Cycling UK Forum

I've found the following methods work the best for me:

For brake outer (spiral-wound):
1. Place onto a flat worktop, hold a Stanley-type knife on the top of the outer, and then 'roll' the outer while cutting increasingly deeper with the knife. Watch that you keep the cut at 90 degrees, it's easy to go off and end up with a helter-skelter. You should be able to tell when you are through as you can feel the blade pressing against the inner metal spiral - you only want to cut through the outer plastic at this point.

2. A bit of 'feel' is required for the next point: keep the blade in the cut you have just made and apply a bit of pressure at the same time as rolling the outer again, but you are aiming to get the blade to separate the metal spiral and cut through the inner sleeve. There is a sweet-spot where the cut you have made in the outer will align with a gap in the inner spiral and the blade will just drop through and neatly cut the inner - it takes a bit of experience but you end up knowing what to feel for.

3. You should now be left with just a piece of spiral inner connecting the two lengths of outer. It should now be fairly easy to cut this almost flush with the end of the rest of the outer. I find a good pair of side-cutters (I use Knipex) are more suited to this than cable-cutters as you are cutting a flat piece of metal, not stranded cable.

4. All that is left to do is open-up the inner (I use an engineer's scriber) and just file the end of the metal spiral - with practise you will have cut this neatly so not much filing will be required. I find it easiest to file with the cable outer held flat on the worktop with its end just over the table edge. I use a smoothing file, about 1" wide, I'm not sure what make it is.

This sounds long-winded but with practice should not take long at all; overall it is probably a lot quicker than chopping through the cable quickly but then spending an age tidying up the mangled end.

For gear outer (with parallel stranded inner): just use a good stranded-cable cutter (I have Park and Knipex) and, because good cutters produce a neat cut, you should only need to open the inner with a quick podge of a scriber and you're ready to go.