Shimano definitely weren’t the only ones to get it horribly wrong when it comes to shifters, and these ‘X-Ray’ Gripshifts are a case in point. In our opinion Gripshift is bad enough, even when done well, but these relatively early, and supposedly high-end ones took poor performance to a whole new level. Like any other Gripshift at the time they were far too stiff even when fresh out of the box, but the icing on the cake of poor design was the fact that a large proportion of them was made out of a clear acrylic, in what I guess was an attempt to make them look ‘pimp’.
This material seemed to be exactly the same as the stuff used to make cassette tape cases (or CD cases, but cassettes are more in keeping with the era), and as we all know that stuff cracks even if you just look at it. Thinking about it, maybe I should actually be thanking Gripshift for making these have such a short lifespan cos otherwise I might have felt I had to get my moneys worth out of them, and in the process had to put up with years of terrible shifting. Instead these lasted about a week, at which point I went back to ‘proper’ shifters.
