Teardown (well, not really) - Shimano RSX Shifters

Like the title says. This is a lie for now.Before I get there let me back up though.I have two bicycles. The old one is a 1996 (?) Trek 1220. The new one is a 2006 Specialized Roubaix.The Trek is an aluminum framed bike while the Specialized is Carbon.The real reason I upgraded to the Specialized is that the shifter on the old Trek -- back in 2006 -- stopped working right. It was already 10 years old and I was tired of getting jarred by the stiff, unforgiving frame.All of the components that matter are Shimano RSX -- and a seven-speed rear-end. The RSX is a fairly low end group that would be the equivalent of the Tiagra groupset of the current day. All things considered it's not surprising that they wound up non-functional over time.The components on the Specialized are mostly 105 but it came with an Ultegra rear derailleur. Things are cool with that setup.Fast forward to yesterday when I started talking to my coworker about trying to unload the old bike as a frame and wheels since it wasn't working.He thought about it a moment and started to spend my money: "Why don't you upgrade your current bike and move the old components to your old bike and make it a mud bike?"At this point I think I might do that.The bottom brackets match -- both standard English threaded BBs. The back-end of the Trek, surprisingly, is the correct 130mm as is the current spec. (Generally 7-speeds had 126mm rear dropout spacing)So today I started to try to tear down the cause the whole thing: the front shifter.I failed.I didn't want to beat it open and I didn't want to break anything that I'd need to reassemble.I got all the way to unwrapping the bar.You don't win all the time.I'm going to do more research on this and keep going. Hopefully, over time at least, I'll be able to get a set of SRAM Force components on the new bike.  :-D[smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=21276562_dFRHQk&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="smugmug-lightbox" captions="false" sort="false" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]