Caused a celebratory dance around the kitchen/study and all family being forced to admire THE cable. I could not quite believe it myself when it popped out of the tiny hole and onto the magnet on about the 50th poke.

Easiest way is to pop the cable in, have a look through the hole until you see it, then fish it out with the J bend on a spoke.

Or super glue an old cable to the new one and then pull it through

Or buy a bike with proper cable routing.

That’s getting tricky these days. Personally I like internal routing for the most part.

Did the bike come with some narrow tubing you didn’t know what to do with?

well, it probably should have and you use it to replace cables – slide it over the old cable so it’s hanging out of both ends of the frame, remove old cable, insert new, remove tube. Job done. Minimum fuss, minimum time

Do these sort of bikes have full outer going inside too, or just inner?

Most are just inner. The ones with internal routed outers are the ones to avoid. The brakes generally feel crap and the cable isn’t under tension so it rattles.

Ok thanks. This is just an asthetics thing then? (On mtbs at least).

There is nothing inside there except carbon. The black exit hole has a bolt on section, but this would not budge. I think it is glued in. Narrow tubing is being sought for the next time I do this.

You can make a plastic guide sleeve to push onto the old inner cable before you remove it as señor cheesy feet suggests, by stripping the outer plastic and reinforcing wire from an old length of gear outer, thus leaving the polymer inner lining.

With the system shown in the op photo you can lever out the oval surround at the exit from the frame and reach in with a seal pick or bent wire.

Recently had fun and games routing a rear brake hose through the swing arm of my old Five.

Zip tie pushed some string through, then tied string to hose and pulled back through. Took a while to get to the solution though!

What bikeneil said.

Who decided that we needed to make spanner get more work than it need be? Is there any actual advantage to internal routing?

I use some heat shrink tubing and attach it to the nipple end of the cable (nipple cut off…obviously) and pull it through the frame in question, works for gear/brake housing as well.

Got a Dartmoor frame arriving Friday with internal cable routing.

Never had a frame with this before… going to be “interesting” from the look of it! Lol

Good tips though guys.:-)

Form over function, external routing far simpler.

Most are just inner. The ones with internal routed outers are the ones to avoid. The brakes generally feel crap

Not as crap as hydraulic discs without outers! 😉

Form over function, external routing far simpler.

I agree to a degree.

Fortunately I think this frame has an outer routing option too.

That said,I will try the inner routing just for the hell of it I think. 🙂

I thought the default method was to insert a thread at one end and apply vacuum cleaner at the other to suck the thread through?

I just built up a Smuggler which uses the “to be avoided” full outers threaded through the frame. It probably added an extra 10-15 minutes to the build, but was hardly a big deal and it does indeed look neater. I don’t know if it’s noisy as I’ve come from an Orange Five, which sounds like a bag of spanners going downhill. But that never bothered me either.

Never had a frame with this before… going to be “interesting” from the look of it! Lol

Depends on the frame, I did all the internal Di2 routing on my Deng Fu on Monday, sat on the sofa, in about 15 minutes. That included batteries and junction boxes and all sorts! Some can be a complete bugger though!

Full-outers become a pain in the arse if you have to get them around any vaguely tight bend. The dropper routing on my Commencal is a 2min job, but the rear-mech is 30mins of swearing.

Most are just inner. The ones with internal routed outers are the ones to avoid. The brakes generally feel crap and the cable isn’t under tension so it rattles.

The rattle is very easy to fix. Attach a zip tie to the outer, leave it untrimmed and slide it into the frame.