chapotraphouse

This bicycle shifter pull conversion box is neat as fuck and would be a major pain in the ass to build at home without 3D-Printing

To offer some explanation here; most modern bicycle shifters are indexed, i.e. you click some sort of trigger and it pulls the cable a set amount to shift one (or more) gears up (or down).

Problem is depending on manufacturer and model this pull length is different by a bit and if your shifter doesn't match up with your rear cassette or parallelogram rear shifter you just get the crunchy gears because the rear shifter keeps shifting inbetween gears.

with this and some math you can print a conversion box that adjusts pull length so everything works with everything. It does require you to use two cables but it's a boon if you wanna rig some shit together

I've also seen other useful appliances there, broken dust covers for shifting parts which aren't structuturally important but you do not want the fine mechanics of your shifter to get gummed up. Sure, you could tape it up or whatever but manufacturing a new one yourself seems cool. Also seen this for other replacement parts out of plastic that were either never manufactured or have long gone out of stock.

3D-Printing feels like it's a great side hobby to other hobbies but if you do it yourself, barring maybe doing some cool prototypes, it just ends up at "wow, look at this sick Rick skull with a weed!"