Some people really get out there and do it, and it is my privilege to do what I can to support them. I mean, I get paid, but the stakes seem higher when the rider is going for weeks, especially without a support vehicle.
Back in the 1990s I got to do some work for Roff Smith before he rode around -- and I do mean around -- Australia. We gave him shop water bottles with our logo, but I don't think they made it into any of the National Geographic photos.
Roff was experienced enough to be able to do a lot of his own work. And his bike had bar-end shifters, no index-only brifter nonsense. These are two helpful attributes for anyone who wants to experience the full freedom of bicycling.
Our current customer's Adventure Cycling Southern Tier Route of roughly 3,100 miles falls well short of Smith's 10,000 mile circuit around the smallest continent, but it's hardly trivial. Although the ride is a few months away, he wants some preventive work done on his Surly Disc Trucker. Chain. Cassette. Shift cables. Spare spokes. I suggested he have disc brake pads with him rather than hoping he finds them when or if he needs them. His brakes take a common shape, but you can't count on finding the exact jigsaw puzzle piece you need anywhere you stop.
This bike also has brifters. With only a 9-speed cassette, the shifting isn't as temperamental as with ten and higher, but it still depends on precise adjustment of cable tension and cable movement to line up with each gear. As I have stated tiresomely often, in a mechanical system operated by cables, the best option is to use 5mm housing and 1.1mm slick stainless cables. Shimano's stock cables are 1.2, and come with one of two types of coating: the brown stuff that turns into a lint clog, or the green stuff that breaks up into bits of sand. These are always fitted through 4mm cable housing, which is like deliberately constricting your tendons. Quite often, the ferrules on the ends of the housing have rubber seals or long nozzles on the end of them, ostensibly to eliminate dirt. These add even more friction than the fat cable in the undersized housing already provided. The return springs of the derailleurs have to overcome all the drag of those supposed advantages in order to arrive under the cog of your choice.
Because he was getting new handlebar tape, this was our opportunity to strip out the stock 4mm housing that runs under the tape. In checking the rest of the shifting system, I noticed that the stock derailleur had developed some slop. If he was only riding locally I would have let it go, but I questioned whether it would hold up through the rest of his training and then the tour itself. The Shimano Alivio RD-M3100 derailleur has a lot of plastic parts. The pivots in the main body look like aluminum rivets, but even the ostensibly softer metal wears quickly on the plastic, so the derailleur develops increasing play. The shifters have to pull all that together before the cable can move the derailleur to the next gear. Because the industry keeps trying to pull more money out of its addicts, they keep adding gears to the cassette and messing with compatibility, so that older systems, or systems that hang onto lower cog counts, get stuck with cheaper and cheaper parts. I don't mean affordable quality. I mean plastic junk that wears out rapidly. This is supposed to encourage consumers to buy the fabulously expensive, top of the line new junk, which also wears out rapidly, but is way more fashionable.
We had a different Alivio derailleur in stock that matched the parameters of his drivetrain and had more metal in it, but the specs say that it is compatible with Shimano mountain shifters, not road. It has also been discontinued since we brought it into inventory a couple of years ago. This led to some research and anxiety, because sometimes you can ignore the specs, and sometimes you can't. With ten speeds and up, more often you can't. With nine...maybe. The specs for the OEM derailleur said that it wasn't compatible with road shifters either, and yet there it was, on the other end of the cable from Sora brifters. Details matter: the OEM derailleur had the cable leading straight into it through a short piece of housing on the chainstay, whereas the new one led the cable around to the back of the derailleur. If the new derailleur turned out not to work with these shifters, do we order a new plastic crappy one that will wear out sooner but at least be starting fresh, or try to dig up a better one, leaving the rider either without his bike or cutting the housing to the old derailleur, meaning that we would have to replace both cable and housing as soon as a new, better derailleur came in?
Fortunately, the derailleur we had worked with his brifters. It didn't settle right in, though. I had to find the sweet zone for cable tension to get the full range. All index shifting needs to be dialed in, but some always seems to hover at the edge of neurotic collapse.
