We build dreams...

 The owner of this bike has liked distinctive designs for years. I wrote notes on the service tickets on some of the stuff he tried to put together himself that instructed the mechanic "do NOT try to ride this bike." We let the customer know that we would do what he asked us to do on those early death traps, but that no one would put their own safety at risk to see if it actually worked.

One home-made chopper he brought in didn't even have a headset. The fork was just stuffed through the head tube. Foreshadowing of a sort.

Years later, he still likes outlandish-looking (and scary handling) bikes. A year or two ago we assembled a stretch cruiser chopper for him that he had spec'd himself from internet sources. Late last year, on the day after Christmas, he brought us the pieces he had collected for his next dream bike: an e-bike stretch cruiser with a springer fork.

He bought everything separately: frame from one source, fork from another, motor kit somewhere else... It was the start of ski season, so we didn't have a chance to dig into it all right away. More than a month later we finally had a quiet spell where I could start to fit a few parts together.

Aiming for easy stuff first, I installed the bottom bracket and crank. Stuck the rear wheel in the dropouts. Test fitted the front wheel to the fork. He bought a motorized front wheel, which he said would fit the dropouts. I was able to confirm this.

Ski season picked up again, so I pushed the bike aside. When I got to it again, I set up to install the headset. He'd brought the bike with the fork stuck through the head tube, but without the headset cups installed. The springer fork has a heavy aluminum bracket that overhangs the head tube to hold the top end of the springs. This obscured the head tube itself. When I removed it, I discovered that the head tube had been crushed. 

The whole front of the head tube had been flattened. But this is steel. We may not be dead yet.

First of all, I contacted him to let him know. "Oh, yeah," he said. "I forgot to tell you about that." Apparently, it was shipping damage.

"You should have gotten warranty!" I said.

"That's what my dad said," he answered.

Too late now. And he would probably have had to box up the oversize frame and ship it back. Whatever. I told him we would see what we could do.

I started experimenting with different items to use as a drift mounted to the headset press. I also contacted my friend Diane in Orlando. She is an ingenious machinist who has been working on bikes for more than half a century. She has built frames and fabricated some form of just about every part. She had already made a drift that fits the headset press, and shipped it to me on loan.

Many hours of work later, the head tube was round enough to accept the headset cups. I fit the fork.

The steerer tube was too short. It's a one-inch threaded steerer. I went online to see if anyone sold a springer fork with a one-inch, threaded steerer that was longer than what we had. It was nearly impossible to find anyone listing the measurement at all. Most of the forks were 1 1/8-inch threadless. It looked like we had the longest fork of its type. If we couldn't get a fork to fit the head tube, we were going to have to make the head tube fit the fork.

A tool called a head tube facer uses cutters on a rod threaded through the head tube to cut down a small amount from either end, to assure that the ends are parallel. This allows the bearings to turn smoothly. Cut a little, cut a lot. I spent hours, shaving down that head tube like I was digging my way out of prison with a spoon handle. Eventually I had removed about 12 millimeters altogether, to get enough steerer to protrude to fit not only the headset parts but that chunky aluminum bracket for the springs.

Once we could complete the routine assembly tasks, I had to figure out how to install the components of the motor system. Because the frame uses mostly curved tubes, there were no flat, straight areas for the battery bracket that didn't lead to other problems, like interfering with the cranks, or rubbing on the chain. The bracket supplied by the battery manufacturer was drilled for water bottle bolts, but the receivers in the battery box itself left half of its length unsupported. I had to devise a support bracket to allow me to mount the battery in the only usable location on the bike.

Fabricating the bracket required buying some hardened drill bits so that I could drill the plates to match up with the hole in the back of the battery box.

The pedal assist sensor the customer bought was designed for a small bottom bracket shell, not the big, one-piece crank type that the frame had. We had to hunt down a sensor for the larger shell. Then the sensor ring that goes on the crank itself isn't a great fit, but that was better than no fit at all.

