In Resort Town, our bike shop sees not only a seasonal surge of service work, but intense spikes within it as vacationers and weekenders face unexpected mishaps.
Overall, the work load is far less than it was in the 1990s. We had two full-time mechanics and two full-time staffers who worked the sales floor and the workshop as needed. This level survived into the first decade of the next century, even though the bike industry had already torpedoed itself, and "supply side" economic policies were still hollowing out the general economy. It took at least twice as much work to bury us as deeply as we are buried now with just two elderly mechanics.
When the emergency cases started piling up this weekend, the long-term repair queue was basically empty. Most of the intensity had centered on renters picking up bikes on Friday for the local triathlon on Saturday morning. I had one flat tire job for kid or grandkid left over from the day before, and a repair estimate for a job for later in the week. Every walk-in flat tire or dropped chain qualified for a same-day turnaround. "I'm only here through Monday." "We're only here for the week." "We were just starting out on our ride." Within an hour, we had a full day of rush jobs.
Promise is too strong a word for the assurance we give that we can finish what looks like a simple job within minutes or hours, but it's close. We proceed with confidence because we succeed more often than we fail. You see it all the time on the television medical dramas. Simple diagnosis, initiate treatment, sudden downturn, beeping alarms...
Job 1: flat tire on a Surly Grappler. Clean bike, custom equipped with Brooks saddle and a fairly narrow -- by modern standards -- upright handlebar. Tube tires, so a nice, clean prospect. But then the bead fit was super tight coming off. Tubeless-ready rims are a plague, with their little shelf for the bead to snap into. But breaking the bead loose from that was only the first hurdle. I didn't start that repair, but it got handed off to me because I still have some residual grip strength. This only consumed a little extra time. By the end of the day, all those littles add up. hell, by the middle of the day they add up. Fortunately, the tire went on more easily than it came off. This is often the case. Inexperienced or impatient mechanics will panic and resort to tire levers.
Most of the repairs tumbled in at the same time, as people beginning their Sunday fun discovered their problems. I had already checked in a guy's road bike with a broken pad retaining bolt on the front disc brake and a broken spoke in the rear wheel. The full length of the broken spoke was still there, which meant that I could connect the new spoke to the old nipple, and that enough of the old spoke remained to get an accurate measurement. Pfft! No problem!
The pad retaining bolt, or screw, or pin, depending on you choice of internet search term, was the kind with threads right under the bolt head. The rest of the pin sticks though the tabs on the brake pads and out the other side of the caliper, with a retaining clip on the end of it. Although the customer had somehow managed to twist the head off of this small fastener with a 2.5mm head, I knew I could grab onto the other end of the pin and unthread it from there.
Grabbing the end was relatively easy with our smallest locking pliers. However, the space available in the Shimano 105 brake only allowed me to get about one-eighth of a turn at a time. Progress was imperceptibly slow at first. Everything in there is black or dark gray. Finally I saw threads emerging. This did not speed the process, but it verified progress.
Our stash of pad retaining screws did not include one long enough. I checked our suppliers. No one had one, including Shimano's B2B website. You could find them on retail sites, including titanium ones for stupid amounts of money, but we didn't have one and had no wholesale source. No matter. The customer needed it that day. I used a cotter pin, the way so many brakes do anyway.
On to the spoke. Rear wheel. Remove the cassette. Remove the brake rotor. Center-lock rotor using the same tool as the cassette lockring. Nice. All I have to do now is extract the broken spoke from the nipple and thread in another spoke to keep the nipple from disappearing into the rim.
