ShimanOh No!

   Many times in this blog I have mentioned problems that have arisen because of compatibility difficulties between brands. I have also written about issues popping up between different models of the same brand. Campagnolo, despite everything I love about their products, is notorious for incompatibility, but this time around Shimano had me so frustrated, I actually came away with a headache when trying to figure out what was going on.

   It all started when my friend Mark brought over his Specialized Roubaix SL4, a high-end carbon fiber bike that would have given me fits simply with its internal cable routing. I've told stories about that process before, and this time around I was dealing with routing through the drive-side chainstay. The exit hole near the rear derailleur was too small to use my feeder tool with the magnetic end, so the only solution was to feed cables from both directions and solder the two ends together below the bottom bracket so that I could pull the everything through.
   The whole reason for this work was that the little nub on the cable end had broken off inside the righthand shift lever and jammed up its operation. I had real trouble fishing that nub out of the Shimano Tiagra product and recommended to Mark that Bikesport or one of the other local shops might know some tricks or may have a special tool to help the situation. However, he decided to upgrade the parts while we had everything disassembled and purchased some Ultegra levers instead.
   Mark had bought the Roubaix in slightly used condition, and the previous owner had equipped the bike with a mix of Shimano components, so an Ultegra rear derailleur was already installed. It seemed that, after mounting the replacement levers and inserting the new cable, just a simple barrel adjustment would be necessary, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the gears to shift smoothly. I panicked a bit thinking the derailleur hanger had been damaged, as Mark had a delivery truck-induced crash a while ago, but the bike had been shifting well since I tuned it up after that incident. I grabbed my alignment tool to double-check anyway, and it was fine.
   I did a quick internet search to see if there were any setup tips with this particular derailleur and, after seeing photos, I realized this was actually an 11-speed version, which, in order to operate properly, required a different amount of cable pull than that provided by the 10-speed levers. This had me thinking, “...then why did the Tiagra levers work.” Well, it turns out that the most recent Tiagra 10-speed levers are not compatible with the 10-speed 105, Ultegra or Dura-Ace derailleurs, because of a design that provides different cable pull. The real quirk is that the Tiagra cable pull does match up with that needed to operate the 11-speed derailleur over the range of a 10-speed cassette!

   To be honest, I noticed that the 105 derailleur that I had put on the recently completed Orbea Mud cyclocross bike wasn’t operating perfectly with the Tiagra levers on that bike, either. It was a little noisy through the middle shifts, so as an experiment, I took the 105 part from that bike and put it on Mark’s Roubaix. As predicted, it worked flawlessly. Problem #1 solved!
   The Orbea had actually been set up with Tiagra levers that were one generation older than the ones on Mark’s bike, and it wasn’t behaving well with the more recent 105 derailleur model. I purchased a nice, older Ultegra version to solve problem #2.

   Maybe I shouldn't refer to #3 as a "problem", because it didn't really require any solution at all, but it had a related quirk. A Nashbar carbon fiber bike, which I had purchased as a parts donor, came with a SRAM drivetrain, and I was well aware that the company's shifters have a different cable pull from that of Shimano levers. I wondered if the recent Tiagra levers happened to match the cable pull of the SRAM, and it did! By the way, here is a sample of some of the artwork I'll be using on that frame - (left to right) Boonen, de Vlaeminck, Cancellara, Merckx and Museeuw.

 

   The Surly I had been refurbishing had come with 10-speed bar end shifters, which operate much like indexed downtube levers. They had been working fine with the modern Shimano Deore rear derailleur that had originally been installed on the bike, so it immediately occurred to me that the cable pull is totally different with the bar end levers, and there was no way that the Deore product was going to work with the modern Tiagra “brifters”!

   Well, that 11-speed derailleur worked fine on Mark’s crazy Ultegra/Tiagra setup, and it no longer had a home, so I simply installed that on the Surly, and you guessed it, the bike shifts perfectly...problem #4 solved! I don’t do a whole lot of touring bike builds, so I’ll sign off with photos of the completed Surly.