The sensor itself came with a different style of plug than the original sensor intended for use with the motor kit he had. I couldn't find an adapter cable to bridge the difference, so I had to snip the end off of the new cable and graft on the plug from the original one. This included salvaging contacts that were not meant to be undone and refastened. Somehow, this actually worked.

Next I had to figure out the cable runs. I only had specific lengths to work with, and no second chance if a broke anything. The harness on the control box had plugs we wouldn't be using, so I had to separate those and bundle them safely in case they get used in the future. The customer had gotten brake levers with his kit, but he was only going to run a coaster brake on the rear wheel. The front wheel -- the one with the motor -- has disc mounts on the left side, as is normal, but the stupid fork has its caliper mounting tabs on the right fork blade. It also has posts for a rim brake, but the customer didn't want to bother with that. This means that he won't have a brake cutout on the motor. Fortunately, his intended route with the bike is entirely flat, using the local rail trail for his commute. 

The motor kit includes a throttle, so he won't really have to pedal at all, but I got the pedal assist to work anyway. He had wanted it enough to order the new sensor kit.

The control box presented another challenge. It needed to be close enough for all the wires to reach, mounted solidly, in a protected location if possible.

My colleague George sketched up a simple and effective concept. I made a day-off visit to the hardware store for the U-bolts and other bits. The bolts are cushioned with shrink tubing. The box stands off slightly from the seat tube so that airflow over the cooling fins is unrestricted. Because the chain line runs right next to the box, I fabricated a bracket to deflect the chain when it bounces over that way. The customer did not get the chain guard usually included with these frames. He might want to track one down. The chain is very long, so it has a lot of latitude to waggle around. It not only comes within a couple of millimeters of the control box, it also almost rubs on the rear tire.

No notes on the seat. It's perfectly on brand.

Even the handlebar wasn't simple. The apehangers he ordered don't fit the stem. I shimmed them in. It's a perfectly legitimate procedure for which nice shims are machined in a number of sizes representing the standard increments. Of course this setup didn't span the standard increments, but I found something. He can order larger-diameter bars, but the bike is usable in the meantime. He won't be driving fast or cornering hard on it. Not more than once, anyway.

The biggest worry is that the customer will be severely shocked by the final price. Figuring straight time at our posted hourly rate, he's into us for more than $1,700 in labor alone. I shaved that down to just over $1,400, but then there's 50-some-odd in parts. We may end up eating this thing.

"Why didn't you warn him?" you might say. Our only choice was to pull the plug when we saw the head tube, and just send him out to buy a new frame. So he'd be out whatever he paid for the first one, plus several hundred for another one, plus shipping, plus the labor to fit the head tube to the fork of his choice, plus all of the design and fabrication time that went into fitting the motor kit. Yes, he could buy a pre-made e-bike stretch cruiser for $2,000-$3,000, but none of the ones I saw looked very close to what he chose for himself.

Building a bike on a frame is always more expensive than buying a bike already factory spec'd and assembled, especially if you have to pay for someone else's skilled labor. When you really depart from any kind of plan or standard, you need to have your own ingenuity or pay for someone else's.

You might quibble that everything is just stuck on the outside of this frame. If you're lucky enough to know someone like my friend Diane, or any other mad genius tool user, you might get some sweet custom work for the same price or lower -- Diane does not have the same shop overhead that a retail business has -- but you need to live near her, or travel to her, or ship all of your stuff to her, in a time when shipping prices themselves are staggering. If we had drilled the frame to put battery mounts directly on the top tube, for instance, we would have either had to use rivet nuts (lame) or properly brazed them in, requiring repainting afterward. $$$. The same goes for drilling in for cable guides or brazing something on outside without installing a threaded receiver into the frame.

I don't know anyone locally with the same collection of skills and career bikiness that Diane has.

Anyway, we accomplished the desired task: it's a complete bike, as rideable as its awkward design will allow.

On some level, we do want to give our services away. But we can't. The entire resources of the business contributed to successful completion of the task he requested. All of the knowledge, and all of the collected miscellany hung and piled around the place represent years of experience and a warehouse of potentially useful elements.

