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TIL the hard way that brake cable ferrules are not all the same size
Spent a full afternoon last Tuesday fighting a sticky rear brake on a customer's touring bike. New cables, new housing, cleaned everything. Still felt gritty. Finally measured the ferrules with calipers and realized the ones I grabbed were 5mm instead of 5.5mm. They seated okay but pinched the inner wire slightly. Swapped them out and it was perfect in ten minutes. Has anyone else burned time on tiny fitting details like this?
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max_schmidt771mo ago
Wait, were you using a housing cutter with the right size hole, or did you just eyeball it when you crimped them on? I've seen guys swear by certain cutters that actually flare the housing and mess with how the ferrule sits. Also, did you check the ferrule on both ends of that rear run, or just the one that felt gritty? Sometimes the one at the lever side is the one that gets overlooked, and it causes a drag you only feel at the end of the pull. That 0.5mm difference sounds tiny, but it's enough to bend the wire trajectory and make everything feel like sand in a bearing. I'm curious if the customer's frame had a specific routing guide that made the angle worse, because that would've made me pull my hair out too.
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