Pushing through headwinds of contempt and hostility

As a commuting cyclist who rides close to 30 miles on the basic route to work and back, I have spent years in the public eye. Even though the vast majority of drivers make at least some effort to accommodate bike riders, there will generally be at least one a day, on average, somewhere along the route, who will emanate some kind of negativity. It might be as mild as squeezing past at an intersection or as blatant as an actual assault. The worst infractions are quite rare, but you never know when one will come, so you ride in a constant state of tension. Anyone passing could have a bad attitude and the means to inflict it on you.

Pandemic precautions have created another way in which we can judge each other. Any venture out in public now puts you on display, subject to public comment and reaction for your clothing, equipment, and behavior.

At work, we continue to follow protective measures, and continue to take some degree of crap for it every single day. I am fortunate that the management takes the situation seriously, so we're all in the fight together. Any time I have to go to any other business I have to wonder what sort of yahoos will be there, as patrons or staff. The grocery store I use most often is doing the best it can, but the high number of selfish idiots is overwhelming. Basically, I don't go anywhere. I hardly did before, but I miss having the option.

On Sunday I drove because of the forecast for severe thunderstorms by the time I would be trying to ride home. This meant that I came in the back way, on Mill Street, past a church a couple of hundred yards from our parking lot. It's a repurposed building, not a classic New England white church with a steeple. The parking lot was full. A dense crowd of people sprawled over the grounds around a large tent in which a stage had been set up with sound equipment for a band. Almost no one wore masks or stayed very far apart. I wouldn't have gotten as good a look if I had ridden, because I would have come in on Main Street and turned down Mill Street from the top.

I got to the shop, parked, put my mask on, and went inside. Because two of our staff had unavoidable matters to attend to, only El Queso Grande and I were available to work.

Repairs continue to come in at least as fast as they go out. Parts may not be available for various reasons. Customers know now that they can't expect a quick turnaround, but that doesn't mean that we can float through in slow motion. And we still get people who -- for various reasons -- want our attention more urgently.

About an hour into the day, a local dentist showed up with his kid, with some sort of mechanical problem with Junior's mountain bike. They picked up masks from our display in the  entryway, but Baldy took no more than a half a dozen steps into the shop and pulled his mask down, first exposing his nose, and then his whole germ-hole. El Queso Grande asked him to pull it back up. Baldy said, "I wear an N95 all day at work. I know about this stuff."

Yes. And? What does that have to do with wearing this mask, now, incorrectly, when you are in a high risk profession that increases the chance that you may have been exposed? Is the N95 just marketing theater so your patients won't know that you cough all over the place between appointments? Why don't you just wipe off the dental tools in your armpit? Disclaimer: I do not know or guess that he does such a thing. But if he's so blase about precautions in other people's businesses, how serious is he about people's safety in his own?

Think of yourself as a gun. Your breath is your ammunition. If you are not sick, you're loaded with blanks. If you are sick -- even without symptoms -- you're loaded with live rounds. You can injure or mortally wound anyone you hit. Unless you live under very strict isolation, you don't know whether you're dangerous. In any firearm safety class, you learn to treat every gun as if it's loaded. That's one of the touchstones of gun reverence: every "good" gun owner observes that fundamental safety principle. It's a myth, of course. Gun handlers relax that perpetual vigilance and get away with it, until they don't. No one can be perfectly careful all the time. We're only human.

Once asked, the dentist kept his mask in place for the rest of the service visit, including outdoors. But we shouldn't have to keep slapping people straight on this. It's like something out of a movie. We're inside our building, looking out at the pod people milling around waiting to assimilate us.

The repairs continue to inspire improvisation. A local camp brought in a mountain bike from their program, with a freehub body that wouldn't freewheel. With extreme force I could get it to shift slightly back and forth. I could hear the collapsed pawls crunching over ratchet teeth, and something else that I couldn't identify.

