I think it can work with practice. The derailleur made a bigger difference for me than the shifters, but I've only used bar-ends, and never Silvers.
I've shifted 9sp friction with an XTR derailleur and Suntour barcons (ratcheting) for years on my mountain bike. It seems to work fine, but I tend to shift early and rarely. I rode it in the rain on rocky uphill single track on Sunday and it worked great (which means "totally unremarkably"). I did re-count the cogs, because I had thought 9sp was too fiddly to shift friction in the past. I guess I got the hang of it. I had a hard time friction-shifting a 9sp cassette with Shimano bar end shifters and a Suntour Cyclone derailleur, and went to a 12-32 7sp cassette. When I changed to a Shimano 105 (medium cage?) derailleur, I noticed the spring was much much stronger, and shifting was much easier, both in lever feel and shift accuracy. Last weekend I installed the matching front derailleur, to go from a single ring to a triple, and changed the 7sp to a 12-25 9sp, because the 105's upper pulley rubbed the 32t cog. I find the friction shifting now totally manageable with 9sp, and the jumps between gears is much more pleasant while riding with my roadie friends yesterday. Also, the closer gears mean a less jarring mis-shift, which happened maybe twice in ten miles. Philip www.biketinker.com . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