5 Days ≠ 5 days

Ski season demands a different kind of energy than bike season. In some ways it's lower. If we have good snow, leading to active rentals and retail sales, we have to deal with a lot of immediate customer needs, but almost nothing spills over into complicated services. Dealing with the public can be tiring and annoying, but it's basically a revolving door kind of transaction. They trample in, we hand them gear, they trample out. In the afternoon, renters return to drop their wet gear and leave again.

I work some long days in rental season, arriving early to set up the shop after wet boots have laid out overnight to dry. My personal life goes on hold for as long as the peak period lasts. That depends on the weather. It could be a couple of months or a few days. It only demands patience and infection control. The five-day week is tiring. I'm always glad to get to the shorter hours of spring.

Here's the thing: bike work, especially service work, is way more exhausting than ski work. Winter is exhausting in its way because I have to take care of my house, clear my driveway, shovel my roof if the winter calls for it, and still get to work on schedule. It taxes my body. But bike work absolutely drains my brain, and has an emotional component as well as I try to handle all of the variables.

Bike comes in for service. What kind of bike is it? How old is it? Expensive or cheap, was it well made? Plenty of expensive stuff out there in the last 20 years is poorly thought out. Some of it, particularly from fringe e-bike companies, is shamefully crappy. But even the "good stuff" from what are perceived as reputable companies suffers from technophilia. So when I assess it I have to determine if it was ever fixable, let alone whether it is still supported.

As the 20th Century neared its end, bike companies started getting more and more coy about publishing tech information and specs. For a while we could keep an archive of printed catalogs to have some idea. Back when we went to trade shows, we could pick up materials from the brands that we didn't sell as well as the latest from our own vendors. That not only helped us when chiseling customers quoted competitors' prices to us. It also helped us repair those bikes. And the bikes themselves were simpler, which helped everyone, especially riders, whether they realized it or not.

I advocated for simplicity as I saw the trend in the industry toward complicated, expensive mechanisms. No one listened to me. Customers voted with their wallets in two ways: A bunch of them abandoned biking altogether. The remainder were technolemmings eager to run off of whatever cliff the industry put a shiny new gizmo on the edge of.

The next steps after figuring out if a repair is possible at all are to determine if we have parts on hand or can get them. At the same time I have to calculate the cost and see if the customer is willing to pay it. People will sink astonishing amounts of money into a piece of cheap junk, while others will walk away from something in the mid or upper price range that could be fixed for significantly less than the price of a new one. It's just that new ones are so expensive that "significantly less than the price of a new one" is still several hundred dollars. We have repairable full suspension bikes abandoned in our basement because the owner ghosted us. More than once this happened after they said, "I do want to pay you for your time." No you didn't. Don't even bother to lie.

You might think that we can then spiff up those bikes and sell them for enough to recover our sunk costs, but with all of the other things that we have to do with a rapidly aging skeleton crew, like vet our decrepit rental bike fleet and keep up with the billable work for customers who do want to pay us for our time, rehabbing a mountain bike rapidly going out of fashion never seems to get done.

As a repair moves through the process, setbacks might occur that lead to additional charges. Then I have to feel out the customer without scaring them off and figure out how much, if any, of the extra cost we can recoup to avoid losing our entire investment of time and material in the repair so far. Most people don't need their bikes. It's all discretionary spending.

The ones who do need their bikes don't usually have a lot of slack in their budgets, no matter how willing they might be in theory to pay us what we're worth. We've had two bikes hanging downstairs for at least four months while the owners try to scrape up the money to have a flat tire repaired. We know from experience that if we fix the bikes and let them go without payment, the owners won't get back to us with the money. Heck, we've got a guy who actually worked part time for us to score employee discounts who is into us for a couple thousand for an e-mountain bike and trailer. Times are tough. A lot of our inadvertent charitable donations are not tax deductible.