The broken spoke was welded into the nipple. Fortunately, it was a brass nipple that could take some torque. Holding the spoke with the locking pliers, I twisted the spoke wrench. The nipple moved a little, with the protesting ratcheting noise of dry metal against dry metal. I flooded the area with penetrating oil. One nice thing about disc brakes: no need to keep a braking surface clean on the rim. With the rotor off the wheel, it was safe from drips as well. Good thing, too. It was at least a half hour freeing that spoke without destroying the nipple. If I needed to replace the nipple, that would mean removing the tire and peeling up the rim strip. Sometimes that only requires deflating the tire, pulling back the bead, and prying up a section of non-adhesive rim strip. These days, though, the rim might have "tubeless-ready" rim tape stuck down, not to mention an absurdly tight tire fit requiring more complete removal of everything. Hey, I don't give a shit, I get paid by the hour and bill accordingly. But when we're trying to accommodate a whole flock of people whose vacation fun depends on getting their bikes fixed now, extra steps just add more stress.
Into the chaos came a walk-in with a folding bike. She was half of a couple, but only one bike needed our attention. Based on its condition, I would bet that the other one did, too, but as long as they were satisfied, I wasn't going to instigate anything.
"The chain keeps falling off here." She pointed down between the small cog and the dropout. I could see that the derailleur was hanging funny. "I was trying to tighten the brakes. I messed with this cable too." That was the shift cable.
It took a while to get it onto the stand. The limit screws on the derailleur were run all the way out, so you had your choice of whether to drop the chain down beside the small cog or throw it into the spokes. The customer had run the brake cable the wrong way around its anchor bolt and graunched it down, oblivious to the deeply and unevenly worn pads. The shift cable anchor bolt was rotated in a way we see often, thanks to a quirk of Shimano design. There's a little tab that is meant to hold the plate in the proper attitude while the cable runs under one edge. Instead, people are constantly turning it to put the cable under the little tab. The bike could have used another hour of cleaning and adjustments by the time I got the derailleur working and replaced the brake pads, but it was safe and functional. It can be admitted later for the less acute problems.
Just before the weekend I had done a spoke and tire job on a mountain bike with tubeless tires. That one worked out well, because the customer used spoke hole plugs instead of stupid rim tape. The breaking spoke had popped its plug loose, deflating the tire quickly and completely. I had ready access to the spoke hole to install the new one. We had some rim plugs sitting around, to replace the one damaged when the spoke blew out. The tire re-seated and held. So that was nice. There was only one complication. When I had everything back together all snug, I spun the wheel and heard something rattling, either inside the tire or the rim itself. Fearing it might be another old rim plug or some other debris I had overlooked inside the tire while the bead was detached, I took everything apart to remove whatever was rattling.
There was nothing in the tire except still-wet sealant. The noise was in the rim. Broken nipple? Bits of rim plug? I shook and shook and shook it to move the object to a spoke hole. Eventually, a perfect sphere of something fell out. It was dark and appeared hard. Ball bearing? Too light. And it crumbled under a firm pinch with my fingers. Also, the rim still rattled. I shook it over and over as it released a total of four of these little dung balls. Near as I can figure, they're composed of sealant, trail dirt, and carbon dust, spun into spheres by wheel rotation.
That was just on my stand. El Queso Grande had his own set of urgent care cases, as well as launching most of our renters, and working the register for sales of clothing, sunglasses, daypacks and other merch. It's like the ER staff also operate the hospital gift shop. Hurry up and stitch that laceration! Someone needs a tee shirt! Fortunately, no real lives are at stake. I mean, we need to do our work right so that riders don't end up in the actual ER on our account, but successful repair doesn't depend on speed and precision the way emergency medicine does. However, some of the clientele get fretful over how their planned day of fun is bleeding out on the bike shop floor. We're here to literally save the day.
Between the end-to-end days and the bike commutes on either end, the hours left over go to preparing for the next day and trying unsuccessfully to get enough sleep. The days off go to catching up on that sleep whether I want to or not, and all of the routine chores to get ready for another week. And summer's over and the days are shrinking and we face east awaiting the sun again. Sure, there are a few weeks left, and all of fall, but the cellist is leaving for her school year job, leaving behind the keening silence of tinnitus and the decaying sunlight of our turn toward the season of darkness.
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