Car culture chains the United States to dirty energy

 No other country on earth was as smitten with the automobile as the United States. The oil industry itself originated in Pennsylvania, but the love affair that has driven us to cling to oil addiction took a while to get rolling. The Ford Model T put the automobile in reach of ordinary workers. The simplicity of the machine and the ingenuity of many tool users gave birth to the Model T speedster and other variations. In Ossipee, NH, a Model T was reworked into the first snowmobile.

After the Second World War, the American hotrod drank deeply of cheap gas while forging an image of freedom and daring and mechanical creativity. American cars were big, with big engines. Speed limits crept higher and higher, allowing these beasts to gallop across the miles of wide open spaces in the American interior.

When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, it didn't serve as an early warning that we should try to detox from petroleum. Worldwide, economies just retooled to accommodate the rising price and manipulated supply. Fuel prices pushed upward ever harder on the cost of living, but people paid it. The United States instituted a 55 mile per hour speed limit, which brought the average cruising speed down around 65 on most highways for a while, but that has been rescinded in most places now. Good luck finding the road less traveled nowadays. If you do, it probably goes somewhere very obscure, or the stretch isn't very long.

Emission controls have improved the smell and cleared up the worst of the brown haze that hung over any populated area. Improved fuel economy standards help a little with the environment. Only steadily climbing wages and salaries keep up with relentlessly inflating prices. Consumers focus only on whether they can afford to fill the tank, not whether they should push hard on elected officials to shift to energy sources that don't carry the vast liabilities of petroleum.

Gasoline equals freedom of movement in the American mind. That means oil. Electricity means convenience and entertainment in the home and in rechargeable handheld devices. Who really cares what fuels the power plant? Coal seems so 19th Century, and yet it still fuels about 19 percent of electricity generation in this country. Natural gas fuels more than 40 percent. Straight-up oil fired power plants account for one to three percent of energy generated. Combined, that's more than 60 percent.

Renewables account for 21 percent of energy generation. Biomass is considered renewable, but it still involves combustion, requires energy in the machinery used to harvest and process whatever is being burned, and contributes to the environmental impacts of commercial forestry.

The most visible connection Americans have to petroleum use is their vehicles. For more than a hundred years, generation after generation has grown up with engine noise, clouds of exhaust, crashes, traffic congestion. Obviously it didn't just spring fully into steaming gridlock on the day the first flivver putted down a stretch of dirt road. But drivers started running into things back when cars were still powered by steam. Cars in a form we would recognize began to run into things before the 20th Century even began. As their numbers grew, they got in each other's way more and more. We're obsessed with the price of their fuel.

Electric vehicles have become a common sight, but their drivers still have to plan carefully to make sure that they can recharge as needed. Recharging still takes a lot longer than a quick pit stop at a self-service gas station. An electric vehicle represents a conscious choice to accept inconvenience. The inconvenience may seem trivial if you live where you can charge at home and never venture far, or have access to charging at a place and time that coincides with work or another interval when you wouldn't need to go anywhere anyway. But what if you need to make an unexpected trip in the middle -- or near the beginning - of the time you had set aside for charging?

We live by the car. We may die by the car. Our dependence will continue to help politicians who enable it, and even glorify it as a defiant expression of liberty. It's really nice to be able to hop in a speedy vehicle, protected from the weather and relatively secure, to arrive fully rested wherever you're headed. I get that. As much as we all hate the downsides of their ownership and use, generations have accepted the costs in order to have the benefits. The majority has spoken over and over. A sizable chunk of them will throw in behind some nightmarish politicians rather than risk losing access or having to pay higher prices for their fuel. It's freedom juice.

E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.

Independence Day

Main Street was blocked off. Spectators already lined the road to watch the parade. I rode up to the police officers at the Central Avenue intersection. It's a grand name for less than a hundred yards of street.

"Can I get through to Nordic Skier" I asked, gesturing toward Main Street.

"On that?" one said, indicating my bike.  "Sure!"

I thanked them and excused my way through a thin spot in the spectator crowd. I hate being the entertainment, but I had no choice. Hundreds of people waited on either side of the car-free street. I threaded carefully through the random wanderers popping out to take pictures of their friends or searching for a place to squeeze in.

