Fibrax Powerglide Sport stainless steel brake cable

Fibrax Powerglide sport stainless steel sport brake cables are a nice surprise. Cheap as chips, they'll do old faithful proud without impairing the performance of your sportier Sunday ride. However, be sure to leave cable stretch to do its thing overnight, adjusting and snipping come the morning.

In common with their Powershift siblings they feature Teflon coated, nylon outers - available in the same black, blue, white, silver or red. Those of you with an eye for colour coordination and going in for simultaneous derailleur and brake cable set replacement should keep them separate to avoid potentially serious confusion. The inners are bog-standard affairs measuring a generous 180cm and with snip-to-suit barrel/pear nipples. This makes them perfect workshop staples for multi bike households or longer tours/social outings where some folks prefer drop and others, flat bars.

The supple casings are easily cut using snips but give the cut end a quick buff on the grinding wheel. In the interests of thorough testing, I installed ours dry and was suitably impressed by their deliciously smooth action, although I'd be inclined to flush the outers with a Teflon spray before installing them on older bikes without slotted guides and/or tricky runs. Ten pumps of the levers summoned cable stretch so following my quit while ahead philosophy, I left them overnight, making remedial adjustment and trimming their ends the next morning. Soldering/gluing is preferable to crimping since this encourages frayed ends – if you can be bothered.

They've been extremely dependable whether scrubbing off a little speed hurtling along the open road, or performing do or die emergency stops through congested town centres without any obvious loss of modulation or feel compared with a premium set.

Verdict

Great value everyday cables, but for best results allow to stretch overnight before snipping.