Getting a broken shift cable out of a jammed Shimano STI road lever

If your shifter is jammed and won’t shift, the cable may be broken inside it

Dear Lennard,

For the third time, the shift cable in my left [Dura-Ace ST-9000] shifter frayed and broke off inside the lever near the cable head. This time it was the left lever. My levers are the 1st generation of the DA 9000 series. I guess later there was a 9001.

My right shifter has shredded 2 cables, this the first time the left shifter has shredded a cable.

On your suggestion, I removed the lever and fought with it with a pick for an hour and could not get the broken cable end out of the lever. Any other ideas?

Alan

Dear Alan,

This is an irritatingly common occurrence with Shimano 11-speed STI levers. I have had it happen personally on the right lever of one of my own bikes, and our mechanics at Zinn Cycles have dealt with this a lot, especially with Ultegra ST-6800 levers, but also with Ultegra ST-R8000 and various Dura-Ace levers. I haven’t yet seen it with 12-speed STI levers and would be interested to hear if any of you out there have experienced it with those.

What eats cables inside the lever appears to be the sharp bend the cable must make when shifting to the largest cog. The cable wraps around a relatively small-diameter grooved spool and gets pulled very tightly around that tight curve when shifting to low gear. If you live at the top of a hill and arrive home in low gear and park your bike in that gear, the cable remains under maximum strain even while the bike and you are at rest. This may accelerate the process leading to a snapped cable inside the lever. By contrast, when the bike is in high gear, the cable is under the least strain and takes a shorter curve out of the lever.

The first thing to try is, after shifting to the high-gear position, dig at the cable head with a sharp pick. A curved dental pick or even a sharpened nail, ideally bent at the tip, can do the trick. You’ll need to flip the lever hood up from the bottom to reveal the hole in the side of the shifter housing where you will see the cable head, once it’s in the high-gear position.

Unfortunately, the cable can be so frayed inside that you can’t shift to the high-gear position. The broken-off cable strands can be tangled with the shifter mechanism to the point that the cable spool will be pinned in place and will not rotate back to high gear—the point where the cable head appears at the hole in the housing. In that case, removing the lever from the handlebar may help you get at the hole and the groove in the spool under it at more angles with your pick.

However, if you can’t dig the cable head out with a pick through the hole in the side of the housing, you must open the housing and get directly at the cable and cable head. (You may want to cut to the chase from the get-go and proceed immediately to opening the shifter housing as described below and not even bother with trying to dig the cable head out through the hole in the side of the lever body.)