Maybe you’ve been there too: your hands wrapped around a pair of Shimano road shifters that are gunked up and clumsy in their performance, clearly nearing the end. When the bad shifts (or non-shifts) finally get too much to bear, maybe you unwrap the bar tape and pull the levers off, and maybe you take them apart to see if you can solve the problem.
In doing so, you probably find another problem – there is a fiendishly complicated series of tiny screws and springs and pawls inside that all work together in a way that makes great shifting possible, when it works, and becomes a complete nightmare when it doesn’t. A lot of the time, the answer tends to be a new pair of shifters.
But what if there was a better, more sustainable way, and what if it could even help cyclists in the developing world?
For Brisbane-based Escape Collective member Julian Del Beato, the ageing Shimano shifter has become something of a passion project: through his Shifter Upcycling Project he’s been restoring old units for close to four years. Each shifter is a little puzzle of its own: some have chewed-up cables, some have broken lever blades, some have malformed little springs inside them. There’s a steady process to taking them apart and putting them back together honed through repetition and a learned mechanical knowledge of what’s going on in there – but sometimes the shifters can be saved and returned. And if they can’t, those shifters can donate their guts to another shifter in need.
It started, as you can probably imagine, with a broken shifter. “I tinker with my bikes all the time, and one of my shifters had stopped working,” Del Beato told me. “I thought, I’ll try and fix it. And I tend to go down rabbit holes. So it just went from there.”
There were challenges to overcome: “it’s quite daunting to work on them at first, and they’re not made to be easily serviceable. That’s just clearly not the intention,” Del Beato said. There’s also limited information online (apart from a couple of videos from similar tinkerers) about the detailed processes involved in a shifter repair, meaning he needed to figure a good portion of it out by trial and error.
And even then, although many principles are similar within brands, the steps aren’t necessarily the same from model to model – and nor are the vulnerabilities. While Campagnolo and SRAM shifters are at least somewhat serviceable and supported by spare parts from the brand or third-party sellers like Ratio Technologies, Shimano is a different beast.
Shifters from the Japanese company with product codes ending with 600 (5600, 6600, 7600 – 10-speed Shimano models dating back to around 2007) typically fail at the pawl; the next generation of shifters ending in 700 tend to fail at the return spring. We’re now several generations past either of those, and Del Beato said with new iterations “they are becoming less serviceable – there’s a couple of things Shimano does with some of the newer ones; they’ve got some kind of special thread where if you back out the nut that holds the shifter assembly internals together, it strips the thread, so it’s a single-use thread. So that’s annoying.”
Because of the differences between generations of shifters “it takes ages” to learn a new model – ”it can take a whole weekend for one to really learn it, but then you get better as you go.”
Having recently tried (and failed) to resurrect an older-generation Shimano shifter, I can relate to the word ‘annoying’ – in fact, I’d probably add some other choice words to that description. Del Beato chuckled as he acknowledged that “it’s not all strawberries and cream – they’re very finicky things.” One shifter he repaired recently had to be taken apart and reassembled 10 times before it was working again. “It’s not always obvious what’s wrong – sometimes it is, but I just couldn’t get this one right,” he said. The sense of satisfaction of saving a shifter, however, makes it worthwhile: “you feel like you’ve achieved something, for sure.”
For a task as time-consuming and potentially frustrating as a shifter repair is, it’s perhaps surprising that Del Beato isn’t trying to monetise his labour – it’s more of a hobby than anything else, driven by altruism. Of the shifter repairs he’s done (he estimates around 20, which isn’t huge, but a lot of the mental exertion is learning processes and his efficiency is building), many have been returned to their owners at no charge. Others may have been beyond restoration but have been able to be salvaged for parts, building a reserve of spare bits to repair other shifters. And others still have been donated to Masaka Cycling Club in Uganda, where an old shifter means a whole lot more than it does in the first world.