The work no longer inspires hope or is particularly satisfying. Some customers appreciate it. Others take it for granted. The cool kids are all way cooler than I am, so I'm barely a step above someone pushing a broom to them. Maybe not even. So at the end of the day, and emphatically at the end of a week, I'm fckin' done. I want as much of the season of light and warmth as I can get. All too soon we go spinning into the darkness again, to grapple with whatever passes for a winter.

Consistency, fitness, and junk food

 As Driving Season winds down for this winter, I endure the last few commutes in which I am completely at the mercy of whoever is in front of me. It will probably be more than a few, given our typical weather, but the trend is clear. Daylight Relocating Time has started.

Bike commuting time in transit is much more consistent than driving time. I've written about this before. My average speed follows a predictable curve, increasing to a peak in July before tapering as the summer drains away again into autumn. As age takes its toll, I don't know from one season to the next whether I will make it to the previous year's high range. Just feel it out carefully and settle into a moderate, steady pace. Don't stress the cardiovascular system or the joints. Whatever the average turns out to be, I can set my starting time to get me to work more or less on time. Usually less, but that's not the fault of biking. I can have just as little enthusiasm for punctuality when I'm trapped in the car.

Bike commuting was part of a long-term, open-ended strategy to provide consistent exercise around scheduled employment while saving lots of money and burning off my consumption of snack food. Lots of money is a relative term. I've never earned lots of money in my life. But I haven't pissed away a lot of it on motorized activities, particularly getting to my various jobs. Having my winter job at a cross-country skiing shop and touring center has helped somewhat with the winter interruption to cycling, but I can't count on getting out there as regularly as bike commuting. I even wrote a song titled Snacking out of Boredom and Depression about the toll that the dark and frozen -- or inadequately frozen -- months can take.

Learning to bake has given me greater control over the ingredients in what I make, but it has also made it a lot easier to slap together sweet comfort carbs. And I'm not quitting. I built a whole lifestyle and career around not having food discipline, dammit! At some point, your consciousness ends as your energy is recycled into the universe. Have a damn brownie. Have two. Then go run or ride around.

The rest of my diet is generally pretty healthy: meals made with few ingredients, a high proportion of non-meat items. It looks even better if you count maple syrup and coffee as fruit juices. Oh yeah, and chocolate is from plants, too. I just need to get out there and burn it off. It's all fuel.

The coming recession

 Back when the economy sagged around 1990, mountain biking surged, because it looked like cheap, accessible fun. A thousand bucks was still a lot for a bike, but sporty, capable machines costing $500 to $800 were an easy sell.

The recession in New Hampshire started a little sooner than 1990, because the 1980s had spawned a real estate boom that began to falter as the '80s ended. We went down a little sooner and stayed down a little longer than the official dates for the recession period. But the shop stayed busy because the many families that had been feeding off of the building boom couldn't just uproot and leave. Where would they go anyway, when the economy was spongy all over the country? So they stayed.

People from away still visited. People who might have taken a more expensive vacation to a more distant, bragworthy destination stayed closer to home.

Mountain biking thrived because it didn't require much investment after you bought a bike and a few accessories. You didn't need to buy fuel for it, register it, and insure it. Just buy a bike and go find the local trails.

Trails did exist. We rode for miles on logging roads and snow machine trails, and tried out hiking trails with varying success. During mountain biking's exploratory period, mountain bikers hadn't become as jaded and demanding as they are now. Consequently, there were a lot more of them.

By the mid 1990s, when the economy had revved up again, mountain biking was a habit. The bike industry was busily technologizing it to death, but it was a slow poison in pursuit of perfection. The mountain bike of today is truly an impressive product of evolution, well suited to the style and environment of its use. It's also never going to be cheap again, because you can't make a machine that will stand up to the demands of technical trails and fearless riders by keeping it simple. You want a simple bike? Stay away from mountain biking.

Because the bike industry grew obsessed with increasingly expensive technologies in all categories, their user base shrank, leading to much larger and more rapid inflation than in the rest of the economy. They had to farm fewer people for more money per person just to try to tread water.

