The little red pointer inside my Tour Easy’s rear SRAM Grip-Shift broke. Back in the old days, this wouldn’t be a problem, as we used friction shifters on the downtube (as we rode to school, uphill, in the snow, both ways) and knew by feel which gear was engaged. But that was then, this is now, and fixing things is what I do anyway.
The pointer turned out to be a thin plastic strip, molded into an L with a domed arch over the pointy end. It simply rests in a slot in the shifter mechanism, held in place by the transparent cover (which, mercifully, came off without dismantling the bike or even removing the cable).
I made a similar replacement from thin red-anodized aluminum, but that didn’t work out at all. The mechanism snaps from one gear to the next at roughly the speed of heat, accelerating the pointer so rapidly that the aluminum deformed. Score one for plastic!
Actually, I made two aluminum pointers. Prototype One vanished into the Sargasso heap in front of the Solvents & Lubricants Shelves at the first upshift; that’s when I discovered just how much snap that shifter applies to the pointer. Made another one, installed the cover, and then discovered it wasn’t going to work.
So I applied some Plastruct solvent adhesive to the broken plastic bits, lined the parts up on my crusty surface plate, applied a bit of gentle pressure overnight, and in the morning had a like-new pointer. It installed just fine and works like the original.
Solvent-bonded plastic is supposed to be just about as strong as the original material. We’ll see just how long this repair lasts…
Pop Quiz: Do you know the first four derivatives of position w.r.t. time?
Answer: Velocity, acceleration, jerk, and snap. You could look it up…
Update: Alas, the repair lasted only about two weeks before failing at the same spot. Some deep rummaging produced a similar (but more thoroughly dead) SRAM shifter. Turns out the pointers are similar, so I salvaged the older one. Ya gotta have stuff… and remember it, too, which is becoming something of a challenge.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
I Have Been Told that the next two are “crackle” and “pop”.