In addition to sawing through the side of the cable ferrule, the front derailleur cable began breaking at the edge of the derailleur arm:
Tour Easy Front Derailleur Cable – frayed
It wouldn’t have survived another ride!
Dan pointed out CNC machined aluminum cable clamps are a thing, but those are sized for larger frame tubes than the 1.0 inch steel used on our Tour Easy ‘bents and, although I’ve shimmed everything else on the frame, I wanted to tweak the cable angle to match the arm on the derailleur.
A bit of OpenSCAD wrangling produces a likely candidate:
Front Derailleur Cable Clamp – Slic3r
That’s a bulked-up revision of the prototype:
Tour Easy Front Derailleur Cable Clamp – installed
Done up in orange PETG, it demonstrated the idea worked, but two perimeter threads wrapped around 15% infill isn’t quite up to the task. Note the split along the screw on the far half and various irregularities around the ferrule.
The cable angle isn’t quite right, either, as the proper compound angle would, alas, aim the cable into the pedal crank. The bulky bushings get in the way of putting the ferrule where it should be with the screws aligned in a tidy manner, so I must get used to the jaunty angle.
The bulkier version, done with 50% infill and four perimeter threads, has the same tilt angle, but the ferrule sits further from the screws:
Tour Easy Front Derailleur Cable Clamp V2 – rear quarter view
The view from the left side shows the cable angles slightly to the rear, but the smaller angle should make it happier:
Tour Easy Front Derailleur Cable Clamp V2 – side view
Probably should have used black PETG. Next time, for sure!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
