Evenin’ all

I’m building up a bit of a Frankenbike for off-road touring /bikepacking or whatever you want to call it.

Most of it is coming from old unused kit and the spare parts bin. Briefly:

A Charge Duster Skinny frame. Not used, but too lovely to ditch
A pair of Pace XC39 Forks (80mm), nice and light, bit of bounce and a functional lock-out
An old pair of Mavic Crossrides
Race-Face Ride Cranks
Thomson stem and post
Some Tektro cable disc calipers
I have a 9 speed cassette (11-32) and chain
A choice of many unused front mechs (though I may go 1×9)

Mainly I need a rear mech and some brake levers and shifters and I’m looking to fit it with some shallow flared drop bars.

I know nothing about ‘road’ levers / shifters.

Will a set of Tiagra (or other similar) 9 speed shifters:
a) work with a Shimano 9 speed MTB rear mech?
b) have the correct pull for cable disc brakes?

That is all

TIA
Al

a) Shimano 9 speed road and mtb is cross compatible. So 9 speed Tiagra/Sora shifters will work fine with a 9 speed mtb rear mech.

b) Probably not. Road and mtb levers have different pull ratios. I have a feeling you can get some sort of adapter to adjust the pull ratio but I’m not 100% on that. Avid do the BB7 calliper in two different types (road and mtb) to get round this. It might be worth setting it up and seeing how it feels to be honest.

Yup, only 9 speed Shimano is road/mtb inter-compatible, plus no clutch mechs.

Whilst an MTB cable disc will work, because the cable-pull is far greater, they need to be adjusted quite tightly and so brakes are very on/off with poor modulation – TRP Spyres and Avid BB7 road are optimised for use with road levers.

MTB cable discs work to a point but not well, I tried to improve them on my O-O Lurcher Frankenbike/Monster-crosser with Tiagra Road levers by shortening the the caliper armss. Helped a bit with giving a bit more pad clearance but I lost power from them.

Binned the idea and bought a set of Shimano Sora cable disc calipers, like night and day. Works really well.

I would get a set of levers with v brake pull ie. Mtb disc compatable and use a bar-end friction shifter.

Find the model of Tektro brakes you have and look them up on the net – they might be road pull. Edit – from what dovebiker says, they’re probably V-pull. Worth checking though.

I’ve got 1×9 on my commuter. Tektro RL320 brake levers and cantis (RL520 if your discs are V-pull) Dura Ace 9 speed bar end shifter, old XT mech, superstar narrow/wide ring.

All works lovely, never dropped a chain, despite non-clutch mech. Seems the narrow wide ring does most of the chain retention work. Seems to work for CX racers too.

I’ve got some microshift 2×9 thumbies if you want to go the flat bar route.

Personally, I’d spend some hard-earned on a set of Gevenalle 1×9 CX Long Pull shifters. Long pull are optimised for the pull of V-brakes, which is what I should have bought after realising my cross bike suffered from terrible judder with cantis (now running mini-V’s instead). Charliethebikemonger is the UK stockist.

Otherwise, if you want road shifters, you’ll need road calipers, and I would imagine the total cost will be the same.

Sounds like some m or h bars would work better with all that kit, likely to handle better too. If drops are a must – road brake calipers needed to go with sti, maybe bar end shifters and tektro ss brake levers for drops instead.
9s road and mtb kit does work for shifting at the rear, can be fiddled to work up front.

A problem solvers travel agent or similar would solve the road levers/mtb cable brake problem.

Drop bar v-brake levers

you could also use these and some bar end shifters like

Ebay shifters

Go SRAM? MTB and road are interchangeable, at least in 10 speed and probably 11.
Actually I would do as you are doing and see what the brakes feel like to you. If they are useless, new calipers are cheapish.

I had a load of spare 10speed mtb stuff when I built my charge up so I ended up with a modified SLX shifter using a 31.8 band on front mech mount from eBay for a couple of quid.
Single ring at the front and Deore clutch mech at the back – chains not come off once.

Thanks all,

Looks like I’m going to need some different calipers then