Thursday 27 January 2011

How to Shimergo your bike

Campagnolo ERGO levers can work with a SHIMano drivetrain, mechs and cassette. In an earlier post here, I showed some photos of a bike that I had converted to Shimergo. Now I'm going to explain how I did it. Here's a photo of the bike as it was originally. The brake levers are cheap and nasty.

The plan was to replace the brake levers and down tube shifters with Campagnolo Ergo levers (Veloce 10 QS Ergo Levers, from around 2009 vintage). The following links are essential reading:

The CTC's Chris Juden on the subject: http://www.ctc.org.uk/desktopdefault.aspx?tabid=3946
CX Magazine on it: http://cxmagazine.com/shimano-campagnol ... patibility
10spd, 8spd success story: http://bikesarethesolution.wordpress.co ... onversion/

Original set up was as follows:

Cassette: Shimano 9 speed, 12-23
Rear mech: Shimano Tiagra
Front mech: Campag Mirage
D/T Levers: Shimano Dura ace
Chainset: Stronglight Impact Triple 28-38-48

According to the above links, the lever swap should work with a little trick to play on the rear mech, namely, the cable attachment bolt washer to be spun round - or "hubbubed".

There's a lot more writing out there, but the above three really convinced me. Plus I saw a forum posting somewhere in which a cyclocross racer reported a season's worth of racing using 10spd Campy shifters on 9spd Shimano with hubbub. That clinched it for me!


Old faithful Shimano Dura Ace down tube levers (9 speed indexed). I'll end up removing these (gulp!)

These cheepo brake levers are going to go too. I'll be happy about that!

First step is to take the old bar tape and levers off.

New 10 Speed Campy levers on. I needed to buy a Torx T25 tool for the main lever clamp bolt. The Veloce levers feel superb in the hand, almost perfectly shaped hoods.


Cable housing fitted for brake and gears, taped down ready for handlebar tape.

The old down tube levers were replaced with Campagnolo resin cable stops. Although inexpensive, these turned out to be simply brilliant. So easy to adjust, even while riding.


This is the hubbub clamping arrangement. All you do is rotate the clamp hook, run the cable over the hook, and tighten the bolt as shown. Dead easy.



Swanky new bar tape. Now, to my total amazement, both the new levers worked beautifully with NO adjustment needed at all. After a few days riding, I had to adjust some cable tension from the down tube cable stops, but that was it. I believe in Shimergo now!

Campagnolo levers added a touch of modern class to a good ol' Reynolds 531C road bike. Apart from being able to change gear without moving hands from the bars, another benefit was improved braking performance.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mr Glider,

    My name is Januar. I live in Jakarta, Indonesia

    I want to share my experience in shimergo.

    I have roadbike that fitted with 2011 10spd Campy Veloce with comapct crank and 11-28 cassette, medium rear mech.

    I prepare 10spd Shimano XT cassette, 9spd XT rear mech and JTek Shift Mate Model 3 to mating them with Campy shifter. I did this at my local bike shop

    First setup :
    XT cassette, XT rear mech and JTek shift mate. The result in disappointing, shifting not smooth, skip for one or two cog.

    Second setup :
    XT cassette, Campy medium rear mech and without JTek shift mate. Suprisingly the result is good. Smooth shifting. The key is at rear mech, they adjusted it in order to made it not strech forward extremly due to largest cog. There's a bolt in the front of pulley to adjust the position of the rear mech (in shimano located in the rear of the mech

    Sunday, I will test it in a uphil section.

    Thank you very much for your blog about shimergo.

    If you have question immediately, you could contact me at januarESA then at twitter.com or email januar74 then at gmail.com

    best regard
    Januar

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  2. Thank you Januar for the information. How did your further testing go? I think you are referring to what Shimano would call the B screw on the rear mech. So, is your setup 10speed Campag levers, Campag (unsure what speed) rear mech and Shimano 10speed cassette? If so, according to Chris Juden's tables, there should be a 0.2mm discrepancy on each change, in other words 2mm total as you traverse the whole block. Don't you get any chain grating in some gears?

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