trend towards concealed cable on newer bikes

[neilhapgood]

Hi all,

I hope you are well, I converted an old MTB with a TSDZ2 some years ago, use it every day and love it etc. I was thinking about upgrading the donor bike to something with disc brakes and maybe 700c wheels. However all recent hybrid bikes seem to have the cables for rear brake and gears going into the downtube at the top then appearing out the bottom and under the bottom bracket.

When I did the first conversion and was looking for a donor bike it was an even(ish!) split between bikes with rear cables on the top tube and those that went under bottom bracket so there was some choice regarding bikes you could use.

Could this be a problem moving forward in that it seems really hard to get decent bikes to use as a donor without cables running under the BB?

I know some people have re-routed them but this seems fairly technical!

Any thoughts appreciated

Many thanks

Neil

 

[Raboa]

I just had a conversation with a bike shop mechanic about this, he thinks it is a bad move as it is more time consuming and more expensive to fix bikes

 

[Bonzo Banana]

The sort of bikes that have that are more performance bikes, bikes typically compromised a bit for the sake of achieving a lower weight or less wind resistance. Do you really need such a bike for an ebike conversion? I feel steel is the right material for an ebike, it fatigues less and is more durable, it is more likely to be overbuilt and cope with the extra stresses of a motor. Why compromise strength to achieve a couple of kilos less when the motor assists.

I bought a Barracuda Corvus for about £100 shop shoiled from Moore and Large on ebay a while back. Likely a shop return (sale or return) to do a road ebike conversion. I can drill extra holes without worrying and even weld it if I wanted to. Being a cheaper bike it has easy sizing with a quill stem for the perfect bike fit, has nice flexing and I'm planning to replace the rear wheel with a 7 speed freehub wheel with a 11-36T or 11-34T cassette. This sort of thing. It weighs about 12-13kg but why worry about that extra few kilos when you are fitting a motor anyway?

 

[Bikes4two]

• What about an older style used bike with more conventional cable routing?
• I recently acquired a hybrid bike with something like 200-300 miles usage - although around 8 years old it had been stored in a holiday home in portugal for all of its life - a real bargain at £150
• Alternatively, an older bike in reasonable mechanical condition could be nicely tarted up with a powder coating for around £100.