And on to the next dream...

 After finishing the e-bike stretch cruiser it was time to replace the shifters and crank on a beautiful late-1990s Dean. The bike might actually date from right after the turn of the century. We've been seeing it in the workshop nearly every spring or summer for a long time. I built those wheels more than ten years ago. Maybe so long ago that we looked up parts in a printed catalog and placed orders by phone.

The picture above shows the bike after its recent changes. Originally, it had a Campagnolo Chorus crank, Record 10-speed brifters, and Centaur derailleurs. I vaguely recall that we had already upgraded it from 9-speed to ten-speed by the turn of the century, but we did work on a number of Campy-equipped bikes. Campagnolo actually provided instructions for changing some internal parts in a brifter to change the number of speeds. And, of course, the internals were completely repairable. But the shifter bodies and so many internal parts on this bike were now so worn that repair would have cost a lot more than a new set of brifters.

A lot of years had passed, but Campagnolo had always been the leader in backwards compatibility. You can buy quite a few parts for a 25-year-old shifter, although some of them are being phased out. During that 25 years, the parts fit models that spanned more than eight years, which is phenomenal in the post-Shimano era of technological hyperactivity.

The rider wanted lower gearing than the 53-42 chainrings on his existing crankset. Campy's 135mm bolt circle limits how small a ring you can fit, and they have to match that proprietary bolt pattern. Back when Campy's BCD was 144, other manufacturers copied it. Then Shimano and the Japanese makers brought in the 130 bolt circle diameter, and the industry shifted to that. This meant that you could put on the 53-39 combination that became the de facto standard for road cranks for years. You could even get a 38 for the inner ring, but few did.

When compact road cranks came in, they used the 110mm BCD that mountain bike chainrings were using. Mountain bikes still used triple chainrings. Road compact cranks were designed for just two rings up front. While the young and strong would combine the new little 50-tooth big ring with an 11-tooth cog for the hardest one on the cassette, the 50-34 combination that was most common served as sort of a secret granny gear for riders who were starting to feel a little faded as age took its toll.

So many years had passed before the owner of the Dean felt the need to gear down that a nice compact double for ten-speed was tricky to find. I also recommended trying to match the aesthetic of the old steel frame rather than sticking some aerospace monstrosity on there. I suggested, and he agreed, to get a Velo Orange Grand Cru Drillium crankset. It was actually a little more retro than the bike, but it's also fairly affordable and distinctive compared to the monotonous hellscape of soulless modern componentry.

It's actually made by IRD. But Velo Orange has their Grand Cru badge applied to it, and they deserve support for being such a friend to the retro rider.

The owner dropped the bike off in late March, 2024. I was able to get the brifters and bottom bracket right away. The crank was shown as out of stock for a month or so. The customer was willing to wait. That ETA got kicked down the road a month or two at a time, all the way to the end of the year. We nearly lost the job entirely, but I had contacted Velo Orange directly by that time, to confirm that they were still going to have the cranks at all. We got the customer to hang on. The crank finally arrived a week or two ago. We were still in ski mode, so I didn't start the job right away. We were also buried in the stretch cruiser project, which had been plagued with its own spec problems, but those had resolved more quickly.

As I dug into the Dean, I discovered that the slop in the shifters had been masking slop in the derailleurs. They were very floppy. That led me to look at what we could get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs.

Nothing. That's what we can get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs. Not a zippin' thing. Zippity doodah. Zilch. Nada. Campagnolo has abandoned their faithful long-term customers actually worse than Shimano. Shimano at least still makes some 10-speed road derailleurs for mechanical shifting, with brifters to match, for those who are addicted. For the friction shifters, the truly free, we can buy whatever derailleur we like the looks of and can afford. But for the brifter-dependent, the company that launched the industry into technofascism still has a little lifeline hanging out for the laggards still nursing their older stuff.

Funny: fascism was actually invented in Italy, and the Italian company was the slowest to adopt technofascism. But they're racing to catch up now. Be sure to shell out massive bucks for their 12-speed electronic stuff. It's kind of nice to see them back to duking it out for pro team spec, but the game has no soul anymore, so what are we really winning?

