shifters or brifters?

^ i trust the seller in regards to his groupset, so hopefully that won’t be an issue.

Well, I think most of the salient points have been covered thus far, except [1], so to summarise…

[1] brifters = bad, lazy, USA inspired word. Call them STIs

  1. of a similar age I go the Suntour Superbe Pro, as it’s likely to be something you can make money on if needed, holds its value and doesn’t wear out as easily. Of an age I’ve seen tons of worn out, clapped out 600 series STIs and they’re not pretty, nor fun to use.

  2. Having said that, STIs are great, and win hands down, but you might do better buying 9 speed units (Ultegra, DuraAce) and adjusting out the 9th click (8 speed freehub on back, n’est pa?

  3. What you want (downtube or STI or Ergo) really depends on your style of riding, intended use etc etc, and we know not much about that. Spirito is right when he says a lot of riders change gears too often, too early, too much… but that’s only behaviour which can be learned or unlearned, it’s not nor should it be a deal breaker between standards of equipment. Getting lost in Buttfuck with a broken shifter is a dealbreaker though, if that’s what your cycling involves.

  4. Oh, by the way, DT shifters with Superbe Pro brake levers will be about 300+ grams lighter than 600 series STIs. At least.

  5. And they look nicer.

  6. And you can lean nonchalantly against your bike at the end of the ride, try to stuff a lung back down into the chest cavity and wheeze “Superbe Pro, man. Best groupset ever made, and this is a complete gruppo”.

  7. Or you could sell it to me. Or Jolan. Fukkit, I don’t really care. Have fun

well, there’s my vote.

We prefer “goofy, but lovable…”

see i love the term brifters instead of some bullshit technically made up crap like STIs.
Brake+Shifter = Brifter. Fucking genious.

And strictly speaking, STI is only relevant to Shimano right (Shimano Total Integration)?

brifter always reminds me of brinner for some reason.

sorry i have nothing useful to add to this thread.

You don’t wanna know how often Sime uses brake cleaner, and for what…

If I have a customer waiting and I need to clean grease off my face quickly, it’s perfectly acceptable!

Yeh. Campag calls theirs Ergo. No idea what the preferred nomenclature is for SRAM.

Brifter is a great word, and non-marque-specific.

Shifter & brakes = Shakes. (Credit to Leigh)

Coulda been a supermodel (according to me).

Shif-kes™® ??

Careful, look stylish never got anybody up a hill (including me). I’m the biggest retro grouch and snob but if you only have the one road bike and its meant to be ridden all over the place then choosing a bike because the equipment looks cooler is putting the cart before the horse.

It’s not an about face but I will concede there have been some improvements in modern groups. Brakes for one, modern derailleurs really can do it all these days, and sealed bottom brackets make life easier. Modern cranks not so much … they’re now uniformly ugly and with much wider Q factors, hubs are about on par to what they used to be, and the extra gears are kinda handy but have lots more duplicates. Speaking of which chains, cogs and cassettes wear out more frequently than they did with 7 or 8 speed stuff. That leaves shifters … if you’re at your limit brifters can be a godsend. As long as they’re working it makes sense to opt for such but they can be finicky and can ghost shift just when you don’t need it.

We already hashed what happens when they go wrong but if they’re working then it’s far easier to focus on the ride … you won’t be much slower on Superbe but it’s like driving a car from the 70’s in modern traffic … you gotta think ahead a little more than if driving a modern car. You can also fix it yourself and it’s easy to maintain but you won’t find parts at your local bike store.

So I vote for both. It’s nice to ride an old bike and feel a part of it, then again it’s nice to ride a modern bike and just press buttons too.

Didn’t Lance (and pleny of other pros in the early 90’s) ride with one of each?

lance rode a couple of early tours with a DT shifter for his front mech, due to the weight saving, which was allegedly 13 grams. later varieties of “brifter” eliminated the weight saving, and thus lance gave his last DT shifter away.

You mean you schift by feel

//youtu.be/vqODZTOY81Y

Here is a pearl that I realised the other day…

I think (purely from a logic stand point, no historical knowledge) the reason people rode such big gears in the hills in the days of merckx and DT shifters was that they needed to be able to react to attacks without changing gears… You can’t ride on the front in a 39 x 19 and expect to cover moves in the tour in that gear, so either you have a shifter that can get you out of it and into something more suitable (which is what happens these days) or you sit in a bigger gear, lower cadence, and if someone jumps, you grunt and catch back up (DT shifter days). It would have been very, very easy to put lower gears on pro bikes, but they would only have been really useful as part of a breakaway, and showing up to the start line with a Rally RD instead of an NR would be laying some cards on the table for sure… I’d love to have seen that sort of thing happen, actually!

So, to my mind, the move to STI and later ergopower, zap, mechtronic, Di2 meant that riders can now be lungs with legs attached, spinning easy gears on climbs and only grunting when necessary, it changed the physiology of riders. Which then makes me think, maybe it wasnt really Lance that made the world spin higher gears, it was just the peloton and their coaches changing the game to an STI specific one… and looking back at pre-Lance Ironman footage, those guys were spinning at around 100rpm for sure, and sometimes (in the case of newby fraser) a lot faster, all because they didnt need to worry about reacting in a jiffy.

Far out I make sense!

Best post ever.

I have 105 shifters to a 600 rear derailleur, feels good man.
But I kinda miss downtube shifters.

Just take the brifters!

ok, for those of you that own one bike with downtube shifters then, how much of a hassle is it climbing and needing to shift down a gear? or is it just a case of being in the right gear from the beginning?

do you wish you had brifters??