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Just replacing the shifters on my bike. It had STI shifters and I'm putting thumb shifters on, the shifters have built in barrel adjusters.

The bike also came with barrel adjusters on the down tube, and there is an adjuster on the rear mech. This means that the cable for the rear mech will have three adjusters along its course.

Is there any reason to not have too many adjusters?

I could take the down tube adjusters off without it looking bad (they're not on bosses), but would like to keep them if there's no downside as they are a bit easier to operate that the ones built into the brakes.

Thanks

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  • 2
    Each adjuster has a certain amount of "slop", and it would begin to add up. But three is probably OK -- I'd be concerned with 5 or 6. – Daniel R Hicks Feb 5 '16 at 13:15
  • You could ditch the one on the downtube but you'd need a different piece to bolt to the frame to hold your housing. You can also tighten one of them all the way so it produces no wobble if you're worried. I'd use all 3 unless one of them was particularly bad. – BEVR1337 Feb 5 '16 at 17:20
  • Thanks. There's actually a seperate braze on that hold the adjuster that would also hold the brake cable on the down tube if I were to remove the adjuster. I've decided to use these ones and just keep the ones on the shifters locked off. – Rich Feb 5 '16 at 19:16
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    The issues is more when they're on bends, as they don't tend to be good at holding the cable straight so you get a kink in the cable which both impedes movement and wears things prematurely. But on a straight cable they should be fine, even if you line up 10 of them. Note that the cable is always in tension, so there's no hysteresis to worry about – Móż Feb 6 '16 at 6:10
  • You shouldn't get slop if the ends of each piece of outer cable is accurately cut, the friction between the outer and inner cable is low and there are ferrules on the ends of each piece outer cable to ensure a snug fit in each receptacle. – Emyr Feb 27 '16 at 8:19
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I don't think so, as long as you have correct cable housing and ferrules where you need them, there's no problem having multiple barrel adjusters. If you know how to use them then there's no downside to having three in my opinion.

Try it and let us know!

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