Ross Burrage – another Australian, and who has a deep involvement in Masaka Cycling Club having established it as a foundation – has spent the last six years trying to support the aspiring cyclists of East Uganda, fundraising, and ferrying equipment across via his regular trips to the region with the philanthropic Cotton On Foundation. What started as the donation of one bike has grown into many: “We’ve got literally 60 bikes over there now that have been donated by fans of the project from all around the world,” Burrage told me. In the process, the scope of the club has been able to expand from “10 kids on the side of the street” racing local bikes into one of the dominant forces in Ugandan cycling, bridging gender divides and being a beacon for cycling development in East Africa.
But that steady success has also introduced some other challenges – maintaining a growing fleet of bikes of various vintages and degrees of mechanical sophistication, some of which are inevitably beginning to break, frequently at the shifter. “In terms of installing shifters, we’ve got the capability of doing that and repairing all these bikes, it’s just that we don’t have enough shifters to fix a whole bundle of bikes that we’ve got there to get them back on the road,” Burrage explained. “For some of them, a right shifter or a left shifter doesn’t work, but the riders are still riding it, just struggling away. I would love to get my hands on any shifters that we can – we could get many, many bikes back on the road.”
In a first-world country like Australia, a broken shifter is an annoyance, seeing as Shimano has discontinued 10-speed shifters using the old pull ratio, but there’s at least a used market or access to alternatives from brands like Sensah – and it’s unlikely to be a financially crippling exercise for the owner. You can’t say the same thing about Uganda or elsewhere in the developing world. “There’s no bike shops on the high street corner in Uganda you can go to and pick up spares – there might be a few locations in [Ugandan capital city] Kampala, but very very limited,” Burrage said. “Don’t imagine a bike shop in Uganda to be like a bike shop in Australia, where you’re likely to be able to get what you want or order in what you want. Spares are incredibly hard to get.”
Through his day job, Burrage is in Uganda multiple times a year, which means that he and his colleagues are able to ‘mule’ in bikes and bike parts to “close that equipment supply gap” – donations that make a radical difference to the riding aspirations of the Ugandan cycling community. “It’s the crucial bit. You know, two decades ago when Kenyan runners burst onto the scene in athletics – they’re dominating the sport today. All they needed is a pair of sneakers; they’ve got unbelievable talent and they just need the equipment.” A level playing field would, Burrage said, bridge the last 10% “to showcase this talent in Africa.”
Showcasing African talent can take several forms: there are the talent identification possibilities of online racing for African riders (as I’ve written about previously), and there have been equipment donations for Masaka Cycling Club from within the industry from brands big (like Trek) and small (like Serk, with the support of the Beijing cycling community). But a large part of it is, by necessity, still grassroots-led: donations from people who have a few dollars to spare, or components lying around in the garage that in a first-world country might be sold for spare change on Facebook Marketplace, but in Uganda could be the missing ingredient in building up a bike. “We need a wide variety of anything and everything – left shifters, right shifters, even if they’re single shifters, because they don’t normally fail together,” Burrage said
Which brings us back to Escape member Julian Del Beato, tinkering from his home in Brisbane, slowly taking apart Shimano shifters and putting them back together. Sometimes he’s fixing them for friends or for the less-fortunate, and sometimes he just repairs them and sends them back as a kind of ‘pay it forward’ thing within the cycling community. But he’s also sent repaired donated shifters off to Ross Burrage, which have found their way across to east Africa, and he’s keen to do that more.
“My theory is that people must have shifters broken all over the place. They’re just sitting there,” Del Beato told me. “If I can get my hands on them and the [original owners] don’t need them – I mean, I don’t care if they want them back for themselves, I’m OK with that – but if they want to donate parts and they’re happy for me to be a part of repairing them for Masaka Cycling Club, then all the better.”
And just like that, old shifters from one side of the world can find a happy second life, in a place where they’ll be appreciated in ways that are hard for their original owners to understand.
-To send (broken) Shimano shifters to the Shifter Upcycling Project, visit the Facebook page.
-To donate (working) parts and equipment to Masaka Cycling Club, visit their website (for non monetary donations, select one-time donation > custom amount > write a message).
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