At Mill Street I negotiated passage back through the spectator wall to ride around into the back parking lot of the shop.

Once upstairs in the workshop I had time to look out from the elevated vantage of the backshop windows at the automobiles stuffed into every possible spot, and the bands of parade watchers still streaming in. I spared only occasional glances at the parade once it started. Most of the time, I worked on repairs and contemplated the absolute saturation of the parking facilities. You could not have stuffed another car anywhere, in any direction I could see.

Even on the ride in I had enjoyed the cyclist advantage. Motor vehicle traffic stopped on Center Street at least a quarter of a mile from Main Street. I don't know where people hoped they could go, or how many -- if any -- were just passing through and had lousy timing. Traffic wasn't stopped completely. I had to ride carefully, threading the Death Slot to the right of them at times, and flowing with them in the short breaks where they could move forward.

Usually at the end of the parade, traffic both wheeled and on foot streams the other way, a tide going back out with Fundian energy. The high water mark of humanity and their vehicles surges strongly on the ebb. Within an hour, parking areas in town can be nearly deserted as everyone disperses to whatever other fun they have planned. They'll be back for fireworks at dusk, but I'm long gone by then. This year, however, the parking eased up considerably, but a lot of foot traffic remained. We sold three bikes, did multiple quick repairs for riders only here for the day or the weekend, and had to stop repeatedly to host browsers among the clothing racks, or ring up sales.

This stands in contrast to the previous month or two in which we sold no bicycles at all, and had many ominously uninterrupted days. I don't know why this particular Fourth and its attendant weekend was so busy, but the fact that it lined up so neatly, with the Fourth on Friday, might explain a lot. We're not used to seeing heavy traffic anymore, so a day that would not have impressed us in the 1990s now seems like a big deal.

Summer brings more vehicles, many piloted by people who live where they have to drive more aggressively just to survive. This leads to some increase in close, fast passing, but also a more subtly dangerous tendency for drivers to stop suddenly to wave their fellow motorists out of side streets and driveways. Those drivers nurture the fantasy that we're all nice to each other in this theme park rendition of a country town. A rider needs to be ready to stop short as well as sprint, and read the body language of the larger vehicles. It's our little urban experience embedded in the months of small-town riding.

At the end of the day, I pedaled serenely out my usual route. Evening hazards dwindle rapidly as I pass the driveways of a couple of eating and drinking establishments on the way to the back route out to Route 28. On the Fourth, the evening commute fit into the lull before fireworks traffic.

Motors and mass: ebikes make crashing more expensive

 With ebikes rapidly becoming the vehicle of choice for workers who can't afford a car, these heavier, faster bikes attract riders who still think of them as just bikes: simple, unbounded by many rules, and relatively cheap. The bikes cost more up front, but the purchase price and the price of electricity are the big expenses. This isn't true, especially if you need someone else to work on it for you, but it's a popular perception of bikes in general.

Ebike riders ride them like they ride any bike. Some riders are more vehicular about it than others. Interacting with traffic, some ride at the edge of the lane. Some try to ride on the sidewalk when they can get away with it. Some take the lane and operate like a motorist.

The riders who stay to the right (in the US) expose themselves to the dangers of the Death Slot, stuck against the curb, the ditch, or a line of parked cars. On a pedal bike it's bad enough, but on an ebike the danger is magnified by the mass and speed of the bike.

A rider dragged the carcass of their massive ebike to us last week after a crash that destroyed the front wheel, damaged the fork, and dislodged the left crank arm. The bike has two-wheel drive: hub motors in both wheels. It has fat, 26-inch tires. It's from a company with a strange name written in a nearly undecipherable font.

We heard from the motorist who hit the bike, who described the accident in a way that minimized the motorist's responsibility. We heard from the rider, who described the accident as a pretty typical right hook by the driver. The motorist said that they would pay for repairs "out of the goodness of our hearts, even though the accident wasn't our fault." I didn't say what I was thinking right then, but I did not believe that they were blameless. However, the rider made a serious error at the time: They did not file a formal accident report. The rider and the driver just came to an oral agreement at the scene, when neither of them knew the full extent of the damage and potential costs.

