Hold my beer while I try this...

It seems like we've had an abundance of muddy races in the Northeast this 'cross season. Even the pre-season race I did in late August had mud, and we've had a handful of days where we were changing bikes once a lap. After all these races I was finding myself replacing derailleur cables and housing, trying to keep things in good working order. One of the downsides of having top-routed rear derailleur cables is that the bottom housing on the seat stay is in a perfect spot to collect and fill with mud. Even if you're not replacing all your housing after each muddy race, you often at least have to pull that piece of housing off and flush it, typically with some kind of aerosol lube (WD-40 works great, actually) to blast all the contamination out.

It seemed to me that I could have better shifting during the muddy races, as well as less maintenance after, if that piece of cable housing wasn't split. Split housing was originally done to decrease tension on the inner wire and increase shifting performance. But it also provides additional entry points for dirt, so there has to be a balance there. When I got my new Van Dessels, I decided to do a little experiment. When I built the bikes up, I didn't split the housing. Instead, I ran it straight from the top tube to the rear derailleur, and simply taped it to the seat stay, bypassing the cable stops:

I left it like that through my first race, which was dry, and noticed that the shifting was fine. I didn't perceive any decrease in performance as a result of not splitting the housing. But who wants to run cables taped to the seat stays? Cue the maniacal laughter:

Oh yes I did. I took my new Craftsman drill, and got to work drilling out the cable stops on my virgin Van Dessel frames, so that the cable housing would pass through the stops:

It doesn't take much, and you could probably do it with a file as well, if you can't get in there with the drill. But once the stops were drilled through, the cables fit perfectly:

Sure enough, once I made the modification, in Granogue we were faced with the worst mud I've seen since the USGP in Mercer last year. Enough that people were changing every 1/2 lap when possible. I snapped a quick phone cam pic after the race, and after the bike had been hosed off, showing exactly where the muck collects, and where it would be seeping into the cable housing, no matter what kind of fancy housing you were using:

So you can spend a fortune on those fancy cables and seals and such if you like. Or you can just run your normal, perfectly sufficient cable housing straight on through from the top tube to the rear derailleur without a split, and save yourself a lot of time and money.

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