Changes to mountain bike design do reflect lessons learned from the period of its greatest popularity. Front end geometry is designed around long travel suspension forks. A longer rigid fork would not provide the secure handling that a suspension fork provides, because it would not redirect the force of bumps and bashes the way suspension does. Front suspension allows you to put the front wheel out in front more, while the rider stays back behind the steering axis, which helps reduce the chances of going up and over the bars. Because the suspension telescopes, the wheel moves toward the bike as it moves upward. With a rigid fork, the wheel would stay out there, exerting its full leverage on the fork legs and lower headset bearing. Your simple bike would have to have the archaic geometry of the 1990s. Your riding style would have to reflect that.

You can still take your old 1990s single speed on many trails. Routes we used to ride still exist. Just make sure you don't impede the rightful masters of those trails who paid a lot more for their bikes, especially if you are on one of the trails that they also paid a lot of money to have built.

The combination of tariffs and economic instability looming before us for this summer spell big trouble for the bike industry. Even the sales of cheap e-bikes will suffer, because they are entirely built in tariff-affected countries. Even with that, cheap e-bikes will stay viable because more and more low-level workers will not be able to afford even a beater car. Hard to say how it shakes out nationwide, when so many urban areas have been designed around the armored cavalry model of transportation.

The way the economy is being collapsed, it won't all fall in at once. This will help the administration, because the people who go down first have the least political leverage. They (we) are quite numerous, but easily divided over trivial matters. But the bike market has been fragmented for almost 20 years now. People in general seem to have less to spend on recreation, and far more options to spend it on than they had in the 1990s.

In hard times, people do pay to repair their older items, but they still have limited funds, and repair parts are subject to the tariffs and inflation.

Endangered species

  One of our ski reps came in yesterday to show us next year's line. He has long experience as a road racing cyclist, as well as competing in cyclocross.

He mentioned that he had completely given up riding the road in the Concord, NH, area, because of traffic volume and how badly people drive. He said that the final straw was when a car shot past him inches from his handlebars. When he caught up to the car at an intersection, the young woman driving was holding a slice of pizza in  one hand and her phone in the other. She was staring down at her phone when the rider spoke to her through her open window.

"Hey, you passed me really close back there," he said.

"Whateverrr!" she snapped back at him and floored the gas to get away.

While an incident like that might make one yearn for a hand grenade in the moment, that wouldn't solve anything. It would make things worse.

He also told us about someone he knows who was hit and injured, and someone else who was hit and killed.

We both agreed that a large part of the problem is "too many rats in the cage." In densely populated areas, in a population under increasing economic and social stress, we're all just generally sick of each other and are rapidly losing what little regard most of us had for other people's lives.

People are also generally more distracted as they self medicate for the depression and anxiety many might not even realize that they have. And at least one whole generation of new drivers has hit the road with little or no experience as transportation cycling kids. They grew up riding in cars to closed-venue activities.

Road cyclists are an endangered species due mostly to habitat loss. The lab rat metaphor applies to humans in general. The wild animal metaphor applies to the increasingly crowded roads where every vulnerable creature gets crushed. The percentage of malicious or careless drivers may not have increased much, but the sheer population increase means that a small percentage is overall a larger number. And they aren't evenly distributed. You might encounter none for weeks and then get harassed multiple times in one ride.

I haven't ridden in a high-traffic, urbanized or suburbanized area on a regular basis since the 1980s. The same dynamics apply. It's just that now they cover a much greater percentage of the country. Add to that an ever increasing population and two-tiered society in cycling.

The haves, the recreational cyclists, use disposable income to fund their hobby on two wheels. Most of those riders have been driven off of the road, but wherever they are seen in public they are perceived as privileged. No one driving past you in your kit knows whether you're a lawyer or an engineer or a warehouse worker, but they are free to assume that you are not a serious individual if you've chosen to prance around in tight shorts and a colorful shirt, requiring motorists to divert around you.