Because so many little companies have jumped into the ebike market, there are dozens of brands with weird names, pumping out superficially similar products with sketchy customer support. Customer support is pretty shabby even from major brands in the bike industry. It's even worse from cheap ebike brands.

That ought to true right out, don't you think?

In addition to the obviously ruined rim, the brake tabs on the fork leg are bent, and so is the brake rotor. The more I looked at the bike, the more things I found. Unfortunately, I can't be sure how much is crash damage and what was simply poor quality control at the cheap ebike factory. For instance, the rear wheel seems to sit closer to the chainstays on the impact side, indicating that the frame got bent as well as the wheel and fork, but I never saw the bike before the crash. The wheel could have been that way to start.

The bike weighs about 80 pounds, so I can't exactly sling it around. With the front wheel smashed like that, I can't wheel it around, either.

As the potential cost of repairs mounted, it fell short of the supposed $900 price of the new bike, but still looked to surpass $400, maybe even $500, with shipping and labor. The driver will likely balk at that amount unless they're either super benevolent or secretly acknowledge that they're at fault. We as a shop don't want to take it on, because we've already gone through a couple of long, expensive slogs this season. Barely breaking even is a bad business model. I feel really bad, because the rider is a worker once again getting screwed by someone else's carelessness, but they did contribute some negligence by riding in the Death Slot. I recall my chess match with an insurance adjuster when I had a serious encounter with a motor vehicle years ago. We negotiated a settlement because I needed money and was willing to barter a little, but I only had the leverage I did because police came and everyone filed a formal report. I had 'em by the insurance, and by the officer's report that the occupants of the car were fundamentally at fault.

As I researched repair options, I also found companies that offer bike insurance, particularly ebike insurance. This rider got a lot of bike for their $900, but this accident may have wiped it all out. They have no safety net. If they can't get the bike fixed for an amount that the motorists will cover, they lost their shot to apply legal leverage because they didn't get a police report to create an official narrative. They're left with a pile of scrap metal that a single human can barely drag around.

So: if you have an ebike, especially if you use it for transportation, insure it. Otherwise, be prepared to lose everything, because drivers will always have the better story. If you ride any kind of bike in traffic, obey the rules as much as possible, so that you have a solid basis if you do get hit. Avoid the Death Slot. I ride to the far right a lot on stretches where I get along better if I let traffic flow past me, but in town I stay out of it. Especially with a powerful ebike, get out there and claim space. Otherwise, crap like this happens.

If you have an insurance company, you have a corporate entity with accountants and lawyers who will be looking for ways to take that money out of your antagonist. Granted, they'll take it out of you as well, if they have to. But at least you have a contract with someone who is supposedly on your side. Your ebike is much more of a vehicle than a pedal bike, even if it costs far less than a top of the line pedal bike. With power comes responsibility and expense.

Remember "House?"

 In the medical drama "House," caustic genius Dr. Gregory House diagnosed mysterious afflictions that suddenly struck down the patient of the week, for eight seasons of often nauseating entertainment. The nasty genius used his mega mind, extensive education, and long experience to slice through the confusion and bring us the answer.

After the previous medical drama ER made patient -- and even doctor -- survival far less likely, viewers were trained not to expect a happy ending. House delivered pretty often, but sometimes the patient died. Also, House would be wrong several times in the episode before delivering the right diagnosis within a few minutes of the end. After you watch a few, you realize that early certainties never pan out. "Do this!" House snaps at his team. We look at the clock and go, "Nah, that ain't it."

Without all of the good-looking actors, life and death stakes, and medical bills that would bankrupt a medium sized city, bike repair has become like episode after episode of House. A patient comes in with weird symptoms or what looks like a simple problem at first. We diagnose and treat. It fails. We try something else. Thing is, no one has bike medical insurance, so we the greasy healers are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money on these false starts.

