Your free tuneup

The token work can’t be very important. If it’s free, it must be worthless, right?

Wrong.

Shut in with the few repair bikes that made their way in before everyone headed for shelter, I see the familiar toll of neglect. The guy who brought in one batch of three, none of them a recent purchase, said that he didn’t think they had gotten their free tuneups. He wasn’t angling for the freebie the way chiselers do, which was refreshing. He was just adding some details to the obvious list of what was bent, torn off, falling out, mysteriously severed, and generally shit-covered and corroded.

This brings us to The Free Tuneup Hoarder.  The hoarder holds onto the token up to — or well past — its expiration date, in order to get what seems like the maximum value out of it. What often happens instead is that things that would have been minor if we’d gotten to see them within a couple of weeks are now seriously mangled, like a crank arm that could have been tightened, but is now distorted and impossible to keep secured.

When I assemble a bike, I start by taking it apart. Technically, they’re supposed to come from the factory ready just to have the unattached parts attached and go out on the sales floor. I like to think that almost no bike shops trust that bullshit. Most of them will true at least the front wheel before installing it, and maybe adjust gear cables properly at the anchor bolts instead of using up lots of threaded adjuster. But it’s the next level or two that make the real difference.

If the assembler basically does a full tuneup on the bike as it is being assembled, every operation afterwards takes a lot less time and attention. Take off the cassette or freewheel. Properly secure the cones and locknuts to make sure that the hub bearings are adjusted and stay adjusted. Properly secure the front hub adjustment as well. Then true the wheels.

If the bike has rim brakes, undo the pad mounting hardware completely and grease the threads. This will make the pad alignment easier to adjust, and help you tighten the pads securely.

Generally greasing threads anywhere you find them goes a long way to make proper tightening easier.

All this meticulousness takes slightly longer than a slapdash assembly, but it pays off big time down the road or trail. I can’t say that everyone here does that thorough a job, but anyone I have trained has been taught that it should be the minimum standard. Less meticulous work will usually come back to bite you.

Desperate times lead to desperate measures, so our primary assembler will feel besieged. Stuff is going to hit the floor that didn’t hit all the bases first. We deal with that as we can. It’s all safely tightened. It just might not stay that way after bouncing over a bunch of rocks and logs, or potholes, or rail crossings. So don’t blow off the free tuneup, or try to stretch it out to get the most for your zero dollars. It could end up costing you a chunk.

Just a technicality, followed by another technicality, followed by...

Shimano's latest mechanical shifting systems seem designed to make you hate mechanical shifting systems. Weird cable routing in the frames already made mechanical derailleurs an increasing nuisance. This style of front derailleur cable attachment puts another few solid spikes into the coffin lid. And it gives double value to current technofascist fashion, because it's not just an annoying cable, it's an annoying front derailleur cable. Front derailleurs? Why did we ever think those were cool?

The instructions for this style of derailleur are an 8-page PDF. That's simple and straightforward compared to the treasure hunt I went through later in the week looking for information about electronic shifting and hydraulic road disc brakes on a bike I was assembling. Bikes like that used to come with a few helpful hints and diagrams to help with componentry that is less and less intuitive all the time. Now most of the printed matter is just legal disclaimers and directions to "visit our website."

The front derailleur on this bike led me upstream to the R7000 front shifter. In yet another silent recall situation, these marvelously redesigned shifters are apparently hanging up, jamming intermittently on bikes that are new or nearly new. 

I poked around looking for clues, but found nothing that I could tweak to make the ratchet behave consistently. I found a video by some guy that supposedly showed how to fix the problem with a little piece of plastic and some double stick tape, but further investigation revealed that whatever "cured" the problem was purely coincidental. The comments include testimonials from people who followed his instructions and achieved satisfactory results, but my explorations in the interior revealed an oily place where double-stick tape would have a very short service life. And why should someone have to fiddle around with their new shifters because Shimano screwed up again?

After I poked at things for quite a while, the shifter worked consistently without malfunctioning, even when I tried to make it misbehave. That doesn't mean I cured it. It just means that the clever bastard decided to go underground until the heat is off. I advised the rider to go to the shop where she bought the bike and ask them for warranty support, rather than pay us to dig around in it any further. The problem is similar to the old 105 ST-5600 almost-recall a few years ago. It's become common in the industry for a big component manufacturer to hand out free replacements to anyone who asks, while doing nothing to publicize the problem or take direct responsibility for it, which would cost them a lot more money. If you haven't ridden your bike enough develop the problem, why should they spend their money to give you something that actually works?

The current fashion for cable routing under the bar wrap requires some ingenuity in feeding the cables so that they don't get a kink in them at any of the tight changes of direction needed to make their way into the cable housing.

