How to Tweak Cyclocross Bike Cable Routing

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: Because you spend so much time riding a cyclocross bike in, you know, adverse conditions and sand and mud and muck and stuff like that, it's, you know, good to make sure that you're running cables that are, you know, somewhat sealed to keep the elements out, to keep things working, working longer. You also want to make sure you have relatively straight, smooth cable runs, you know, without, you know, long kinks or, you know, short stuff that really is going to get gummed up more easily. So these particular cables that I'm running, you know, one way to help this stay, you know, working smoothly longer is you can see how they're black. It's because they're Teflon-coated, so they slide a lot smoother and sort of help to repel dirt. Another thing that you can see, especially up here, is these little black plastic shields that come out the end. It helps to keep dirt from getting down in the, you know, in the actual casing of the cable. The other thing that you can do for your cross bikes, because, you know, most road handlebars aren't designed to use a brake like this, they're usually designed where the cable just comes down and goes straight to the brake, is you need to find, you know, nifty ways of routing your front brake. This particular--it's just a piece of bent-up metal that's hooked up to the stem, so I have a place to stick this cable. Sometimes if you have more room, there's a little hanger that can replace one of these spacers that you can run this cable to. But to run the cable from here all the way back here, you need a lot more cable and it has to make a lot of little bends. So we found, you know, a little bent-up piece of metal to do the same thing. It shortens your cable run and makes it straighter. So when things start to get dirtier and muckier, it's going to make a big difference. And that's the sort of thing you should always be looking out for when you're setting up a cyclocross bike. It's how to simplify things, what works better, you know, in the nastiness and, you know, saves that little extra bit of weight, add, you know, and you gain that little extra piece of performance."