My bike won’t reliably shift down the cassette into a harder gear. 10 speed Shimano ultegra. When I push the little paddle, I can feel that the ratchet pawls do not engage. If I push the little paddle forward into the back of the brake lever as I shift, It does engage. How do I remove this play? Is it the nut in the 3rd and fourth pic?
by niftyzwifty
4 Comments
Some people are going to tell you to try and degrease them, since sometimes the grease coagulates and gums up the shifting internals, but in reality, I think what you have here is 20 year old lightweight racing components which are worn out. They’re not serviceable in any real way, there are no replacement parts, and they will probably need to be replaced if you want this fixed.
Yeah if I were troubleshooting at work I’d change the cable and housing. If better but not great, clean and lightly lube shifter and parallelogram on derailleur. If better but not outstanding, check for chain/cassette wear replace if needed.
These shifters like to get gunked up inside from the old grease in them getting dried out and stiff. What you’re describing is exactly how they feel when this happens. The internals don’t want to catch, or maybe they only catch some of the time.
The standard solution is to flood the shifter with a strong solvent/cleaner like carb cleaner or brake cleaner (from an auto parts store). Do note that these chemicals are pretty smelly, so you might want to unwrap the bar tape from your bars before spraying down the shifter. Even better if you can get the rubber hood off of the shifter. I’ve done it without doing that step and it turned out okay, thought. Spray a lot of the cleaner on the mechanism of the shifter (the top part where the cable goes in) so that the cleaner can get inside, then shift up and down a lot to work all of the internal parts clean.
That’s really the only service you can do to these old shifters. Like another commenter said, new cable and housing could be a good idea, too. (But based on your description of the shifters only “catching” sometimes, I don’t think that’s what’s giving you an issue).
I think it was just gummed up grease. I sprayed some wd40 it there and it works a charm now! I just gotta re lube it with some non tacky spray lube now! I thought it was going to be some mis alignment.