Bike shops have no medical associations in which we share our experiences and publish papers in a journal. We don't know what other mechanics are doing. Online videos show either idealized versions of various procedures or selected experiences of individuals who may be amateurs and inexperienced. And if the video doesn't cover the exact model in the exact year that you're dealing with, the information might not help at all. On top of that, who has time to spend hours trolling through search results in hope of finding a tutorial that might not even be out there.

Forums may yield some useful knowledge, but are just as likely to attract experienced misinformation or loud, confident, and wrong newbies. You have to sift carefully to find cases that fit what's in front of you on your work stand.

The manufacturers really don't care if you can fix anything. They just want you to buy it. Ancestral sources like Sutherland's and Sheldon Brown can't keep up. We're thrown back on our experience and education -- such as it may be -- to analyze the problem.

With every added cog in the cassette, mechanical shifting gets more and more temperamental. As the manufacturers abandon what used to be the state of the art, replacement parts for that number of speeds are made more cheaply. This includes shifters and derailleurs. You had fancy ten-speed when it was the best? You're just part of the rabble now. Eleven speed is rapidly going the same way.

Any repair could turn into a frustrating mystery these days. I like a challenge, but most of this crap is just an affront. Parts are disappearing for the old, reliable, simple bikes, while tech support barely exists for the new, throwaway bikes. I get it: to a racer, the entire bike is as consumable as chains, tires, and tubes used to be. As long ago as the 1980s, racing was already turning into a massive science experiment. It has only gotten more so. Rider and machine need a complex support system to eke out those hundredths of a second per kilometer.

Advancements in racing technology through the 1970s improved quality for all riders, because we all used similar mechanisms, shaped slightly differently for variations like racing versus touring, and, later mountain biking. As disciplines diverged, particularly off-road, there was a lot less cross-pollination.

People here used to complain from time to time about the level of detail I would go into, but less time was wasted diving right in as opposed to dithering around trying to figure out how to avoid it. Lately, though, it seems that diving in doesn't assure solid results. Too many things have to work too perfectly together.

The road bike that's giving me fits right now was built on a bare frame in 2017. The owner rides hard. He raced a couple of short seasons, mostly just a nearby training series, but it's a competitive series. He rides with people who never go easy. Over the years, we have replaced gear cables and housings as necessary to restore precise shifting, along with chains and cassettes. This time, though, I can't get it to behave.

The brifter seemed to be worn out. It needed too much lever travel to engage, which meant that it didn't have enough left to climb to the low gear cog. I changed the brifter. It was crisper, but still did not have the reach. The chain gauged pretty new. We'd already changed all cables and housings with tried and true 5mm. The bottom bracket cable guide can't be removed because the bolt that threads into an insert in the BB is rusted in, and the insert itself is broken loose from the bottom bracket shell. It's been that way for years. It shouldn't matter as long as the guide stays in position. Cable tension should hold it.

I rigged a brifter in parallel, using full-length housing, to test the derailleur itself. It shifts the full range. So something in the cable system is eating lever travel. I can see motion where the cable housing enters the upper end of the downtube. There's a bit more waggle where the housing exits the chainstay near the derailleur. Is that enough to cause the problem? Parts are all original, and very simple. But the hole in the downtube could be worn. After all this, is the answer something simultaneously stupid and difficult?

Possibilities on the whiteboard: Maybe I should drill out the frame and run full-length housing. That's a one-way trip, though. How about using carbon-compatible epoxy to shim up the frame hole? But I don't want to glue the cable stop into the frame. That might make future cable changes even more time consuming.

I tried every combination of cable housing, including 4mm, 5mm, and mixing widths in case the flex characteristics of the 4mm handled the bends better than the 5mm we can get now. I'm happy to say that 4mm did nothing to help. Eventually, I put on a new brifter, new cassette, and the 5mm housing we had installed first when we thought it would be the routine repair we had completed successfully several times over the bike's life. I got it to hit every gear from the 39, and every gear but the Ned -- the full cross 53-28 -- from the big ring.

Given the option of taking the bike with the gears we could get or making permanent modifications to install full-length housing, the rider opted to take the bike as it is. He even said that it hadn't been getting the Ned for a while, and he was fine with that. We'll see how things go.