The have-nots are the transportation cyclists who used to ride department store bikes and now try to get e-bikes instead. But they can't all afford e-bikes, so they're pedaling whatever they can get until circumstances improve and they can get a car. Some of them are discovering the economic benefits of a vehicle that doesn't have to be registered and that's much easier to park, so they might only level up to a more powerful e-bike.

In my own area, traffic has gotten somewhat worse along my commuting route, and vastly worse on the popular routes along the lake shore and on the roads and highways that feed into and out of the area. This refers primarily to summer, when seasonal residents and visitors swell the ranks. Year-round population has also edged upward steadily.

If you're riding a bike, you have to assume that you are invisible. This is especially important at intersections. Even if you have the right of way, you can't assume that you'll get it. On a busy road or street with a lot of feeders that enter or cross it, you have to be alert at all times. That's why I never use headphones or ear buds. No distractions!

I'm part have and part have-not. My income is well below the median, but I don't spend a lot. My bikes and gear are above average because I get my meager income from the industry, so I get lower prices, and can do all of my own work. I don't have kids, but I do take my responsibilities to my cats seriously. That can take a bite out of savings.

Bikes can be a powerful tool for your personal economy. If I lived where wintry weather was less common and winters were shorter, I might not own a car at all. When I lived in such a place, I went without a car for years. That saves a lot of money. I rode to work, to train for racing, and intended to tour much more than I ever did. But that was millions of rats ago. All of the cages are more crowded. Some have infrastructure to help riders, but there's no universal standard. Wherever you find yourself, you have to assess the risk and figure out how to manage it.

"Not all fat bikers"

 Inconsiderate fat bikers ticked me off recently by flaring up again on the cross-country ski trails. The outbreak was brief, overshadowed by an epidemic of foot traffic. Passive aggressive behavior? Impossible to say.

On Tuesday I had one of the cats at the vet. While we were waiting to pay our bill, motion outside caught my eye. A rider on a fat bike pulled up and plunked his bike into the snow pile beside the walkway. He had come to pick up some pet supplies he had ordered. The front desk crew asked where he had come from. He said he lived on a road about five miles away, but he had ridden down the railroad line that the snowmobiles use in the winter.

That right there is the fat bike's original mission: biking on existing transportation trails to conduct practical business or to pursue challenging tours or races. To use trails that they can't hurt, because the intended use is already a heavier impact than cycling. Admirable, though it still calls for a higher level of disposable income than a lot of riders might be able to justify. If I lived where he did I might ski to the vet for anything that didn't require bringing the actual pet.

Anyway, it was refreshing to see a self-reliant fat biker out there representing.

Fat bikers are an invasive nuisance

 Cross-country skiing is on life support on our local trails. After weeks depending on our kilometer of man-made snow, we finally got a storm that delivered six fluffy inches that packed down to a barely slidable two inches on our network.

Fat bikers consistently underestimate the impact that their tires have on the ski trails. They push constantly for unlimited access. If they are denied permission, their most diplomatic ambassadors just go in anyway, even when a trail is posted. They're doing it now, probably believing that they can't hurt the meager cover because it's not deep enough for them to sink in. They're shredding the cover that we can't replace.

If the cover is so thin that you don't sink in, you don't need a fat bike. Go ride on the rail trail, and leave us alone. Go ride on snow machine trails that no one is using, because the motorized users don't want to tear up their machines.

Fat bikes were developed for intrepid riders doing unsupported rides, sometimes for days. But sport fat bikers are some of the neediest whiners in the off-road demographic. They also consistently overestimate their economic value. For a ski area, they do more harm than good. Someone needs to establish fat bike touring centers to run the complete economic experiment. See how much revenue they actually generate after you have arranged for land, built and maintained the trails, and established a rental fleet for the visitors who don't want to invest in their own bikes.

Fat bikes are like a recurring infection that dies down for a time and flares up. I'd say they were like herpes, but you at least get to have a little fun once to get herpes. Oh, or you could get it as the result of rape. So maybe the analogy does hold up. Fat bikers certainly don't seem to understand consent.