I ended up cutting and soldering extensions into my Clics, so here’s some info that might help others.
First, I figured I needed about 6 inches of additional length based on routing the wire through my Giant Trinity and seeing how short I came up. I then grabbed an old 12v DC AC adapter for something I no longer had since the wire was a decent size. I cut my pair of 6 inch pieces from that.
Next, I cut the Clic about 2.5" inches from the button - I wanted to make sure I had some wiggle room if something didn’t go right and I needed to cut it again and retry, but I also wanted the extension pieces to be close to the button to be hidden in my aero extensions. Since they’ll be a little thicker I didn’t want them complicating routing the wire around in the handlebars and frame.
After that, I stripped the wires. This was easy with the extra wire I had cut using a standard pair of wire strippers. The Clic wires though, were too thin to strip with those, I used a different blade to nick the surface of the insulation enough to pull it off, I did this about 0.5" from the end of the wires. Then, to strip the even smaller red and black wires inside that, I used fingernail clippers lightly to again nick the insulation and then pull it off with my fingers. After that I twisted the ends to smooth them out, and tinned them with some solder.
At this point I checked if the heat shrink tubing I had (3/16" to 3/32") would fit over the plugs, and it wouldn’t, so I cut two pieces about 2" long and put them on the wire before soldering it, pushing them down to the plug and out of the way for now.
I then held the tinned ends together of the Clic wires and the new length and touched them to my soldering iron to solder them together. I made sure to match the same color to the dotted wire of my extra wire so that the ends were consistent with each other. I then wrapped each soldered joint with a small piece of electrical tape.
Next, I put the heat shrink tubes over each area and heated them using a heat gun on low until they were shrunk snugly. The first time I did this I used the high temperature and it melted the electrical tape on the inside causing a short to where the button always showed as if it was pressed when I plugged it into the Blipbox to test it, so I cut the wires again and re-did things, making the extra wire I was adding slightly longer to make up for the pieces I cut off.
Once the heat wrap tubing was good, I plugged it into my Blipbox and checked that pressing the button flashes the green light as expected. I then routed the wires through my handlebars and frame and into my Blipbox. I’m waiting on Blips to come to put by my brake levers, once I run those internally I’ll post something about routing all that on the Giant Trinity specifically.
Hope this is helpful to someone,
-Dan