Way way back, in the 1970s and early 1980s, you could actually get every part of a Campagnolo derailleur, separately, to replace what might have gotten bent or cracked in a crash or a workshop mishap. It was treacherously easy to strip the threads on a front derailleur swing arm when tightening the cable anchor bolt. Good thing you could buy just the arm, install it, and pledge to use a lighter touch after that. You could also crack the clamp band, tightening the derailleur on the seat tube. Again: press the rivet out, replace the band, put on the new one and be more sensitive, you clod. Do you caress your lover with those awkward, loutish hands?

Well yes, yes I did, which explains my long spells of monkish solitude, but anyway... You can't get parts to rebuild a derailleur anymore. Long gone, though I do recall seeing them as late as the early 21st Century. I'll have to dig into my archive of Quality catalogs. QBP's print catalogs used to provide such complete tech information that we could figure out a lot of repairs and compatibility puzzles just from what they included about each product.

I had recommended that the customer stick with Campy because of their legendary durability and product support. Seems like I should have investigated them a little more deeply before charging ahead with this job. The customer and I were both trying to extend the life of existing parts rather than junk stuff and start over. Now, if he isn't satisfied with how this thing shifts, we have no option that doesn't cost him a chunk of change to take a different tack.

These shifters seem less substantial than they used to be, and the upshift thumb lever impedes removing the rubber hood to mount the brifter or run cables.

They also only fit 4mm shift cable housing, which means that we can't fit them with the easier-running 5mm which cures so many shifting problems.

Just like Shimano, Campy declares that their shifting systems and drive trains have to be completely matched, 11-speed with 11-speed, 12-speed with 12-speed, end to end. While I would be inclined to test them, trying to graft in 11-speed derailleurs with these 10-speed brifters, the lowest priced front derailleur retails for about $60, and they don't even list an 11-speed rear derailleur. So then we're experimenting with a 12-speed rear derailleur costing more than $200. Or we go on the hunt for good used, and new old stock.

If we talk him into friction barcons, he either eats the cost of the 10-speed brifters and buys some nice brake levers on top of the barcon price, or he uses the brifters as brake levers only, which looks kind of weird and accentuates our defeat at the hands of the technofascists. And all of this is just so that we can graft in whatever derailleurs he wants to try. Whatever derailleurs he wants to try includes pretty much anything on the market if he shifts in friction. They just have to have the gear range and chain capacity to match what he has. And friction shifters will be much more forgiving of the slop in the old derailleurs. He could just keep running those until they totally flop off.

I'm insanely loyal to old machines that I've grown to love. Aided by my own mechanical knowledge, friction shifters, and access to parts, I will keep my own stuff going for decades. I provide the same service to any customers or friends who want to cultivate and maintain the ancestral riding skills. It bums me out deeply when a customer decides to euthanize an old bike because they fall for the lure of the new and exotic, or just decide that something old isn't worth spending money on. I can't afford to rescue any of them, let alone all of them. And I always feel guilty if my enthusiasm for bike immortality and persistence in the face of a challenge leaves them with a result that they're not delighted with.

The industry makes it increasingly hard. Any of us interested in the deathless bike need to pay constant attention to keep track of something that might have been replaceable that has now turned into a vital organ to be preserved. Friction shifting can cover a lot of situations, but it can't work around systems that the industry completely abandons, like certain chainring sizes, or cassettes for proprietary freehub bodies. I'm looking at you again, Campy. While it's contemptible on one level that the entire rest of the industry adopted Shimano's Hyperglide spline pattern, it does create a de facto cassette standard that makes mix and match a lot easier.

I do have a Campy-equipped carcass in the shop basement that might yield donor organs, but it might be 9- or even 8-speed. It's that old. I have defended it against many a clutter purge over the years. Vindication would be sweet. I'm not into losing to the industry and the throwaway mentality.

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.

Cycling's Inferiority Complex

 Way back in 1980 at my first shop job I learned very quickly that I had no skills with customers. A couple of people brought in a very rusty old bike and asked for an estimate. I started going through all of the things that it needed to be in its best possible shape. Their brows furrowed. Chins might have quivered. They wavered between crushing disappointment and rising outrage. The manager, a bike shop veteran for many years, stepped in and provided the lowball, bare minimum estimate to get the bike functional but still decrepit. They were immediately charmed. I shriveled away like a vanquished demon.