This little screwdriver with a notch filed in the tip had been kicking around the workshop for years after whatever job had led to its creation. It has now become a crucial tool for guiding a new cable into the exit from a Shimano brifter.

You have to push the end of the cable into the exit groove without extracting a lot of cable behind it. The little notched screwdriver is perfect for this.

Another bike with the annoying front derailleurs was a gravel bike with through-axles front and rear. The rear wheel shows how designers have realized that long horizontal dropouts really did serve a purpose back in the dark ages:

Whoever assembled this bike was not familiar with horizontal dropouts. The wheel was crooked in the frame. With an old style dropout, you'd just undo the quick release, straighten the wheel, and tighten the quick release again. With a nutted axle, loosen the nuts, straighten, tighten the nuts. In the through-axle version, you have to loosen the through-axle attachment, loosen the two 20mm nuts, turn the threaded adjusters to straighten the wheel, re-torque the 20mm nuts to 200 in.-lbs, and re-tighten the through-axle itself. The nuts are alloy, thick enough to make a cone wrench an inadequate fit, but not thick enough to fit a regular off-the-rack spanner.

In the middle of one morning, in came a regular customer who never buys a bike from us, but comes in for service when he's at his spare home up here. He said he was just starting out on a road ride with  his daughter, when the bottom bracket made a "snap" noise, and the crank got really loose.

The left crank bearing (press fit) had blown apart. Most of it was now cozied up against the right side bearing. The rest of it was greasy fragments inside the bottom bracket shell. He borrowed a rental bike to nip home and get his gravel bike, so that he and the offspring could continue their ride. We didn't have the bearings in stock, so we ordered him a nice mid-price set. No need for hundreds of dollars in ceramic bearings, but nothing too cheesy, either.

On the lower end of the price range, someone checked this thing in, with a couple of squirrel tails woven into the cables at the handlebar.

I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't think I want to know.

Sometimes, a rider will get the rear derailleur caught in the spokes or jammed with a stick. The pieces will be dangling or twisted up around the dropout. But this guy set a new high mark, sucking the derailleur cage all the way through the rear gears:

Moving back up the price range, it was time to assemble a special order bike for another summer customer. 

This Specialized Tarmac does away with cable-actuated anything. Specialized had previously sent rather detailed instructions with their technological marvels, given that the consequences of error are potentially worse than embarrassing for all concerned. Not this time, though. The most detailed instruction sheets were for parts that were already fully installed. The hydraulic brake lines were not connected, and electronic shifting reveals nothing to the external observer. The enclosed sheets from Shimano contained only the vaguest generic information in one or two sentences buried in paragraphs of even less useful verbiage. Their website was even less help. After studying it from all angles and trying to piece together clues from all of the fragmentary or obsolete sources I could find, it was time to poke and hope.

The brakes have "easy connect" brakes lines that aren't really. There was nothing magical about them. Fluid did get lost. Air did get in. I did have to do a short bleed of the top end of the system. It was better than a complete fill and bleed, but not significantly easier than any other pre-filled system on which I've had to trim the lines for size and replace lost juice.

The electronic shifting either works or it doesn't. At least the wires had already been run, but I did have to stuff the battery into the seat post. The non-round seatpost on this bike holds the battery more conveniently than the round post on a previous bike I wrestled with last summer. But I didn't want to mess up its brain by fumbling something in the initial startup, if such a thing is possible.

The charger that came with the bike only had a USB plug, so we had to plug the bike into the shop computer to top up the battery. The system was set in manual shifting mode. The customer can decide if he wants to use either of the synchro modes. The rear derailleur clicks or clunks into gear depending on how many cogs you've asked it to cross at one time. The front derailleur makes an officious, annoyed whine when it shifts. Back when Shimano first pushed index shifting on the road biking world in the mid 1980s, riders joked about how you knew someone was attacking when you heard their shifters click. On large-diameter frames like Cannondales, the snap was amplified. But it wasn't enough of a problem to keep indexing from becoming the norm, paving the way for STI and the rest of the Super Highly Integrated Technology we deal with today.

Look Ma! No cables! Just Shimano Mechanical-Electrical Gear Manipulation Apparatus.

The customer will have to synchronize his own personal electronics with the crank. Your riding style will determine the kind of targeted ads you see on the internet after every ride. And if you complain about hunger, muscle aches, or saddle pain, those remarks are recorded and uploaded to your profile to help refine your personalized marketing even more.

There it is, in serious black. Not only does it look badass, the manufacturer saved lots of money on paint. And the naked frame is easier to inspect for damage that could "lead to serious injury or death."

Assembly comedy of errors

Bikes people get somewhere else are one of our main sources of income. Maybe they bought it on line and realized that bikes aren't really that easy to put together. Maybe they got it at a shop that thinks bikes are too easy to put together. It goes like a snap if you leave out a lot of steps. It goes even faster if you don't even know what a problem looks like.

