Shimano 6800 right brifter repair

A few weeks back, I was in the embarrassing situation of having several of my bicycles out of commission at the same time. Voyage Voyage (Ti Travel bike) had been disassembled for installation of SRAM Etap drivetrain; the Sky Blue Parlee's right shift cable had broken; by 2012 Canyon CF had gone onto the trainer for Powercranks ...

I first tried to fix the shifter cable, as that was the fastest to get back in service.  But when I tried to install the new cable, it seemed that there was still some cable and the cable head stuck inside, and the shifter would go more than one click toward the big cassette. I quickly removed the new cable (fortunately it was still removable and unblemished).

In the end, I removed the shifter from the bike, and ended up taking off all the visible screws and covers until I could find the problem. There was an inch-long piece of frayed cable still in place. Once that was removed, it was easy to put the parts back on. And now I know that I could have left alone the front portion of the component (I removed 5 screws in total) and done this with only a single screw removal -- the one that secures two plates on the bottom of the brifter near where it attaches to the handlebars. Unfortunately, I could not find a good youtube video for repair of THIS model of Shimano brifter.

The Shimano Dura Ace 9000 / Ultegra 6800 are reported to have a common issue with cables fraying and breaking in two ... but at least they are repairable, unlike some earlier generations of brifter!

The culprit.

Brifters -- SRAM 1, Shimano 0

Last week as I was heading home one evening on the Yamabushi, I tried to downshift hard, pulling in the right hand brifter of my SRAM Rival double tap derailleur.  I heard the sound of a cable pulling apart, metal threads shredded, and rear shifting done for the evening.

No time to replace the cable that evening ... and I would not get around to trying until beginning of this week.  When I did, I could see that there was still at least a couple centimeters of cable attached to the brifter.  But I could not pull this severed cable out.  The repair was again delayed.

This morning, got the right tools and carefully removed the 3 screws securing the hard plastic plate on the inside of the brifter, then tried again.

Wow.  It was easy to dig out the parts, and to see out the brifter works.  Installing a new cable also was easy.  So unlike the two times I have gotten severed shifter cable stuck in a Shimano 7800/6600 series brifter and been left with an unrepairable piece of metal, plastic and rubber, the SRAM Rival double tap brifter looks incredibly resilient.

Well used, grimy SRAM brifter with severed shifter cable end.

To be fair, I have not (yet) had any broken cables with the Shimano 6800 brifters I have on the Canyon Shark ... so all my negative experience is with older 7800/6600 series.  But so far, SRAM has the edge in terms of each of repair and reliability.  Aesthetics also.

What don't I like about the SRAM brifters?  The rubber hood covers wear out way too fast.  I used this occasion to replace them with a set of spares I got a few months back.  But my SRAM Red brifter hoods are tearing as well.