Cycling UK Forum

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fausto99 wrote:Wow, that's an expensive little box. Should be cheap as chips! I doubt there's more that £10 worth of components in it.
For those of you not afraid to tackle some electronics diy see:
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/q ... c-to-5v-dc

Since I have some practical knowledge in this area, I cannot resist adding a comment. Certainly choose the DIY route if most of the following applies to you:

--You do not care when you have a device that works in practice. Even if it is after the USB standard fades out, it is still OK.
--You consider a career in electrical engineering in some vague future.
--You do not mind ultimately spending far more money than on a commercial device. After all, it is an investment in your future career. If the career never pans out, no refunds.
--You do not mind damaging a phone or two in the process - after all it is about getting it done.
--You do not mind that after all the time and money spent, you still buy Sinewave or another commercial device.

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Look at motorcycle switches on Ebay. You want a high/low one. I normally go for Lucas/Triumph reproduction handlebar switches. There are more choices but it may get you started.

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bgnukem wrote:I can't really see the advantage of having them unless it's necessary to remove the cranks on the road, to avoid having to carry a crank extractor and associated spanners, e.g. on a long tour, but even then that would probably only be necessary if the chainrings or bottom bracket had to be replaced, so it would need to be a VERY long tour!

Every bike getting through our door gets its self-extracting bolts on the first opportunity that comes by. Regular pullers are practically never used. Yes, fingers might be chopped off if somebody touched one. During most intense projects, the cranks may come off a bike 30 times in one day. Doing that with a steel puller would have been suicidal. However, everyone is free to do to their cranks what they want.

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The most important in practice and commonly overlooked component of a self-extracting bolt is the washer between the bolt and the retaining ring, that allows the bolt to rotate independently of the ring. If the washer is not there, the bolt pushing the ring with a large force will just clutch with the ring and they will both come out together. The washers can be seen in the TA Specialites bolts here (the thin ones)

but is often missing from junky bolts such as depicted earlier.

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The purpose of the grease put into the Grip Shifters is to slow down the wear for plastic notches, not to make the shifiting easier. However, these are the grips of the shifters that deteriorate the fastest, so worrying about the notches inside is pretty irrelevant for most users.

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The problem is quite likely not in the Grip Shift. To add to the possible culprit areas, are there any unmitigated sharp cable turns there? Is the cable rubbing somewhere? If you have any stretches of open cable, you can grab the cable by hand and try shifting, testing how hard it gets. This should tell about what is going past that point, towards RD.

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This is one of the most pointless applications of such a readout. After you read the display, you need to go to xeroxed pages, if they are there at, try to identify the column with your spokes, hoping that they are actually listed, and try to transcribe the digital readout onto actual tension. The transcription actually pertain to brackets and comments for table use are in Chinese characters. If the transcription pages are not there, you misplaced them or tore up, you need to look around the web and hope that what you found actually pertains to what you have.

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Brucey wrote:good effort, but honestly? It looks like it will fill up with water (from both ends) to me.

This is 3M Adhesive-Lined Polyolefin Heat Shrink, completely sealed from the top and most of the length to the bottom and from the bottom there is Nyogel.

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/All-3M-Products/Energy/Electrical-Construction-and-Maintenance/Wire-Cable/Insulation/Heat-Shrink-Tubing/?N=5002385+8709319+8710679+8710817+8711017+8730567+8743879+3291756777+3294857497&rt=r3

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Brucey wrote:FWIW I use thicker wires where possible in shimano plugs and I also protect the wires using Vaseline etc. They don't seem to be in the slightest bit unreliable when treated thusly (and BTW my most used bike lives outdoors in the weather 24/7, and has done for many years). So deterioration of the contacts in shimano connectors is, as near as I can judge, a non-problem provided they are assembled with a modicum of diligence. That you can rewire/repair the plug if necessary is a welcome feature which means to all intents and purposes you are definitely not going to be stuck by the side of the road with failed wiring.