The manager operated under the principle that some money was better than no money. Not every bike can be saved from abuse and neglect. I was always trying to get people to love their bikes and get hooked on the good stuff. Every person who worked at the shop was doing it at least in part for the discounts. On the retail side, a quick discount could turn a browser into a buyer, or a buyer into a loyal customer.

Avid bicyclists are always trying to get friends into it. Worse yet, we try to get romantic partners into it. That works about 0.0000312 percent of the time. The fact that it works at all, however rarely, keeps poor idiots trying, year after year. In a broader sense, the bike industry, bike retailers, and cycling organizations are all trying to win friends. C'mon! Try it! We know you'll love it, no matter how much you hated it the first (dozen) times you tried it!

In the 1970s, the bike shops I frequented all seemed to have the same welcoming attitude. Paradoxically, shops have developed the image of being snotty and condescending just because of the inescapable technical complexity of the deceptively simple machines, and the fact that we do try to establish dominance over anyone who appears to be challenging us. But our public image always fights against the perception that our machines must be stupidly simple because they don't have motors.

As I think of it, some bike people can be really caustic bastards. But even that stems from the inferiority complex. Genuinely strong and secure people don't have to be assholes. That doesn't mean that every insecure person is an asshole, only that the truly great are always truly good. Some insecure people are sycophantic grovelers or codependent people pleasers.

Then there's financial insecurity. I returned to the bike business just before the market exploded in the feeding frenzy of the 1990s. Money was pouring into the industry, but individual shops had to battle furiously to make sure that enough of it came to them. Lots of players went into the retail side. Price competition was brutal. One chain in Connecticut put all of its competitors out of business by price matching and giving free service for life. We pored over their ads and press releases, trying to find how they were faking it, but they weren't. Supposedly, they also paid their mechanics fairly well, as bike shop wages go. I don't know if it was a calculated strategy of long-term loss or if they had income that wasn't obvious, but they did prevail in the long run.

"We'll pay you to be our friend" has worked in many forms in the bike business for many years. I can't count all the times I totaled up a repair bill, realized that it would lead to a lot of nasty words, and planed off what I could to avoid the hassle. A classic case occurred this week, when I redid work on a bike that the other technician had misdiagnosed, and altered the bill to reflect what the customer had asked for and what was actually done. I removed parts that had been installed in error, but performed adjustments that had been left undone, so the total bill was slightly higher than it had been with the unnecessary parts. I noticed later that the shop owner had written a completely new ticket, discounting my labor to get the price below a maximum that had not been included on the original ticket. If I'd known that the customer had an upper limit, I would have done the discount myself. It's not only an example of how bike shops have to eat sh** just because customers don't value either their bikes or our services, but also of poor internal communication in the shop itself. You get used to being insulted in this business.

I might be able to recall every one of the few times that I've held the line on a big bill and had to deal with an ugly scene. Some people specialize in ugly scenes just to get that discount. When we identify those customers, we give them a farewell party at which we actually get paid one time for the work we put in. Then we stand in the flames of their wrath as they pay that final bill and darken our door no more. It's happy-sad. It's a shame to think about how they're going to badmouth us afterwards, but a great relief to have one less thing feeding our ulcers.

Over time, the constant need to overcome the lowball image leads to feelings of guilt over legitimate prices. I know that even the simple old equipment can't endure ignorant and uncaring technicians. You pick up all kinds of little details over years of doing the work. I also know that I wasted my earning life in a stupid job that would never in any market area pay any sensible adult enough to justify spending those years. I'm a special kind of idiot. The fact that I'm not living in a single grubby room or squatting in a tent on the back of somebody's woodlot is due entirely to luck. My life is a series of accidents. I still assert that a mere bike mechanic is worthy of respect and a comfortably livable rate of pay. Take a break here to explore for yourself the wildly divergent economies in different regions of the country and parts of the globe... I have imagined myself squatting in front of a shelter made of scrap wood and tin roofing, facing onto an unpaved street in a crowded city in the Global South.

