Why Mechanics Drink

When I arrived at work yesterday, there were about 15 bikes in the repair queue. We checked in a new one about every 20 minutes for the rest of the day, leaving us more buried at closing time than we were at opening.

Anyone who wants to blurt that it's great to be busy should try being force fed.

Highlights from the past couple of weeks include:

This rider wanted to sit up higher, so he raised his threadless stem and left this gap. Front end noise? What front end noise?

The upper bolt is clearly completely above the top of the steerer tube. Let's go trail riding!

When a roadie complains about funky shifting, the answer is frequently within:

Internal cable routing has turned a routine task into a time-consuming chore. Thanks, Bike Industry!

The new fashion for routing the shift cables under the bar tape has not eliminated the problem of cables fraying inside the shifter.

Shi-no has made access to the mess a little easier, reducing the chances that leftover fragments will jam an expensive mechanism permanently, but I did find pieces of an old cable inside a brifter that I was servicing. They had been in there from a previous break. That explained the intermittent crunching and imprecision.

OEM cables all seem to come with this bullshit coating on them. It quickly scrubs up into lint balls inside the undersized 4mm cable housing that the industry is trying very hard to turn into an inescapable standard. Many high end bikes won't accommodate an upgrade to 5mm.

Here's what came out of this brifter: potential Strands of Death, plus wads of scuffed-up coating. Thanks, Bike Industry!

Someone thought it would be a good idea to shove a stack of cable doughnuts onto the shift wires inside the sleek, black Trek in which I spent close to an hour spelunking. You have to run your guide tubing up the old cable, if it's still there and not too frayed. Otherwise you do a lot of blind fishing to get cables to feed. And hurry up! Someone's waiting to have a flat tire fixed immediately, and six people are renting bikes.

Hire more staff, you say? I'm writing this in stolen minutes before scampering off to work, so I don't have time to explain the particular economy of scale that keeps us from heeding that logical suggestion.

People don't need us until they need us. Then they need us right away. This customer bought this bike on line and assembled it at home. Hey! The left crank arm fell off! Is it supposed to do that? Gosh, between on line sales and You Tube experts, why does anybody need a bike shop anyway?

The forced adoption of disc brakes brings its own time-sucking extra steps. On bikes with adjustable bearings, the rotor bolts almost always block the wrench flats on the inner cone. The mechanic can try wiggling a worn cone wrench in there at a slight angle, or remove the rotor, complete the proper adjustment, and reinstall the rotor. Or, as most likely happens, fudge it in some way and send it down the road.

Yesterday, parts had finally come in for yet another improvised ride that some kid had bought used. The parts, individually, had at one time been decent, but the way in which they had been combined, and some of them mangled, left me zigzagging through the underbrush in search of a path forward that was safe and reasonably priced.

It had obviously been built by someone with only the beginning of an idea how things go together, who pummeled it for a while and then scraped it off on its current owner. Its problems can be summed up nicely by the fact that the crank arms were two different brands and two different lengths.

Looking through the archives for component compatibility information, I found this piece of copy editing I did in 1998 or '99:

The pile awaits. I have to rip out of here and go burrow into it again. Grease be with you.