Nothing is a sure cure anymore. Every fix is temporary. Who needs another metaphor for life when we just want reliable machinery? I hop on my primitive bike, day after day, and just go. I can change a cable on the side of the road in about 15 leisurely minutes. If I get a flat, I put in a new inner tube, pump it up, and ride on.

What seems dangerous

 An 80-year-old woman driving a small SUV was obliterated by a drunk driver in a dump truck on Route 28 a couple of weeks ago. She was southbound. The truck driver was northbound. He crossed the centerline.

The skid marks, crumpled guard rail, and churned-up road shoulder gave mute witness to the horror that had unfolded in a few long seconds. The dump truck careened on its way to overturning, leaving broad, curved swaths of black. The SUV left straighter, fainter marks. The road had been closed for about six hours, but had reopened in time for me to ride through on my way home. Few but the investigators had seen the crash site at that point.

Over the ensuing days, the investigation continued, leaving more and more marks. There's a countdown to impact from each direction, and a mark where the vehicles collided. Cryptic notations on the pavement. Motorists seemed subdued for a day or two. It's hard to be impressed for long, when your own flow and schedule dominate your continuing life.

As a cyclist, I'm not only aware of my exposure to danger, I'm reminded of it regularly by people who remark on my own persistence as a road rider or tell me about how they decided to give it up. It's true: bicyclists don't have fender benders. If we get tagged, it leaves a mark, at the very least.

(Cartoon from 1984)

In your motor vehicle, you are not only required to stay out there in the lane and maintain speed, you have few options for a quick escape. Peer pressure generally enforces faster travel than the speed limit, although dedicated road blockers will ooze along. Even at annoyingly slow motorized speeds, the vehicles they're in have considerable mass and limited maneuverability. Most of the time, traffic rips along at the posted limit or higher. On a two-lane highway, you can easily race toward each other at 120 miles per hour. A motorcyclist might combine skill and luck to shoot a gap to survival, but skill is vital and luck is indispensable. A regular car, SUV, or light truck is just stuck there. If the antagonist is a dump truck, you know how it's going to end. In the recent crash on 28, the dump truck driver survived with minor enough injuries that he was able to go straight to jail. He laid the truck down and dumped its load, but got no more than banged up.

One message is clear: If you bought a large vehicle because you wanted greater crash safety, it better have been a dump truck.

As common as highway fatalities are, millions more people complete their trips each day than die or are injured in the attempt. It's not because all of those millions of drivers have perfect safety habits. It's because they get away with their foolish risks. If nothing goes wrong, was it really dangerous? 

A few nights ago, I heard a motorcycle blaze past my house at a speed that guaranteed that the rider's body would haunt the first responders for the rest of their lives. At that kind of speed, you don't even need to hit a deer. A porcupine, raccoon, or possum will do the trick. But the deer is highly likely, especially along that stretch. The idiot held his speed all the way out of earshot. The roar of the bike Dopplered away without ending abruptly.

Right now, raw milk has been getting a lot of press, because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a big proponent of it. Scientific consensus agrees that you're better off drinking pasteurized milk, but no one is forcing you to take this precaution. Occasional explosive diarrhea keeps you cleaned out. Extended periods of it can be a big help with weight loss. Just be sure to stay hydrated with refreshing water from Rock Creek.

Our entire country is living through the risks ignored or welcomed by the small percentage of voters who embraced it and the other percentage who didn't care enough to come out and vote against it. We're roaring down a highway full of blind curves and hills, with occasional fog, and impaired drivers at the wheel.

I've said it before: risky behavior persists because most people get away with it. You could say the same thing about the few persistent road cyclists. We're fine until we're not. Our small size and relatively slow speed can be advantages as well as disadvantages. I'm constantly scanning for escape routes and mentally rehearsing situations suggested by conditions. When things get hectic, I have to trust the motorists. For the most part, they come through.

We hear from quitters all the time. El Queso Grande told someone out in the shop about yet another one who simply assumes that the majority of drivers are impaired in some way. Could be. I smell a lot of the wake-and-bake crowd on my morning commute. Major drawback to stinky weed, y'all. It advertises your choice to the world. The worst booze breath can't match that.