A precarious existence in a privileged society can look very cushy compared to one where everything is more obviously subject to capricious destructive forces. Our shop here in Resort Town is heated in winter, cooled in summer, has indoor plumbing, and everyone old enough to drive has managed to obtain and support an automobile. But income depends on the public's recreational interests from year to year, in activities that have seen mostly downward trends. Those trends were interrupted during Covid, when the public suddenly had time and interest, and the business had nothing to sell them. The slump resumed as the economy recovered.

Participants in any sector of the bike world can't believe that the outlook overall is weak, because they are immersed in their chosen aspect of it. The mountain bikers are convinced that the boom is still booming. E-bike riders see plenty of their own kind, especially in more densely populated areas where support is more available.

DIY videos and helpful friends with a workshop in the back of their saloon take the place of the rival shops that forced each other to live on suicide margins and give more for less. The technolemmings who buy into the notion that every change is progress have no patience with another point of view. We're free to have the point of view. They just won't be around to listen to it. When anyone does bring in their mountain bike these days, I wonder why. Gone are the days when I was the go-to problem solver in this town. The industry has specialized in producing problems faster than I can keep up with them. Mountain bikes have replaced one set of vulnerabilities with another, much more frustrating set. Parts and labor cost more, but the potential unreliability in the outcome makes me nervous about charging what we should. But that's just when dealing with the already addicted. The general public has the same dismissive view of bikes and biking that they've had since at least the 1950s. Muscle cars would always be way cooler than muscle-powered vehicles. Loud noise! Cloud of smoke! Flashy paint job! Back seat you can get laid in! We were never going to beat that.

Your safety is assured because I hate your bike

 Some customers have expressed gratitude over the years for my vigilance in finding things like frame and component cracks that could have led to catastrophic failures. These include cracks in suspension forks and other linkages, failing handlebars, and cracking rims.

The dark truth is, I take delight in finding fault in ultramodern tech weenie bikes and parts. The customer's safety just comes along for the ride. I would scrutinize their bikes in any case, looking for the satisfaction of a structural or functional failure that I know will be there. It's a wonderful affirmation. I don't mind benefiting humanity, but my real aim is to compile such a huge dossier of evidence against the overwhelming mass of stupid design and cynical gouging that has overtaken the bike industry since the 1990s that it finally creates a customer backlash that returns us to an ethic of durability. That would be the real service to humanity. Because that is doomed to failure, I'll take the small victories of one or two riders at a time preserved from disaster, or perhaps even converted to the path of durability and simplicity. It has happened, a rare few times, that riders have abandoned the NEW! and IMPROVED! offerings of the industry and returned to a saner form of the machine.

Older stuff fails, too. It always did. Some changes are actually improvements. We have to be patient with some evolution as an idea gets refined. For example, the threadless headset started as a way to get around the problem that the influx of new mechanics in the explosive rise of the mountain bike boom couldn't understand how a locknut works. They couldn't adjust hubs and they couldn't get headsets to stay tight. You could overlook the hubs until they got really bad, but the clunky loose headsets were right there in front of you. So someone came up with a fancy-sounding reason to clamp the stem around the steerer tube and set the bearing adjustment with a cap screw. Then they just had to teach the ham-fisted apprentices not to graunch down so hard on that top screw that they broke the bottom out of the plastic top cap. On the first models, the top cap was designed to fail like that so that the enthusiastic wrench grunt wouldn't crush the actual bearings when they overtightened the headset. Within a couple of years, this had changed and metal top caps became the norm. They were slimmer and stood up better to abuse. They looked sleeker, and could be printed or engraved with logos. 

One nice thing about the threadless headset for the self-propelled traveler was that you didn't need a big headset spanner to adjust or disassemble the headset. That meant one less large tool for the fully equipped tourist to carry in the bottom of a pannier, hoping not to need it. But threadless headsets created real difficulties changing the height of the bars. The devices developed to deal with that can be very clunky and inelegant.

