Is it possible to put bar end shifters on an old friction shifting bike. I would be doing this on a shimano tourney front/ rear derailleur. I would imagine this would work as long as there was enough actuation by the lever, and I took out the components which index the tension. Am I correct here or will this be a big flop?

Sounds like it should work. I have barcons on all my bikes except the one with brifters.

many friction shifting bikes had bar end shifters back in the day.

I have two of them.

You may on rare occasions come up short on cable travel, but most available friction mode barcons will work well with most available combinations of cogs, chainrings, and derailleurs.

Back in the late 70's, I converted my 1974 Raleigh Supercourse with friction downtube shifters to use Suntour Barcon bar end shifters. My Supercourse had Simplex front & rear derailleurs. No problems, worked great. I have no direct experience with Tourney DR's, but seems like it should work fine also.

--W

I'm currently running a Suntour ratcheting barcon on an old Tourney RD (from around the Crane era, pre DuraAce) and the combo works great...on a '70 Holdsworth Super Mistral, BTW.

I converted my Schwinn LeTour over to bar ends. I used Shimano Ultegra indexed. So I changed the rear der. to a Tiagra. I left the original Altus on the front because that is friction anyway. It has been a tremendous improvement over friction. Though I don't mind friction (better mention that before I get hammered by the old school guys) I can change the rear to work as friction also. I have maybe $80.00 in the conversion.

Had bar ends on a bike I bought back in 1970 long before index shifting was popular. Worked quite well.

yes

If the bar was not intended for bar ends will I just have to drill out some holes for the cables or should i route them through the frame?

the cables exit outside of the bar end shifters

huh?

you dont need to drill anything. Just run the cables up the bar and exit where you'd like. Do a search on this because there was a thread a bit ago about the "proper" place to exit the bar when running your cables.

You then need to install cable stops where the down tube shifters used to be. The cable housing ends there and the cable itself from there on out to the deraileur runs the same way it would with your downtube shifters.

ah ok I was imagining the wires running through the bars like through the stops - dont need to worry about the downtubes because stem shifters - I probably woudnt mess with them if they were downtube shifters. Speaking of, what is the official knock with stem shifters. I dont like them because they get in the way and im afraid im gonna punch some holes in my chest in a wreck

I've seen cables run a couple of different ways. Most people have them come out of the wrap right before the biggest part of the drop bend. I wrapped mine almost all the way to them stem,about the same place as you would have aero brake lever cables come out. It's a much cleaner look. I was told it would create extra friction with the extra bends in the cables, but it works just fine. I'll post some pics of it tomorrow to give you an idea of how it looks.

The derailleurs simply go where they're told, whether it's a bar end, downtube, brifter, Ethiiopian or Klingon shifter. Doesn't matter. When the shifter moves the cable, the cable moves the derailleur, the derailleur moves the chain.

I've just never seen any modern stem shifters. I have little reason to wonder why, but they are in a busy place, stems have really changed over the years, clamps vary too much, they require additional cable housings, and no one seems to have bothered to upgrade them, once indexing and brifters came about.

I really liked the ones on my Nishiki, they just shifted by themselves once in a while.

Love the ghost shift..

Here's how mine look..