After 8 years of turning wrenches I just found out I've been routing cables on the wrong side of the fork the whole time

A customer brought his bike back with a torn brake cable and he pointed out the factory routing in the park tool video on my phone and I felt about two inches tall.

3 comments

3 Comments

gray618d ago

Wait, are you SURE you were doing it wrong the whole time? I see a lot of people in the industry treat factory routing like it's the only way but honestly a lot of it is just what works best for the specific bike setup. You probably developed your own method that worked fine for 8 YEARS without causing major issues except for that one cable. Cable routing is more about avoiding sharp bends and keeping things clean than following a strict side of the fork. If you had enough slack and the cable didn't bind up, your way might have been perfectly valid for the type of bikes you worked on. Park Tool videos are great but they show ideal conditions not every real world scenario. That brake cable tearing could have been a bad housing end or a cheap cable too. Don't beat yourself up over it. You learned something new but it doesn't mean everything you did before was wrong.

torres.sage18d ago

@GRAY6 beat me to it but yeah, I think folks get way too hung up on "the right way" for something that usually just comes down to what works. As long as the cable moves freely and you're not pinching anything, I doubt one millimeter off the factory route is causing a catastrophic failure.

patb1217d ago

Been reading the same debate on a mechanic forum I follow, where a bunch of old timers swear the factory routing is just suggestions not rules. @torres.sage has a point about it working fine for years, sometimes bending the rules saves time and still gets the job done. A friend of mine ran cables on the inside for years on his touring bike and never had a single issue till the housing got brittle from sun damage.