Cassette hubs went through a period where they were a real improvement, too. During the brief time when you could get replacement cogs in any size, and the cogs were separate across the entire gear range, you could customize or repair a cassette at home or in a tent with only hand tools. And the freehub design does put the support bearings for the axle in a better position to support the drive side. Beyond that, though, the design of cassettes now has turned into another facet of technological enslavement. One article I read while researching bike gearbox transmissions in mountain bikes said, "External drivetrain owners who ride often might replace their chain, cables, and housing three or four times per year, and the chainring and cassette once annually. As those components wear and their precise angles begin to dull, performance suffers. The chain is pulled laterally across the cog teeth under heavy loads, and as dirt and debris are introduced the metal is essentially sanded away."

Great, more stuff sent to the landfill by a once ecologically supportive industry. And a 12-speed cassette sells for an average retail price of close to $100.

Customers I deal with are not expecting to replace their chain, cables, and housing three or four times a year, although they might choke down replacing the cassette and chainring annually. With internal cable routing and full-length housing, replacing those parts can add up to a hefty service bill just to have the fussy shifting mechanism returned to its original state of acceptable mediocrity passing for precision. They certainly won't believe me if I share this information with them, even though I would rather do something else with a couple of irreplaceable hours of my life than ferret out cables and housing from the mysterious interior of their overpriced toy.

Because bikes are toys, they're designed for people who can afford to play games. It's not about finding enjoyment and fulfillment in the necessary labors of transporting yourself. It's merely discretionary recreation. The players might wish that their toys held up better, but they always have the option to quit. In the meantime, companies that make stuff want to find ways to get people to buy it. Once someone is recruited from the sidelines, how do you get them to part with more and more coin to keep the company in business?

The more complicated things get, the more details can get overlooked. Even my own urge to scrutinize is overwhelmed by the volume of work and the external complications required to hunt down solutions to the problems we can readily identify. I also have to fight through an initial thick fog of disinterest, because I find nothing desirable about the bikes brought before me.

My scrutiny is more appreciative on designs I like. I want to preserve and protect a bike I respect. Since those are almost invariably older, they may have seen more miles. But because the designs are simpler they could be built a little stronger, because the weight budget didn't get spent on bulky index shifter mechanisms, disc brake calipers, suspension forks, and rear suspension assemblies. Road bikes of today don't delve too deeply into suspension, but they do have the weight of disc brakes and bulky shifters. The weight budget for those comes from the lighter frame and rim weight, but those definitely come at a cost. Not every piece of racing technology should trickle -- or deluge -- down upon the citizen rider just looking for a bit of sporty transportational fun.

When the oppression of proprietary shifting systems first descended on the biking world disguised as a great new convenience and a boon to all humanity, I treated their ills as any physician would when faced with a new disease. I wondered, as any plague doctor would, how long the scourge would last, and how many casualties it would take. It would have required a widespread customer revolt to stop the spread of it. We've all seen how unbelievably hard it is to get the vast majority of people to band together to take simple actions to stop a plague. Lots of people either don't think it's serious or see some advantage in it for themselves.

Unlike the current actual plague afflicting our species these days, the plague of proprietary bike systems really was manufactured by known entities intending to profit heavily from their scheme.

 

One company in particular seemed to lead the way, but the other big players, including at least one new entity whose product was originally derisively called "gripshit," followed along behind the marketing juggernaut that was convincing a large pool of new customers that they needed innovation.

Some changes were improvements, even some changes that I derided at the time, before I studied them more closely and the changes themselves evolved into something more standardized and less "Shimano-y." Like linear pull brakes.

Original V-brakes were complicated and notoriously noisy, with Shimano's "parallel push" linkage. The idea was well meant, but in typical fashion it was overkill for the actual problem of brake pad alignment at the rim on cantilever brakes. 

Parallel Push disappeared after a couple of years, and now linear pull brakes themselves have been scrapped in favor of the even more complicated and annoying disc brakes. 

Disc brakes are a good idea on mountain bikes, because they take vulnerable, bendable rims out of the braking system, but they generate their own complications because you have to keep the fluid where you want it and rigorously guard against getting it where you don't. Rotors bend easily. There are two types of fluid. Know yours and keep it faithfully, for I thy brake fluid am a jealous brake fluid. Or you can have cables for slightly less hassle, and much easier servicing, at the cost of some braking power and modulation.