By contrast if a wire with a moulded plug on it gets a good yank it will be damaged and there will be practically nothing you can do about it. I have also had a number of moulded plugs (of various kinds) go intermittent because the wire connections inside were not made correctly. In the case of the plug you like, the blades may well corrode and need to be cleaned, and IME cleaning blades inside plugs like that is something of a PITA.

We all make different choices about what kind of equipment suits us best; what is 'right' for one person might be 'wrong' for another, depending on their skills, preferences and experience. Having said that the moulded plug you favour has multiple extra failure modes which can't easily be mitigated, and doesn't even fit/work as intended. It also attempts to address 'problems' which may not even exist. So I am struggling to see the attraction.

The photos show the ones I make myself. The contacts are out of solid copper wire that I hammer down flat half of the way to blades that I wrap around the Shimano plug, just like the stranded wire they wanted. I use no Vaseline but professional stuff, Nyogel 760G.

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Brucey wrote:BTW to fit a wire with a moulded plug requires that you make connections inside the lamp or a splice in the length of the wire. This adds another point of potential unreliability.

If the plug were correctly designed for the intended application it would be yet another example of having to make a choice in a bike between something which can be maintained/repaired vs something which might be slightly better in some respects but can't be maintained/repaired. I guess I prefer the former in any event, and I certainly prefer it over a plug which isn't a perfect match.

Dynamos are sealed and you cannot open and rewire them, so are the majority of current LED lamps. You are indeed balancing durability and serviceability and needing to make a cut somewhere. Single conductor connectors, such as the Shimano dynohub one, were common in German dynamo systems, but they seem to be disappearing. To me such a connector represents a slow but continuous progress towards failure - at some point it must fail because of the way in which the fragile wire strands are made to work. A sealed system with more bulky connectors might never fail within the life of a bigger system where you use them. If it seriously fails, though, it is nearly certain that you will not be able to fix it in the field.

Now, turning to practice, the sealed connections to Shimano dynohubs, now on several bikes, have never failed other than simply getting disconnected and reconnected. The Shimano original system, on the other hand, when it was still there, failed quite a few times, sometimes got fixed in the field and sometimes not. At this point, as I said, I do not look back - it is a sealed system moving forward. The similar German single-conductor connectors are also weeded out - they are just a problem in waiting.

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Brucey wrote:
Tiberius wrote:
I like that - It's more or less how it should have been made in the first place IMHO.

AFAICT it is designed for a completely different style of plug and will only maintain contact by putting the blades under constant side load, with no support behind them. No-one would design a connector that way, and in the event of trouble this one can't be rewired. So it wouldn't be my choice.

It is a gain and lose. I rework the regular Shimano connectors to this form for all bikes under my care. They work for years and I do not look back. A regular sealed AC plug cannot be reworked either and I have not heard consumers en masse pleading for that option. There is a bit of the tension issue there, as you mention. There could have been a better latching and the plug gets at times knock off, but in practice this works very well. You do not want thin wires, with a plug hanging off them, wandering into high action area. If thick wire comes off and gets banged around, nobody cares.

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A while ago, I ran into connectors advertised for Shimano dynohubs on Ebay, see the photo. I am not sure they were actually made for this purpose, but they fit well and are convenient to handle. Recently, I have not seen them any more, but I make very similar ones out of the original Shimano connectors, flattened solid copper wire and a dose of heatshrink.

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JonMcD wrote:Every roll of Velox tape I have ever bought could only be described as "tacky" rather than having a strong adhesive effect. In fact I have some unused wheels, without tyres, hanging in the garage at the moment where the Velox tape has unglued and is hanging down from the wheels.
I had always assumed that the pressure of an inflated inner tube was all that was necessary to keep the low-tack tape in place. It seems I was wrong. I've got a can of spray-on contact adhesive so I think I'll try a light coating of that on the next Velox tape I apply to give it a bit more adhesion.

You heat up the rim with a hair dryer before putting on the tape.

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The best sounding bells are those out of brass. Two reputable companies are Crane Bell Co. https://www.cranebellco.com/bells and Mirrycle https://www.mirrycle.com/product-category/bells/, already mentioned before. Mirrycle has small brass dring-dring bells.

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Isn't it necessary to use a folding RH pedal then?

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