Then there's electronics. Our helpful devices feed us mostly useful navigation information, but also draw a glance or a lingering look for what seems like no time at all until you snap back and straighten out. Hopefully you do it before going completely into the ditch, down a ravine, through a crosswalk full of people, or into oncoming vehicles.

EQG's outlook could be soured by the fact that he developed medical conditions that severely limited his ability to ride. He may take comfort in the idea that it's a bad idea anyway. Who likes to see other people having fun when you can't? Especially when it defined so much of his personality. When he delivers these reports of the steady decline of road cycling, it reminds me a little bit of my ex-mother-in-law who loved to tell me about the latest cyclist fatality on the roads around her home. "They hate bike riders around here!" she would declare.

If you stay home in bed, you might get bitten by a Brown Recluse spider. They love beds. And they hate people. I've heard that.

Specialized did us a favor

 

A customer ordered this bike online from Specialized. It was one of two. He tried to assemble his own. When he hit a snag, he decided to bring this one -- his wife's -- to us without trying to do anything himself.

Because he said he managed to do everything except size the shifter cable correctly on his own bike, I expected to find the usual online bike in a box, pretty close to complete. Instead I found a project akin to doing a colonoscopy on C3PO.

This bike, a Specialized Como SL 4.0, was designed to look like a picture of a bike drawn by someone who has never looked closely at a bike. The hydraulic brake lines and shift cable are routed into the handlebar within inches of their requisite levers. The brake lines and cable housing are not seen again until they emerge near the brake calipers and rear hub respectively.

Whoever assembles this bike is expected to feed the brake lines and shifter cable from the top of the head tube into the base of the handlebar stem and out through the proper side of the bar to the correct exit. These are not sinuous cords that curl easily into the contortions necessary. The assembly video (there is no printed manual) shows the Park Tool internal cable threading tool, which is a clever and effective device. But even that is not sufficient to ease the whole trip. I don't know if the customer bought himself one or just winged it. We'll find out when he brings his flubbed effort to us.

There is absolutely no margin for error in sizing the brake lines, and nearly none with the shift cable. In the picture you can see that I tried to get away with leaving the front brake line the length that it came. This is because the line already had the barbed fitting in the end of it, and no spare fitting was provided. The TRP brake appears to be a special makeup just for Specialized. You can salvage a barbed fitting from the end of a brake line, but you can't count on being able to. I'm guessing that the remaining Specialized dealers after they downsized a few years ago have the requisite parts on hand. We have an assortment of fittings, but not these specific ones.

The front brake has a problem I still have to diagnose. The lever feel was rock hard, then suddenly went "sploot" (picture a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine). It went totally squishy, but there was no splurge of escaping brake fluid. A few pumps of the lever brought it back to a reasonable travel and resistance, but the pads are now clamped against the rotor. It's even worse than an overfilled SRAM brake, and those are pretty bad. But those are easily cured, and consistently too tight. The "sploot" indicates a mysterious ailment.

At least the fluid is mineral oil, so when it goes all over the place while I'm doing the bleed with so little room to operate it won't eat the paint off this piece of crap.

The assembly video lists the TRP bleed kit as one of the required tools, but never shows the brake lines being trimmed or the system being bled. It just shows the technician/spokesmodel uncapping the lines and connecting them to the levers. Ta daaa! Turbo: It's you only better... or some bullshit like that.

I'm happier than ever that the Big S tossed us in the dumpster after our decades supporting their brand. Their disloyalty to us saves us from having to put a good face on utter crap like this. The owner of this bike would have to work on it themselves or pay a shop to do it. I don't know what sort of loss a Specialized dealer would be expected to eat for the time consuming mess of this needless puzzle, or what an independent shop would charge for the time consuming annoyance. It's apparently supposed to be so easy even a consumer could do it. Maybe not knowing any better is an advantage. If you have no basis for comparison, it just becomes another comedy bit, like assembling flat-pack furniture. You do it once, and when the bike craps out you just replace it.