Rivendell Shifter - Silver 2

What They Say

Short story: These are friction shifters with a light ratchet. They don't index. They are beautiful, versatile, wonderful, and require skill. They're easy, though.

Tip: Put some loc-tite on the D-ring bolt threads and you'll likely never have to mess with them. If your shifter loses a little tension, turn it at the next stop or even while you're riding, if you're careful.

These are compatible with up to 9 speed rear derailers only. Not compatible with SRAM rear derailers.

Choose the X for a right-hand (inside) thumby or a left-hand bar end

Choose the O for a left-hand (inside) thumby or right-hand bar end

Longer story: They're our 2020 model version of SunTour’s 1982 XC mountain bike thumb shifter. We copied what was perfect: The idea, the guts, and the shape. We surgically inserted the SILVER1 guts (the light ratchet inside, which SunTour dubbed “power ratchet”). It’s a slight improvement over the original SunTour ratchet.

We polished them better and designed a nifty hinged bar-clamp, so now you can put them nearly anywhere, super conveniently, and fine-tune the cable exit barrel in so you get good cable flow no matter where you put it.

(This may sound like nothing, or like something that only bizarre shifter placements can take advantages of, but it is useful all the time, and came about out of frustration with mounts that didn't allow it. If you don't follow this, that's understandable and fine, but you'll take advantage of it when you mount Silver2 shifters as thumbies.)

These have been a long time in the making; more than five years, and three and a half years of designing and prototyping. They’ve been stupidly expensive to develop, but they came out better than we’d hoped at our most idealistic, and are one of the things we're most proud of.

Shifting with these means understanding that a mechanism or tool can be mechanically perfect and virtually un-improvable, while at the same time allowing its user to flub up a shift. At some level, the degree of control and intimacy with your bicycle that Silver2 shifters allow improves your relationship with the bike by involving you more with its functions. It's not scary, it's wonderful.

If you want skill-free perfect shifts, get indexing. If you want to work harmoniously with your mechanical-object bicycle, if you enjoy that level of control and are willing to accept the possibility of flubbed shifts as hey no biggie, then get these.

The SILVER2 shifters are beautiful, mechanically honest (they don’t shift for you, but they give immediate and accurate feedback, so you learn quickly), and are an anachronism in 2020.

Friction shifting isn’t hard, but it takes practice, and these days you can buy shifters that shift for you.

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Here’s how to buy shifters, depending on how you set them up:

SILVER2-O: Bar-end RIGHT, Thumby LEFT (inside or behind the bar)

SILVER2-X: Bar-end LEFT, Thumby RIGHT( inside or behind the bar)

For thumb shifters, the O mounts on the LEFT, inside the bar. The X mounts on the RIGHT, inside the bar. Think of the animal OX. The O is on the left, etc.

For bar-end shifters, it's the opposite. You can remember this by considering that in the real alphabet, O comes before X, and we read from left to right, so the X goes on the left and the O goes on the right, which is just the opposite of the way we read.

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These are sold as the shifter only. If you are confused about which to buy, please send an email or call

Find the thumb mounts here

You can also buy our bar end pods here to mount Silver2 shifters onto the ends of most of the bars we sell.

If you're putting these on bar end pods or thumb shifter mounts, be sure to match type O to type O, and type X to type X. In other words, a type X shifter won't go on a type O pod/thumb shifter mount.