Some things in life hit you head-on, smack, straight in the face. No warning, their full force coming to bear in an instant. Other things in life are sneakier. They creep up on you slowly, gradually and by the time you’re aware of their presence, it’s too late, they’ve taken hold and the damage is done … gear cables are sneaky like that, but really it’s not their fault. We’ve all done it – you fit a new gear cable and you’re full of good intent but somewhere along the road to hell, that good intention vanishes along with all the other promises you regularly make yourself. Six months down the line, your shifting is a shadow of its former silky smooth self, it’s now a mixture of stiff, gritty and notchy. Eventually you realise that the cable fairies won’t be visiting your shed any time soon, so you reluctantly replace the cable again. With your task complete you stand back to admire your handiwork and once more, you vow to take better care of things this time round.
![]() |
Pick a colour to match your bike if you’re OCD or artistic. |
Wouldn’t it be good if there was something you could do to prevent this sorry state of affairs from happening on a regular basis? Okay, so you could always keep the promise to maintain things but we know that’s not going to happen, don’t we? No, what’s required is some way to keep your cables in tip-top condition, that demands only minimal input from you; because the less you have to do, the greater the chance of you actually bothering to do it – am I correct?
![]() |
Lubing your cable can be done faster than you can say, “can’t be bothered”. |
Seeing you’ve probably looked at the pictures before reading my carefully crafted words, you’re no doubt already aware that I’m going to suggest fitting an in-line cable oiler – a Cable Lubie to be precise. The Lubie is an aluminium sleeve with a ‘window’ machined into it and covering that window is a piece of clear, ‘self-healing’ tube. When you want to show your cables a little love, you simply pierce the tube with the needle of the supplied bottle, give it a gentle squeeze until you can see the window’s full and that’s it. Your inner cable is now happily gliding through a bath of oil, rather than grinding through a layer of grime.
Even for the mechanical primates amongst us, fitting a Lubie shouldn’t take more than ten minutes and once in place, lubing your cable is literally a five second task. It’s up to you to decide what type of oil to use but my advice would be something light and thin rather than thick and greasy – Simply because it’s what I had and because I’m tight, I chose some cheap universal cycle oil and it appears to be performing very well. Some cable oilers use the contents of an aerosol as the lubricating agent, which is fine just as long as you choose the right one … mentioning no names; but there’s a few which people believe to be lubricants but are in fact solvents and work much better as degreasants than they do lubricants. I’m assuming you can see where that path might take us?
Prices start at £9.99 for a single cable kit which includes everything required except for oil. Besides gear cables, Lubies can also be fitted to dropper and Poploc cables and I’m really hoping that there’ll be a brake cable version available before too long.
Get your Lubie HERE in a colour to match your bike, eyes or socks and make gritty, sticky cables someone else’s problem.
I've gone fully sealed on old faithful and it's made a massive difference. I can't believe how much easier it is to switch gears than the nightmare it used to be (especially when it rusted in on the second day of a multi day ride).