The latest example had something to do with a charity promotion, but when the technician doing the check in asked conversationally, "what charity was that?" the customer replied grumpily, "That's immaterial."

Ooooo-kay.

At a quick glance, the bike looked like a typical low-end facsimile of a hard-tail mountain bike. It had some snazzy cosmetic touches, like a silver and black headset spacer and machined-out highlights on the conical top of the headset itself, and on the top cap.

The dials on the tops of the fork legs looked like a particularly brittle chromed plastic. The oversize frame tubes are faux aluminum: they're steel. But it has disc brakes that actually seem to work.

The rear wheel was the heaviest thing I've hoisted in a long time that did not have an electric motor built into it.

The adjustment process went deceptively smoothly. Then I removed the top cap from the stem, so I could grease the threads on that bolt.

Perched atop that attractive two-tone headset spacer, the stem was halfway off the top of the fork and could not be mounted any lower with that spacer in place.

The star nut itself, which is supposed to be 15mm down in the steerer, was nearly flush with the top of it.

I found spacers to set the stem at the correct height and reset the star nut before putting the whole mess back together. That got me scrutinizing the rest of the parts.

Check out these shifters: Fake Shimano.

ShiMING.

The derailleurs were another inside joke:

Sun Run! A knockoff of Sun Race, a company that began in the 1990s by making good but not fashionably exciting mix-and-match components to repair Shimano drive trains.

The front derailleur is a double knockoff, because Sun Run evokes Sun Race, but SR is an even more venerable company (Sakae Ringyo).

The only brand labeling on the tires was a logo that looks like WD

This might be a swipe at or homage to the old Flying Pigeon brand of bicycles. In this case, WD stands for Wounded Duck.

Nice machining on the pedal threads:

Nothing that should have been greased was greased. A tuneup on a bike like this is basically reassembly.

Bikes like this are one reason that bicycle accident statistics exaggerate the danger of simply riding. If the bike had not had a defective rear inner tube, someone could have ridden it. As long as the chain pulls one gear around, and the wheels don't fall off, some poor idiot could pedal this thing out to the top of Dead Man's Drop and launch it. The stem was one solid pothole away from detaching from the bike. The brake cables were reversed and tangled. The pedals were finger tight in the crank arms. As far as I know, bicycle accident statistics never include in depth analysis of the machine or factor in the bad decisions made by the rider. It's just bike=injury or death.

The cruelest thing about a bike like this is that a kid might think that it's totally cool.We scrape off a lot of crap on kids because, "they're just going to grow out of it," or they're going to get a driver's license in a couple of years. So at an impressionable age we condition them to expect nothing better. This one didn't even have a country of origin sticker. Apparently, not even China wants to claim it.

My bikes when I was a kid were nothing special, but it's a lot easier to make a durable, affordable one-speed with a coaster brake than to pump out cheap, crappy versions of complex mountain bikes. Along with the plethora of downright hazardous bikes, kids have ready access to heavily edited videos of trained (and battle scarred) professionals showing them how to abuse their bikes and themselves.

Progress marches on.

A classic case of a well tuned bike

A customer brought in a pair of Trek 930 mountain bikes from 1993 or 1994. He said they had been in storage for a long time, so he wanted them looked over and tuned up.

The bikes have been ridden, but not a lot. All parts are original. So I'm guessing that they reflect how well they were assembled, since they probably did not see enough use to have gotten a comprehensive tune up before they went into storage.

They were assembled really well.

1993-94 was the height of the mountain bike boom. That height lasted until about the turn of the century, but by 1993 it was full on. Old shops battled hard for market share. New shops sprang up. Sports shops diversified into biking even if they had little or no prior experience. Work quality ranged from superb to disgusting.

Whoever worked on these bikes knew how to do it. The hubs are not only smooth, the lock nuts and cones are firmly secured. The threaded headset is adjusted and properly locked. The derailleurs are adjusted and the cables snugged at the anchor bolts, not just tuned by running out the barrel adjusters.

Twenty years later, my job turns out to be easy. I have to check all the adjustments, but only to confirm that they are tight and right. Twenty years, people. This is why I have such a seething contempt for half-assed mechanical work. Do your procedures and things will run smoothly for a long time.

"The bikes were stored," you might object. True, but that means I'm probably getting an accurate archeological picture of the quality of the original assembly. Observing well assembled and well tuned bikes over the long term I can confirm that they stand up to regular use better than something slapped together.  Remember: if anything is correctly done straight from the factory, it was an accident.

I appreciate good work. It takes no longer and is no harder than crappy work, and it makes my job easier. It makes everything better at no extra cost. Then we can all concentrate on having fun.