Heckle Me!: The next bit...

Dear o dear o dear me. 17 piss weak days without a blog update. This also means 17 days since any attention has been paid to the bike build. And to think, keeping all of my loyal readers out there, hanging on a thread. I am so sorry, I know it must have been indescribably painful....

Alas, I am back. Well, I never really went anywhere. Life just got a bit busy, again, there for a while. So what have I been up to on the bike?

At the end of the last blog I made mention of the "fiddly" bit of the build I would be doing next - the cabling. Well I can fairly say that while it was fiddly, it actually wasn't as hard as expected. I was perhaps exacerbating the complexity of the task. I needed to cable the front and rear gears & put the chain on.

Another small expense incurred ($35). I didn't have cable housing. The gears only came with the gear cable. Rather than wait for online deliveries, I went to the local bike shop and grabbed 3 meters PLUS importantly, the little nipples that attach to the housing for the bare cable to enter and exit from. Most modern bikes do not have cable housing for the full run of the cable. I "think" this is so there is less friction for cable movement, but housing to keep the cable taught - shitty explanation, I will let the photos do the talking.

Importantly also, I looked up many Google images of the Heckler to make sure I was getting the runs correct and using the correct mounts.

So, first bit, run of the front derailleur cable from the shifter to frame. Note where the cable re-exits the housing at the frame mount:

I was careful to measure the cable several times before making the cut to length. You can see above only about 20cm of housing is needed until it reaches the first mount, at which point the cable exits the housing again. The mounts are designed so the nipples sit snug in place and once the cable is taught, everything will tighten up.

Here are the special cutters to cut the housing. You cannot see in this picture, but they have a spike on the back to insert back into the housing to re-form the housing after the cut (the housing has a metal sheath). This is important to reduce any drag when changing gears (so the gears don't feel too tight).

Here is the run re-entering the housing (left of the picture, just above the shock), and then angling back down towards the derailleur:

And finally, the cable re-exiting the housing again to attach to the front derailleur (just in front of the rear wheel). So you can see, fiddly to run a cable with all the cuts.

Next was the rear derailleur cable and housing. A longer run to get to the back of the bike, but same concept of cable cuts, measuring, mounting etc....

So here is a progression of photos to give you an idea of the task. In these we have 1. Housing being slid onto the cable, 2. Pulling/measuring cable to rear of bike 3. Mounting the housing where the cable re-enters the housing on the bottom of the frame, 4. Completed run to rear derailleur and 5. example of the completed run showing both the gear and brake cable runs to the rear of the bike:

Next was putting on the chain. Pretty straight forward. To get the chain the right size, you place it on the largest chain rings at the front and back of the bike pull it tight and leave about 1 inch extra. Chain breaker needed to snap off the 3 or 4 chain links I do not need (the chain breaker is an essential tool to take on rides - I have broken chains many times and a breaker on track allows you to remove the broken link and re-link the chain). This is a SRAM chain with quick lock links to re-attach. The rear derailleur is always a pain as it is spring loaded, so one of my ye 'ol faithful decommissioned from primary life duty socks were used to hold the derailleur so I wasn't fighting the spring when trying to link the chain. I was quite surprised that with a quick test ride the gears were changing oddly well - odd because they still need to be tuned!