I recently picked up a 2nd hand Planet X XLS with hydraulic Force 22 and am having a bit of a nightmare getting the rear shifting sorted. I’ve traced the problem to the outer under the bar tape which have a number of tight bends leading to a very sticky gear cable.

I’ve never used SRAM stuff before, but the angle of the cable exit seems a bit daft, requiring the outer to be bent back to the bars before bending the other way round the bend of the handlebars, which have a fairly tight radius. I’ve tried easing this one by routing round the back of the bars rather than the front. Finally the frame has the RD cable entry on the right of the frame requiring more tight bends rather than curving sensibly round to the far side of the head tube. The internal runs are bonded into the frame, so can’t easily be swapped.

Any tips for improving this? Are there some outers that are better at coping with tight corners than others?

Nokon, Alligator?

had force on one of mine and the exit of the brifter could point to
the inside line of the bars or the outside … you choose which is better
for curves !

Hmm. Mine doesn’t have the option, it just points off into space:

Whichever way I want to route it, it starts with a tight turn to get it running backwards along the bars.

Hard to tell but could you curve it down and round/under the bar and brake cable to lessen the initial kink?

jagwire cable sets tend to come with a different sort of outer that runs under the tape, presumable to fix this sort of problem.

This looks like another design “limitation” of the SRAM hydro brifters (the other one being their massive ugliness)
And yes, something like the Jagwire EZ-Bend might help here.

If that was my own bike, i’d be taping the bars so that it didn’t cover the gear cable. Aesthetics are pretty pointless if their design creates a system that doesn’t work properly.

Thanks for the link on the EZ bends, but they seem to just be available for brake cables.

My next thing I’m going to try is some fresh outer, routing to the back of the bars, and not taping it too hard back to the bar where it comes out of the shifter. The previous routing was round the inside of the bars and taped very firmly.

The photos I can find of other SRAM shifters all seem to have the cable come out at a much more sensible angle. Not sure what they were thinking when the came up with this one.

otsdr – fair point on the ugliness, although it’s grown on me a bit. My verdict after one ride is that they’re more comfortable than the RS685s I’ve got on my other bike.

Just had another bash at this, and I’m now running out of ideas. Fresh cables all round, and I’ve managed to re-route the RD cable down the FD run so that it curves around the outside of the head tube. It works fine until I attempt to tape the cable anywhere close to the bar, at which point the amount of force required to pull the cable through is ridiculous and unsurprisingly, shifting doesn’t work.