Jagwire Coloured Cable Housings

[surreypete]

I have a bit of a red/yellow theme on my bike, the frame is red, the stickers, pedals, grips, brake blocks etc are yellow, I've been considering changing the outer cables from black to yellow, when I last went out on a ride I broke the rear inner cable so now seems like a good time to swap them over.

Jagwire is a make that keeps popping on the searches I have done, it would appear they are a good make and are fitted as original equipment on a lot of bikes so I'll probably go for this make, seems you purchase it by the metre so just need to measure up what I have and get some.

I've noticed outer cables are listed differently, you get separate gear and brake cables, is this something to do with keeping tension on the gears?

Also do you think coloured cables are a bit extravagant?

I'm english so please excuse the spelling of colour/color lol

[nfmisso]

gear and brake wire inside the cable housing are different diameters. Better housings are sized for one and the other. Cheap housings are all the same size.

[Joe_W]

Brake housing is designed to compress. The force acting on it from a hard squeeze on the brakes are very high. Brake housing is basically a plastic encased "slinky" (spiral). Shifter cable is designed to stay at the same length, no matter what. Therefore it is mostly parallel wires straight along the cable, it is not designed to withstand much of pressure from the inside. Use this if you want to keep your shifting working correctly (the indexing depends on a constant length of the housing).
They are not exchangeable! Using shifter cable for the brakes will kill you! (well, probably only maim you a bit, but the kid you're hitting when the housing fails will be dead).
Sorry to be drastic, but brakes are an important issue for your own safety and that of others.

I guess the cheap housing Nigel is referring to is the "slinky" type (spirals). While they can work for brakes they are... not optimal... for shifters (well, you're looking at the Jagwire stuff right now, so that's a bit of a non-issue). And do yourself a favour: get a decent cable / housing cutter (I sort of managed without, but now that I have one I cannot think how!).

[surreypete]

Cheers guys, just what I wanted to know.

I remember the cheap nasty spiral housing from when I had Raleigh bikes as a child, it used to have lines along the outside of the casing which would always go brittle and split letting water in eventually leading to a rusted broken cable, it always looked quite nasty as well would turn an off white/hearing aid beige colour.

Gonna stick with the Jagwire stuff and do one housing, that way I can ride the bike around and decide if I like it before changing everything, also gonna get some new ferrules and take the time to overhaul and lube everything.

The black is good, suppose it doesn't show up mud or grease but just a little dull.