to be changed out as well. And that's where the problem began.

First I unscrewed the little plastic screw cap which gave me access to the cable. I then pushed the cable out. It came out with no resistance at all. All good and well. The new cable fought me going in, and in fact frayed the cable. So I got out a second one and after a bit of careful wiggling was able to get the cable into the the shifter. The problem at this point is that the cable does not go in all the way. Pulled the cable out and checked my shift lever positions. Nothing works. I can get two clicks out of the upshift lever, rather than three, and only one on the down shift. The indicator in the window does not move at all. Thankfully I bought it from Amazon 3 weeks ago, and it's still returnable. In fact a new one is on the way even as we speak. But I am curious as to what might have happened so that I don't get a repeat performance at some point in the future.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated.

It sounds like a couple of problems happened.


First was the threading of the "new" cable into the old shifter went bad. Sometimes it's a blind effort. using a flashlight shinning in from the adjuster can help give one a spot to aim the inner cable end at. Sometimes it's just a mater of hit or miss over and over. I find a slight bend at the last half inch of inner and rotating the cable to move this dog legged last bit about helps to match all up.


Second it seems that the shifter pod's ratchet pawls were gumming up. A classic Shimano shifter pod issue. If happening when guiding the cable through it's likely the shifter spool wasn't fully released to low gear position and the cable didn't have a straight path to feed it through to. Simple WD40 is a meek attempt to fix the old lube's dried out condition. I have seem more then a few shift pods that were "fixed" with simple thin lube spray ins that later gummed up again. The thin stuff usually dries out soon. So at work if we charge we remove the pods/cables and soak/blow out/thin lube/blow in/thick lube blow in/cover with a grease slime before reassembling with new cables. FAR better a long term fix. In the LBS view a far better service for the customer by making the return not likely to happen.


But simply replacing the shift pod is also good. Andy.

Thank you for the reply, Andy.A new unit is expected tomorrow and I'm going to swap it out. The non-working one will either be returned, or perhaps dissected for educational purposes. lol I should return it, but my curiosity about the inner workings of the unit is getting to me.

Hi Guys,

Believe it or not I'm somewhat new to forums.. I keep seeing people apologize for resurrecting old threads but is this really against etiquette?

I could use some help with this Shimano m050r also. I got it off of am 89 giant Sedona I picked up to practice overhauling on. Didn't intend on disassembly it the pod but it was so seized up Incept In had to. I figured I could find a Shimano exploded view worst case scenario but didn't look first. There aren't any online. Any way, I could really use some help getting this thing back together. I think I have the layers correct but I'm struggling with orientation of the c spring and holder plate above it. Heck I might have more parts disoriented.

Andy and others, any way you could help me get these freshly cleaned parts sandwiched back together?

Thanks,

Andy #2