The answer as always is friction shifting. Learn the ancient ways, and you can stuff any wheel in there that fits. It demands more and more precision if you're trying to shift manually across a crowded cassette of 12 sheet metal cogs, but in friction you won't need to play any of their drive train games. Go back to ten, nine, eight. Get a chain with a little more metal in it, that lasts longer. Get a front derailleur again, and a double or triple crank. Rediscover why those were actually good. When you shift by feel rather than by click, you're less likely to cut your chain by jamming a front shift, which was a major complaint among ham-fisted and gimmick-dependent consumers nurtured by an industry high on its own cleverness.
Note: none of this freedom applies to the world of racing or to technical mountain biking, in which the very style of the activity demands that you buy and destroy whatever gear is necessary to stay in the game. But these are also not the highest and best uses of bicycle technology.
While we're on this digression, remember that racers will race on whatever they have. If none of this current crap existed, racer personalities would push their limits on simpler gear. Powerful forces far from the bikes themselves drive the competition in more expensive directions. It's entertainment. It's corporate marketing. Big Race is big business, and it needs flash and excitement.
Surly touring bikes used to come with an XT derailleur, when you could get a 9-speed XT derailleur. That was solid stuff, with little or no plastic in it. Now your choices in index-compatible 9-speed are very limited, and none are as nicely made as the old XT. However, shifting in friction, you can use an older derailleur for 8-speed or a newer derailleur intended for ten, and just shift it to where you need it, clickless. Fewer than 8 speeds might not have the total swing to cover an eight-speed cassette. You might as well have eight, since all the freehub bodies are wide enough to accommodate it, and the rear wheel is dished for it. When 8-speed first came out, there was debate about whether the wheel being dished more would make it less stable. Rims with offset spoke holes came out to address this, but there was no massive epidemic of collapsing rear wheels whether offset rims were used or not.
Disc brakes add a new twist to wheel building. Formerly, front wheels generally had the same spoke length on both sides of the hub, while rear wheels had slightly shorter spokes on the drive side. Sizing spare spokes for this customer, I discovered that the rear wheel has the same spoke length on both sides, because the flanges of the hub are set inward to fit the freehub body on one side and the brake rotor on the other. The front wheel has two different spoke lengths, because the brake rotor on the left takes up space. The flanges on both wheels are set much closer together than on wheels from the last century, or early parts of this one. To minimize the effect, rear axle widths have gone from 130 road and 135 mountain to 142, 148, and up. Through-axles dominate the hub market, fixing the rear wheel position where they tell you is best. Another piece of freedom lost to their claimed efficiency.
Any off-the-rack bike you buy now will have parts from what is currently available OEM new. Thus, Surly had to settle for a plastic facsimile of the solid old XT in order to retain the reliable, durable 9-speed chain and conventional drivetrain they wanted on a reliable, durable touring bike.
Microshift offers some 9-speed derailleur options with more metal in them, but I don't fully trust their quality and function. I would rather find some old Shimano or Suntour, or even Campy, and adapt it. As derailleurs in general get really weird to match the current obsession with huge gear ranges in the back, it's hard to find any new, well made options for someone who wants to refuse that technology. Front derailleurs also become more weird and scarce as an industry dealing with declining revenues weds itself to a particular style that they hope will bait in at least a few new users as well as enticing the old ones.
I'm wicked old, and they haven't enticed me with a damn thing in about 20 years.
Just as in the 1970s people rode across the country on their clunky Schwinns and entry-level ten-speeds from Britain, Europe, and Japan, so do riders today make their journeys on the tailored offerings of the modern industry, with all of its shortcomings. Bike categories are more defined -- I hesitate to say better defined -- than they were in the 1970s, so "touring" bikes are automatically a step up from the true entry level. Their problems are more intentional than the mere quality control and weight problems that afflicted mass-produced affordable bikes back then.
I'd say you can make up your own mind about any and all of what is marketed to you these days, except that the realities of mass production mean that a lot of it is forced down your throat if you don't choose quickly enough and stock up on things you like while the industry still finds it economical to make them. It's hard to get an industry to back up and start over, resuming large-scale production of things it has grown bored with, and trained consumers to reject.
Every generation looks for improvement in the things that appeal to it. Every generation bases its sense of progress on what it noticed when it first started paying attention. A baby born today won't automatically come with a full understanding of what went before. That's highly inefficient for progress as a species, but it's the reality of our limited perception. We need people to fully understand history at the same time that we keep hyperactively making more of it.
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