The hub was tastefully anodized red to match the bike. It had no brand markings at all. The bike was a KHS. The hub could be made by any number of companies that provide house-brand OEM parts. I had to figure out if the freehub body was removable, and if so, how. Some have a bolt that goes in from the drive side. Some have a bolt that goes in through the non-drive side. Some have the freehub body riveted on, in which case the whole hub would be junk. We had no new replacement wheels in stock, and our one salvaged wheel was dirty, but actually a little too sophisticated to waste on this bike. 

After I removed the axle, I found the wrench flats on the bolt, accessed through the non-drive side. I put the long end of a 12mm hex key into the buried bolt, with a 12mm box wrench around the hex key to provide sufficient leverage (with a cheater pipe) to break the bolt loose. Once I had the body out I could compare it to various pictures on supplier websites to see if I could order a whole new body.

No I could not. So then I had to disassemble the body to see if I could fix the pawls.

The interior was a fairly standard configuration, with three pawls held in place with a circular spring. The spring had broken, allowing the pawls to shift out of position. This, combined with the broken fragments of the spring itself, had jammed the mechanism. The pawls and their recesses had not fractured, so if I could replace the spring I could reassemble the freehub body. The 50 tiny ball bearings in two sets of 25 were actually held in such a way that putting them back in place would be much easier than on a Shimano freehub of similar design.

Freehub ratchet springs aren't standardized. We don't have a drawer full of them. They're not a common salvage item when we part out a wreck. I'll tell you what though: they're going to be. This time I scoured the shop and racked my brain for something I could use. Ultimately I thought to dig in our bin of salvaged shifter parts, where I found a circular spring from a SRAM trigger shifter we'd parted out several years ago. We'd gone this long without needing it for a shifter. I snagged it to modify for the freehub. The shifter spring had two loops of slightly heavier gauge than the single loop of hair-fine pawl spring. But the diameter was perfect. I cut a section and test-fitted it. It was beefier, as expected, but I could turn the freehub ratchet without clenching my fist and gritting my teeth. I would have to reassemble the whole thing to know for sure.

The reassembled freehub had a stiff, expensive feel, and sounded like a star ratchet. The stiffer spring really snapped the pawls out. It only pushed the chain very slightly in the highest gears. Maybe it'll wear in. Their other choice would have been to wait for parts that may not be available for months. We might even start a little side business making faux star ratchets for people who want to boost their image in the riding group.

A mountain bike with shifting problems turned out to have, among other things, a tiny rock jammed in the pivots of the rear derailleur.

The penny is there to show scale.

The rock was inside the parallelogram as indicated by the arrow.

Fancy wheels on a road bike I assembled had very important information printed on both sides of the rim at the valve, in print so tiny you would need a microscope to read it.

Another customer had brought in an early 1970s Raleigh Super Course that he found in the house he's renting. He said he had always ridden mountain bikes, and wanted to try road riding. We discussed his options to get the old classic in rideable shape.

Check it out: ten speeds. And it has a cycle computer:

The geometry is a lot like the Cross Check. The frame has middling long chain stays and long dropouts. There's room for fenders above somewhat plump tires. The Cross Check has more modern hub spacing and room for wider tires, as well as canti bosses for powerful rim brakes, but its ancestor here has the general configurations to be able to ride a lot of what would be considered "gravel" today, as well as getting around more than adequately on pavement. This specimen is heftier than later versions because it's old enough to have the steel Stronglight crank.

In the late afternoon on Sunday, a couple brought in a Peugeot that had probably come from the European market in the early 1970s. It looked like your basic UO8 at first glance, but it had 700c wheels and an alloy crank. It still had the steel death rims with the totally useless pattern that's supposed to improve braking, but only makes it a little noisier. At least they appreciated its classic appeal. It's just a loaner while they're visiting family.

I come out of the work week totally thrashed. Days off melt away as I try to do all the things I don't have time and energy for in the margins of each work day. This morning I lay in bed feeling like I'd been poured into a mold and set up there. Bike commuting does take some of my energy, but even when I drive I seem to hit the ground running when I get home and fall into bed around midnight, with nothing to show for it. It's more of a determined stumble than  a run.