I'm currently building up a Van Nicholas Zion Rohloff frame which they kindly supplied when my Redwood cracked. All going well until I started fitting new gear cables. The old outers have a spiral cores like brake cables but are too thick to fit into the guides on the frame so I'm thinking of using gear outers which are thinner. Is there any reason not to?

Nope, that's what we used on our tandem.

Agreed. They use brake outer as standard because it’s more flexible. No reason you can’t use gear outer if you want.

Normal Gear outer will do, Rohloffs are built up using special 1.1mm gear cables, fibrax and Sram do them. The official Rohloff cable are 5mm like brake cables.

Thanks for the replies, the issue is that the new frame is Rohloff specific and has double width guides for the push-pull cables but they're really tight for 5mm brake cables. It's also nigh on impossible to fit any sort of bar bag/roll as the cables arc around the front end and having swept back bars doesn't help. So I've fitted a plate in front of the headtube and use V brake noodles to give me the tight angle I need. Given that a high proportion of Rohloffs are used on tourers it seems strange they don't design the cable routing to accommodate bar bags.

Loki wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2019 9:03 pm Normal Gear outer will do, Rohloffs are built up using special 1.1mm gear cables, fibrax and Sram do them. The official Rohloff cable are 5mm like brake cables.

Those 1.1mm gear cables are the ones Rohloff supply but any standard gear cable will work just fine.

pistonbroke wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:04 pm Given that a high proportion of Rohloffs are used on tourers it seems strange they don't design the cable routing to accommodate bar bags.

But those tourers are generally using Old school Ortleib bar bags which don’t cause nearly as many cabling issues as bar rolls.

My solution on the ECR was to use noodles into the shifter, you will have to shim the ends for a good fit, I used some aluminium from a drinks can. All the junctions were then heat shrunk to keep it neat and water out. Worked perfectly with good shifting.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I too use noodles to sharpen the bend at the shifter end. I also found a couple of very flexible sections that come with Sram Red road levers which sit nicely behind the aluminium plate I've fashioned to rest the bar roll against and mount my kemo switch. Eagle eyed ones may see the switch peeking out behind the plate. Had a maiden voyage on Saturday and everything worked well, if anything the shifting is lighter than on my previous frame.

I've not had any bother this year just squashing the cables behind my harness and dry bag... Looked dodgy at first but shifting hasn't been affected in the slightest...

Have you over engineered a solution, with the noodles and that, to a problem that you thought existed or did you have shifting problems with the "ahh sod it just squash them behind" method I've used?

I guess it could be argued that the plate created the problem but I wanted somewhere neat, permanent and accessible to mount the Kemo switch which is a 30mm square box unlike some of the other more expensive setups which fit inside the steerer tube. I'm actually very pleased with the final outcome as there's no danger of cables rubbing and I've rigged up a quick release buckle making fitting the bar roll very easy.

How is that plate working at the bottom? Is it below the crown race? Or is it oversized, so sitting outside the race? Can't tell from the picture, but in any case an interesting solution.

I used a hole saw to drill a 44mm hole in the plate and fitted it between the crown and race, the fork had a longish section below the taper so the crown race still fits tight enough. So far so good and it's pretty secure. The forks don't have a hole in the crown otherwise I might have considered lengthening the plate and putting a top cap expander up there.