Well, Bill I am not sure if indispensable is the word I would choose, but they (index shifters) certainly are butt saver sometimes.
The answer though, at least for the time being is Microshift. Surly's have come with'em for years. Unfortunately, that's pretty much it. To me the issue is not indexing as much as it is these overly complex, non user serviceable shifting contraptions of the last 25 years. This all makes me think that maybe electronic shifting ain't really that bad!??? My recently built Crust Scapegoat has a 10 speed SRAM "trigger" shifter. I'd like to say I hate it, but truth is it's not that bad. I just don't have too much faith that it'll hold up very well. Very simply shifting is shifting, I've done it 10s of thousands of times and I really don't derive a high amount of satisfaction from doing it right. Exactly the opposite really; I expect to do it right & I am just mildly annoyed if it goes awry for some reason. Increasingly, my fear is that the parts to build a Rivendell are going to go from being commonplace to sort of proprietary. As they move further from the main stream. The choices start to become fewer and more expensive. Finding a 650B disc rim or wheel set is falling off a log easy; rim brake on the other hand, although not too difficult is hard to do inexpensively and it's only likely to get worse. Increasing the front center of a Clem cockpit, may seem fairly innocent, until you think about putting handlebars on it. Your gonna need bars with more sweep back & really nobody else makes those, only Rivendell. This isn't so much a complaint as an observation. Manual shifters in cars sadly are not making a comeback, they've just held on & I hope they continue to. But, I'm afraid, especially with the advent of electric cars their days are numbered. More & more CVTs are replacing automatics as the default transmission and that's pretty much the way it's going to go. It's a short script at this point. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/1443deb5-0754-4167-97e8-43f26b9b32b0%40googlegroups.com.
