Just been using a few different posts recently on others bikes and have really settled on the face that hydraulic is just so much superior to cable actuation. The effort required to move my command post is much more than that of a reverb, for example.

After doing it a few times I have come to the conclusion that this has to be due to the cable friction on the cable housing.

Now, I may be getting ahead of myself here, but perhaps someone can link me to an explanation of how cable housing works. Because I can’t see many reasons not to use a PTFE based housing such as supplied for split gear routing, for the exposed cable, all the way along. Likewise, why can’t I run it through maybe some heatshrink?

I just feel there must be better ways of running cables, perhaps we need the protection for the gearing from the weather, but for a seatpost it’s 0 or 1. There’s not 10 positions it will stop in. The lever is either on or off. Thus any cable wear isn’t going to affect it as much.

On a similar point, why are cable housing run so close in diameter to the cables. Why not give it an extra millimeter of movement to reduce the friction? Or is this just not how it works.

It’s just a gear cable- mine came with a too-short cable so I swapped to an XTR cable then never thought about it again. Low friction, no maintenance, no bother.

Cable’s the better option IMO- when you’ve got 2 choices that work well, go with the simplest most common one. Burst a Reverb hose in the middle of nowhere and you’re boned, burst a Gravity Dropper cable and you’ll easily find a gear cable. 9/10ths of the issues you hear about with Reverbs are hydraulic related.

i dont think it has anything to do with the cable, looking at my joplin I would say the leverage could be improved making the operation easier but it’s only a thumb operation so it’s not that hard.

Joplin lever is a bit odd. Clever in its multi-directional way.

But then the KS lever’s very low leverage but still easy to shift, remember it’ll also depend on what’s going on at the other end. (Gravity Dropper has a massive lever you could use to move rocks around, to balance out the chunky mechanism on the other end).

The lever on the newer command posts takes barely any effort. I agree that cable seems the better option from a reliability/fixability point of view. The Reverb looks and feels a bit more special when it’s working though.

to answer your questions about cables:

Not sure if you grasp it fully by your comment on heat shrink but the way cables work is there is the inner works under tension and the outer works by resisting compression. The outer is just as important. On interupted outers then the frame is used to provide the resistance to compression in the bits where there is no outer.

You need to match the inner diameter of the outer to the diameter of the inner. One of the big complaints with full length outers is that they are sometimes not quite as crisp as interrupted outers. This is because the slop of the cable inside the outer leads to less precision. With interupted outers it is the first and last section of outer that give any slop but they are only a fraction of the total run.

For the smoothest cable run use something like SP41 and a teflon coated inner. Or get some cheaper cables and fit a cable oiler to lubricate it.

I meant to mention earlier- even when you’re buying a £300 dropper post they all seem to come with really cheap cables.

Ok thanks for the replies, Andy thanks for explaining now I can understand a bit more why they need to be so tight.

And actually motox2k, I think you’re onto something. The actuator on the post itself is very stiff, I don’t know much about it but I just feel this could be easier?