On Tuesday, April 6, 2021 at 9:09:14 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
A few miles into my evening ride on my cable-shift Emonda -- with my wife pushing me on her ebike, I shifted to go up the next hill and snap -- immediate downshift into 34/11. Great. In the middle of a 9% grade, that turned at the top to another climb, but a short one. I tacked a bit, got home and then jumped on the Di2 disc Synapse and started over. Heavier with fenders, etc., but still a nice bike. The discs, BTW, don't drag at all. Thank Buddha for that reliable Di2.

The good thing about the latest Ultegra levers is that there is a trap door under the lever body, and you can remove one screw, take out the door and grab the broken cable and end. No more fishing it out of the lever. This is the second time in 20 years on STI that I've broken a cable. Before that I broke a friction bar-end cable in the middle of a tour. I had a spare.

Jay, I wasn't taking a pot shot at you for overtightening a cable. Most people that do not work on bicycle stuff a whole lot do the same thing. When I'm building bikes up I usually do not tighten things up as much as I might because of this danger. I just finished the Eddy Merckx yesterday and took it out on a ride today. I did a flat 30 miles to see if everything worked well. First problem was the I hadn't set the stem dead center forwards. Second was that rather than Look Keo's I have bought a set of Rock Bros's copies. These actually work pretty well but the seals and bearing grease have to be "broken in" for the pedal to rotate to BDC so that you can kick into the pedal without looking. The rear derailleur wasn't perfectly aligned and so the gears were jumping in about half the ratios. This will be the hardest to resolve since I have a Chinese Campy-type cassette and I suspect they have Shimano spacing so I'll have to put a Campy 10 speed on it. I have plenty of 12-28's but aside from this one being very light, it is an 11-28. No big deal but it makes a difference on fast downhill descents. The front derailleur threw the chain for no reason I could see, though I suspect that I might have leaned on the lever going over some bumps. I had also inflated the tires to the 25 mm level instead of the 28 which is 10 psi less. So I was rather rough over the bumps. It was even making my sunglasses mounted rear view mirror move around.

The point of this is that your kind of problem is common. Everyone makes mistakes and it wasn't the cable that was at fault so don't glamorize the Di2 because it doesn't have that particular problem. The Di2 routing on my Colnago should have been the left lever along the top tube to the seat tube and from there down the to the four way connector block. However, there is NO hole between the top tube and the seat tube on that bike. So the wire runs in at an angle facing rearwards but then has to reverse course and go down the head tube and down tube to achieve the same thing that takes up a longer wire than necessary. So there are problems with Di2 and you can expect a LOT more problems with the new "wireless" 12 speed stuff since you have to shift through so many gears to get anywhere.

I have to admit, it was a real pleasure to ride a 10 speed again and I'm sure that a 9 speed would be better. You and I are not racers anymore and it grows tiresome shifting though gears that are only necessary to a 450 watt rider going for a TT record.