- both stem bolts were so rusted they broke off inside the stem
- the headset bearing was so fouled I could never get the bottom piece off the fork
- the skis are still perma-glued into their original position and will never come off or move
- the internal cable guides were fouled with sugary drinks & sweat
- and of course the usual visual blemishes from wear & tear
But I put that thing together and got out on the road pretty quickly, and for a lot less money than I'd expected. I solved most of the problems without too much fuss, although it took MONTHS to finally get the new headset to stop getting wobbly. I ended up drilling out both stem bolts and replacing them with electric-box bolts (you know: the kind that aren't technically "load-bearing" at all), and TBH the skis aren't that far off for me.
But I've never fully solved for the cable guides. One major design flaw in that bike is that all the guides enter the top tube via a shared access panel a couple inches behind the stem. That happens to be just about the exact spot where sweat drops from my chin, and I'm guessing that's also true of the former owner.
He was courteous enough to provide me with a spare access panel cover, but it's really just 4 vertical entry holes in a custom-shaped rubber plug: anything that hits it will pool in the stops and wick down into the guides. And boy howdy has it wicked.
After the first couple of rides, I completely lost the rear brake. I squeeze, it engages, and that's it. No release at all. Then I lost the front shifter to the opposite issue: no moving to the big ring.
At first I figured I'd just go 1x up front, but after a couple of dropped chains I decided to get this crap under control.
I pulled all the cables and, well, there's not much that you can fit into internal cable guides. So I used the cables themselves as floss, which freed up a bunch of gunk--enough to get the bike back on the road...for another month or so.
Round 2 involved pipe cleaners! My kids have lots of pipe cleaners for arts & crafts, so I jammed a few up and removed a whole lot more gunk from both ends of the brake cable housing, but still nothing was long enough to go all the way through.
Round 3 saw the introduction of "safe" cleaners like SimpleGreen, but we're at a point now where I'm having to replace the rear brake cable every 3 rides, and the front shifter almost as frequently. Then in my last TT I started to lose the rear shifter, having to shift down-twice-up-once to climb. These cables have less than 300 miles on them, pulling year-old 22-speed SRAM Force derailleurs.
So I'm at a bit of a loss on how to proceed. I punted and just bought a box of internal brake & shifter cables, but I really have no interest in recabling the bike every other ride (especially not that infernal TRP TTV rear brake). Last night I installed a power meter crankset, and when replacing the bottom bracket shell noticed that there are 2 access ports inside the frame to the internal guides. I cannot possibly imagine that they could be used to actually replace the guides, since they'd have to be fed up the downtube and then bent beyond their limits to fish under the bottom bracket, but I *can* access them.
Do I drill out the stops under the access panel and run full-length outers through the frame? That will work for the brake, but the shifters might be a bit more problematic--the front doesn't have a visible stop at all: only the exposed cable exits from a *very* small hole. But do the shifters matter? I could go eTap for that, but at incredible cost, which wouldn't make a huge amount of sense for a bike that only gets ~900 miles/year.
Will running outers through the frame cause rattling to the point where I'll end up throwing the bike off a bridge?
It does me a frustrate.
