Swarmed

Like the arrival of the black flies, bike repairs start with one or two that suddenly turn into a swarm.

Dressed in surgical grubs

The brake replacement on that Cannondale F900 went very smoothly. The calipers practically hopped onto the mounting tabs by themselves.

The bolts in the spacer kit were too long, but the hardware store is a short walk down the sidewalk. This was just part of the test fitting.

To bleed the brakes after trimming the lines, I removed the rear caliper from the frame and fastened it to a fixture I made years ago for bleeding the rear brakes on some e-bikes.

I had to redirect the line slightly to get a continuous rising path for the air bubbles.

The next bike in the queue was not as lucky. The bike had SRAM Guide RS brakes that had been silently recalled several years ago by SRAM. The master cylinder pistons stick, preventing the brakes from retracting properly. He's actually arranged to get them fixed for free where he bought the bike, so that's working out nicely.

SRAM brake guy had initially asked us to reseal his tubeless tires. They had the usual giant scab of dried snot in the bottom of each tire, along with a peeling crust around the inside of the casings. I cleaned things out, poured in ample doses of Finish Line tire sealant, and inflated the tires to installation pressure. The customer has had to travel a lot, so he hasn't needed his bike for a couple of weeks. This is good, because the tires are not sealing quickly. The sidewalls are very porous. Each time I repressurize them they seal a little more, but it's taking time and a lot of follow-up rotating and flipping to make sure that sealant gets distributed evenly and stays in place long enough to flow into all the little holes.

I use a lot of medical metaphors in the backshop, but now we actually have tires that need post-op care and physical therapy. We need nursing staff to handle of all of this follow-up care.

Another bike came in to have tires sealed. These Maxxis tires are definitely tubeless ready. Seating them was pretty quick and easy.

Next on the stand after the $4,000 Kona was this Columbia boat anchor.

Just another tuneup. It isn't even old enough to be a real classic, so they had to label it as a classic:

After threading internal cables on this fancy road frame, I'm ready to try building a ship in a bottle:

I'm starting to enjoy working on all this shit that I would never want to own. Working in the bike shop used to be like working in the candy store. I saw lots of stuff that I might like to have. That took a real nose dive in the rise of technofascism in the 1990s. I fought the fascists for as long as I could, but they know how to appeal to the technolemmings. Now I just keep my own simple stuff running as best I can and take the money from the lemmings as they queue up and troop dutifully over cliff after cliff. The rise of acceptable complexity was subtle. Each new generation of riders knows only what they find when they take up riding. That's their base line. The industry keeps trying to entice with technology when what the bike business really needs is 90 percent advocacy and education, and 10 percent technical refinement.

With the proliferation of tire sizes, not even bike hooks are simple anymore:

We had to take time to substitute a selection of new hook sizes in both the sales and repair areas to accommodate the range of wheel sizes.

It's been a crappy spring for training. Here's my trusty fixed gear being held up by nature's kickstand a few weeks ago on a side trip into the woods:

It hardly seems believable, but the snow is gone now, replaced by repeated storms of raw rain and cold.

In the triage of repair jobs, I will often take one or more out of sequence because they seem straightforward. It makes sense to cut the queue down as quickly as possible. But these are often the jobs that turn into total tar pits.

This cheap mountain bike was in for a tune up. It had a very loose bottom bracket. Because cheap bikes often have cup and cone bottom brackets made to look like sealed cartridge units, I had to pull the crank arms off to do anything. Fake sealed bottom brackets don't have wrench flats or pin holes, so you have to pull the crank to adjust them.

Because the bike frame was full of water, everything was corroded in place. It wasn't obvious, dark rust, just a binding roughness of initial oxidation. It still required extra leverage. The bearings were a cheap cartridge unit. But we didn't have the size (73x113) in stock. The cheapness of it actually offered a slim chance at repair. You can knock the cheap units apart to separate the bearings. But we didn't have those in stock, either. Because the bearings are designed to fit inside the cartridge that fits inside the bottom bracket shell, they're smaller than any of the bearings normally used in bike repairs. I could order them from a bearing supply company, but that defeated the purpose of battlefield surgery. We can -- and did -- order a new complete unit. The only reason I went into it was that the repair tag had an expedited deadline written on it.

When we get slammed, we tell people that we are backed up at least a week to ten days. Some customers are fine with that and more. But then we get in-fill, with people who come later and need it sooner. Because some customers are fine with the long wait, we can slot these other jobs into the spaces. But the spaces don't really exist, because the long wait was based on the time needed for one overloaded tech to dig through the pile. I could pour a couple of months of my life down the mineshaft of other people's wants, but I have had a lifelong addiction to my own time. The job I took for supplemental income 30 years ago has turned out to be my primary income. I'm still at it because not too many people want to do what I do. But I have become no more valuable for my rarity. It's hard enough to be there for the length of time that I am, let alone flushing away more irreplaceable time on a job that almost no one respects, for a class of vehicle that most other road users despise.

The majority of riders now have no intention of ever riding on the public right of way. Bicycles used to be vehicles of freedom. The original mountain bikes were appealing not just because a rider could go on trails, but because a rider could now go anywhere. The first waves rode like kids again, down the street, across the park, into the woods, over and through anything they could. But after a while it evolved into a way to make bicycles go away. And that's where it's headed today. As more attention is paid to transportation design in built up areas where "the bicycle makes sense," anything outside that evolving norm becomes a bike-free zone in popular perception. Bicycles are being put in their place. Anything out of place is fair game. It's early in the process, but bike advocates need to pay attention to where it's headed.

The repair queue keeps growing. It ranges from a cruddy Columbia to an $11,000 Specialized Tarmac. El Queso Grande had surgery on his wrist and arm, so he's not turning any wrenches. And he has to do everything else to run his business. A shop that can barely function with three people, preferably four, keeps slogging along most days with only two.