Cables - which brands are good?

Thought it was groupo

Oh dang, new page disrupted the flow.

@Lolo Thanks for the advice. Something like these will do the trick then?

I'd think so!

@psg1ben every time I read this I want to scream. Also, "Strada Bianchi".

Looking to replace the brake and gear cables on a SRAM Force 22 bike. Apparently the gear cables should be 1.1mm diameter. Also, apparently coated cables (e.g. with PTFE) are rubbish because the coating degrades and creates friction etc.

What cable sets are there that are decent for SRAM? The SRAM slickwire seems to have some sort of coating.

If you do not like coated cables then you want stainless die-drawn/polished cables. Jagwire slick or Lifeline performance and fibrax pro polished are good examples of these.

I do not think you need worry about .1mm on the gear cable.

Am not trolling:

Have a few cables, shimano kit (both outer and inner)/decathlon own brand cables/clarke (£1 from halfords) and I can't feel the difference between the stainless steel. Are the extra slick worth the three times the price?

Probably not 3x, and if that's your comparison point. If it's an expensive coated cable then there's a different comparison calculation though, isn't there.

I don't think I've ever paid list for a cable mind you and if iirc you can get polished fibrax from eBay and Amazon at a reasonable price and find myself happy to pay a little more for the polished ones.

Clarks die drawn are about as smooth as you need without a coating (coatings are fine so long as you change them regular before they start shedding their load into internal routed areas like under the bb where its a pita to fish it all back out of).
They are 1.1mm od and have the smaller head so work in sram and campag.
. 1mm does make a difference in some of the older sram road shifters (tight around the guide under the hood) but newer ones i don't think are as fussy
And use decent outer, seen a lot of new road bikes come with jag wire lex/lex-sl, its crap, hardens very fast from uv and is far from smooth internally. Some of the aftermarket jag wire is good though

Am not a fan of ptfe coated cables, as brickman says the shedding of the coating is an issue. Found that replacing the inner and outer and cutting the outer properly so the outer liner doesn't get deformed improves things alot.

Wonder if adding graphite to the inner cable before instalation?

Graphite powder or even spray stuff probably fairly close to ideal tbh.
Depending on use of bike I squirt some gt85 and let it dry, small amount of shimano cable grease (high quality silicon grease, doesn't dry out) or just dry.

If I were to do anything, I'd just rub the cables with a carpenters pencil. Only because I have a box of 100 odd Leica branded pencils I was given that weren't given away at a trade show.

Coming from a motorbike background, cables used to be oiled. Then the cables were just inner cable and out with no inner liner just metal to metal. Then cable technology caught up and there became no point in lubricating a cable. If anything it could make things worse., by causing increased frixtion.

Find this in dirty applications (mtb/commuters left outside their whole lives), dry is better for these as they don't degrade as the lubricant sucks in dirt.
Get the odd bike (late gen 10s road shimano) where there is no option but to butter everything librally to make it work, so much stiction in those things