I was out riding with the kid today when my rear derailleur abruptly dropped all the way to the bottom cog. I stopped, undid the corresponding bar end shifter (a Gran Compe EnE from Velo Orange), wiped some gunk off and put it back together. It worked for a little while but soon gave out again and I wound up holding the shifter in place to make it up the climbs on the way home. After taking it apart, cleaning everything, and reassembling the shifter, the ratchet mechanism inside the shifter simply won't engage (I've made the bike usable in the meantime by adding a rubber washer to the assembly, which I did once before when it turned out I had a defective Riv Silver shifter on another bike). The shifter was pretty gunked up with sweat before this happened. A couple questions:
1. Is it possible that sweat got into the ratchet mechanism and caused it to fail? Seems unlikely, but I am a notoriously sweaty guy. 2. The cable attached to this shifter was not that old (6 months?) but on the verge of being corroded into the lever. A moot point, since it seems like I'll need to replace the whole shifter, but how do fellow bar-end users prevent sweat from ruining these things? Should I be greasing the cable end to keep it from corroding into the shifter? Is there a type of lube that works best to get sweat out of the washer assembly? Any advice is appreciated. In the grand scheme of things, a bar end shifter is far cheaper and easier to replace than an STI lever, but it seems like I'm harder on these things than I should be. -Brady -- 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 rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/85933b0a-aed3-409c-8809-2e570c241794o%40googlegroups.com.