[Jayneflakes]

I am not amused.

You see the thing is, I have more than one bike. Yes, I have a hard tail XC race bike that I adore and like to play with when things get wet and muddy, but I also have a strange contraption of my own design. I designed this bike in 1998, I was younger, fitter, leaner and somewhat more of a tom boy than I am now. So said bike was a super fast, short chainstay road/mountain hybrid. Let me explain.

I love riding on the road, but I can't use road bikes because of the horrific pain I get in my hands from riding hoods (got a pair of 8sp STI if any one wants them cheap?), so I have a flat bar. I also run 26 inch wheels for their rugged strength with a pair of Conti slicks. The frame though is a master piece of shed engineering, a custom made super light steel affair made from Collumbus Max and Max OR. Fantastic.

Said bike was finished with Shimano XT, LX and Avid components with Gripshift X-Rays. Ten years on and all is still running sweet. Middle burn rings last year on the 93 LX chain set are gorgeous. Yet there is a problem.

The rubbers on my X-Rays have worn out. £40 shifters that are in perfect working order except for the rubbers. My place says no hope of spairs. The local bike shop sold their last pair in the summer and the nerds in the carp shop say I should "up-grade" to Alivio rapid fire!

So where do I find a set of Gripshift Rubbers for my top flight, MTB based Urban bike? I do not want to down grade the kit to Alivio (spits in horror at the thought of Rapid Fire, still has Thumb shifters on MTB, despite them being nearly a hundred years old!) nd modern kit is nine speed. A change to nine speed means new deraileurs, sprockets, chainset and shifters, all because of a piece of worn out rubber!