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Now that my eldest is onto a 24 inch bike my youngest has his old vitus 20+ with 7 speed microshift gears. I hadn't noticed the firmness of the microshift gear before as, well I have grown up thumbs and it's been 40 years since I was his age. It brought it home when I moved my eldest onto a a deore shifter and xt m8000 mech (lowest gear is limited out due to short chain stays) and it feels much easier than the microshift
How can I improve the trigger feel?
Current thoughts are:
I've changed the cables which has made a slight improvement.
I have a few m8000 11 speed mechs and 10 speed mechs I could drop on if I could reduced the cassette and limited the mech if the cassettes were the lower level on individual cogs with no spiders as the hub is the narrower 7 speed size.
My 7 year old grandson was given a 2nd hand bike with very stiff gears. Fortunately I had plenty of nice quality inner and outer cables which made a big difference. I paid attention to the cable runs but I'll admit to not knowing whether to lubricate, and if so with what.
It's had some new Shimano inner and outer. The shifter has a nice click to it, but he struggles. Maybe I need to get him to work on his thumb strength.
Have a look on ebay or etsy for trigger shifter extensions.
Moore Large did them, but they went out of business.
Grip shift an option?
I’d be swapping the cables and outers for full runs of jagwire with all the little seals and rubber bellows. If theres any exposed runs use the straw style semi-outer with the end ferrules that have the extension tubes on them. Use absolutely no lube at all. Not even a precoat of gt85 on the inner. So long as you can keep dirt out of the run it’ll be far lighter than with lube.
Gripshift as far as I’ve seen is bloody awful for kids. All my kids islabikes had the Gripshift firmly thrown in the trash, with a brick dropped on it and then replaced with an X5 trigger that they far preferred.
other option is a chinesium asx clone of some sort.
Gripshift as far as I’ve seen is bloody awful for kids. All my kids islabikes had the Gripshift firmly thrown in the trash, with a brick dropped on it and then replaced with an X5 trigger that they far preferred.
This. Islabikes did most thing absolutely right, but could never understand why they used stiff gripshifts that were too stiff for little hands. My kids did fine with X5 shifters.
Both of my kids preferred gripshift, so ended up with X4 and X5 bits on their bikes (a 1x8 or 1x9 drivetrain could be assembled from new parts from ~£40), I assumed at some point I would end up fitting triggers (as SRAM still do cheap versions of both at those lower tiers so the swap would be simple) but neither ever wanted to swap...
Part of the trick was the low cable pull ratio, it requires a little less input force whether rotating a grip or pushing a trigger, plus some fresh cables. The bog standards 6spd over-sprung Shimano SIS mechs and gripshifters their bikes often came with which were supposedly intended for kids, always seemed to just be too stiff out of the box...
As above - gear shift extensions and really good cables. I managed to pick up a load of Gore cables when SRAM took them on at silly cheap and reserved them for the kids bikes.
I've picked up an 11 speed slx shifter, and a chinesium 11 speed cassette made up of individual cogs I can pull apart. If I need to I have loads of cassette spacers I can sand down to the required thickness. I'll pair it with an m8000 GS mech limited down. I just need to wax a chain and off we go. I'll see how that goes.
