50% of a day trip to the Cotswolds

Riding Rideouts & Touring
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Today the weather forecast was finally showing the weather would be dry most of the day (only 2nd time this month!) so I decided to head to the Cotswolds for a day out. I topped up the tyres with air, and noticed my clutch cable had a bit of excessive slack, so I adjusted that too. Then after an earlier than normal breakfast headed of down south via the Fosse Way. It wasn’t long before I was feeling the chill and wishing I’d worn a jumper.

After a bit over an hour on the Fosse I turned off to start a big loop through the country lanes, stopping a couple of times to warm up in the sunshine and just enjoy being ‘out’.

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When nearing my planned fuel stop near Cheltenham I noticed my clutch cable was getting a bit slack again and I started worrying about the clutch lifter bearing that went earlier this year. So after fuelling up, I adjusted the cable again and felt the clutch action. I was reassured to find it didn’t feel ‘gritty’ so started engine and went to pull off only for the clutch cable to go, bugger. Then I realised that my temporary cable kit was in my panniers at home, double bugger.

What had actually happened was that the cable had pulled through the nipple that I’d soldered a couple of years and 20k miles ago.

So it was time to ring the AA and listen to pointless automated advice and prompts to download the app or register the breakdown online, and warnings about them being extremely busy, finally for it to start ringing for a human operator who answered in 5 seconds, took my details and gave me a 45 minute ETA for help.

Several ETA postponement texts messages from the AA later, the patrol arrived after two hours. Fortunately he had a couple of the emergency cable kits, so between us we bodged something together and I was back on the road. Not trusting to our work I decided to head straight home, which was still 60 miles away, and was trying to do clutches shifts as much as possible to save cable for when I had to stop. Definitely didn’t like the clunking and jerking that produced.

Back home I’ve got to work out some kind of reliable cable fix before heading off to a rally Friday. Will try and resolder nipple back on if there’s enough length in the cable after I cut off the frayed end (from my original birdcaging effort). If that doesn’t work I’ve got the AA temp cable, and my own, and my old too short cable from before my handlebar swap.

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Not an ideal day, may be it’s time to treat yourself to one of these.

Might struggle getting it to you in time for that rally though. :frowning_face:

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Thanks, but Venhill doesn’t do a cable for my bike and a ready made cable isn’t going to fit anyway with my non-standard handlebars.

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Don’t know your bike spec but they do extend stock sizes to customer requirements for different bar convertions (and full on custom builds).

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Thanks again, I may see how much they charge for custom cables.

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When I changed my handlebars on the Mirage from dropped to upright, the custom cable was about £5 or £6 more than std from Venhill, that was a few years back.

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I’ve fixed up my cable now, with the birdcaging I did it’s probably not much different in quality than something Venhill would do (Famous last words!). That is, assuming they just use their own birdcaging tool for cables.

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I am sure it was Venhill for this, but a couple years ago they didn’t do some cables etc for my then Speed Triple 955…

I asked them if they wanted my originals to take a pattern from, in exchange for new ones for me - for free. And they said “yes”! I even got the old ones back.

Maybe worth asking them the same for your bike?

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Thanks for the suggestion. Hopefully I’ve now cracked the DIY cable thing, but if there’s a ‘next time’ I’ll seriously consider giving the job to the pros. Though my ‘reference’ cable will be one I made myself using Venhill supplied components mixed with OEM parts.