When I rode the Vermont 50 in about 1998, on my fully rigid Gary Fisher with friction shifting (my choice), old-style cantilever brakes, triple crank, and a low gear of 24-28, I did not finish DFL. My lower mid field finishing position had nothing to do with my lack of a suspension fork and up-to-the-minute shifting, and everything to do with my sense of self preservation on the descents. I also lost precious time helping some idiot with a flat tire, because my buddy Ralph had busted my balls for being unsympathetic to someone who broke a Shimano chain in the Hillsboro Classic earlier in the year. And I blew time at the feed stops, admiring the views. Vermont is wicked scenic. But that was the olden days. Courses now are not designed around primitive bikes like my mutant Aquila. The mountain bikers of today are the ones we dropped on all the climbs back in the 1990s, or their philosophical descendants.  And descend they do.

In summary, my critical attitude -- to put it mildly -- toward most modern innovations serves the customer just as well as a deep affection for the same abusive partner we all have in the bike industry. You may be deep in the clutches of that abusive relationship, Stockholm-syndromed to the max, fully convinced that you're hooked into something you can't live without, and I will still do my best to protect you from the worst consequences of your addiction. Because this is capitalism, that comes at a price. You need to know the true cost of chasing down all the flaws behind the facade presented by the marketing department, because you pay in some way, sooner or later. Taking care of this crap is neither simple nor easy, despite what disparagement you may read about bike shops in online forums. It's a daily struggle to keep abreast of all the changes we never needed in the first place, while trying to maintain what was genuinely good in the face of industry neglect.

Do not resuscitate?

Triage has been in the news a lot lately, with the harsh measures in Idaho in response to overloaded hospitals. 

Last week I posted some pictures of one of life's little victories, a time-consuming but inescapable process to save a bike frame that was otherwise seriously limited, if not outright useless. The comments all questioned whether I had wasted my time.

Bike repair shops have seen crisis levels of repair volume since last year, when people who couldn't go to work or socialize in groups discovered outdoor activities. Because new bikes have been almost impossible to get, people repaired a lot of things that they would have discarded in the convenience-oriented consumerist fashion we've been encouraged -- if not forced -- to adopt increasingly since the 1960s.

Growing up, my family wasn't poor, but my parents both were born just before the Great Depression, and were raised in and immediately after it. Their values were shaped by the idea that money can be hard to get and harder to keep, and that you take care of your stuff because you might not be able to replace it.

The bike boom of the 1970s and the cross-country ski boom that overlapped it might have been fueled in large part by the other kids who were raised in similar households. The major expense of either of those activities was the initial purchase of the bike or ski set. After that, participation was cheap or "free." Bikes needed maintenance, and you might decide to upgrade to something lighter or more shaped to a style you liked -- racing versus touring, for instance -- but you could have bought a nice mid-grade bike with sort of middling frame geometry, and ridden it for years, needing only tires, brake pads, chain lube, and other minor consumables. As for skis, your "skinny skier" hoped to find usable snow in parks, golf courses, and other public spaces, or perhaps would shell out the couple of dollars that a proper touring center charged for what passed for grooming at the time.

Subsequent generations have not received the same indoctrination. But for many, money is still hard to get and harder to keep. I ended up living where I live partly because working people couldn't afford housing where I used to live. I had several different full-time jobs and could barely afford to share a grubby apartment, let alone have one to myself. And roommate roulette is a risky game. By the time I fetched up here, chasing a job that disappeared within a few months, I couldn't afford to move again. All this reinforced my reflex to fix what can be fixed.

An affable guy who seems to work in the restaurant business brought us his dilapidated Fuji hybrid. We did a few necessary things to keep it running over the summer, but he needed more in-depth drive train work as soon as he could spare the bike and the cash. It needed chainrings -- or a crank -- a chain, cassette, both derailleurs, and some shift cables. With chainrings unavailable for his existing crank, we had to spec a replacement of lesser quality, but at least it was new. Because the industry has been playing with crank arm profiles as well as the plethora of bottom bracket standards, the bike needed a new, longer BB to match the profile of the crank. All of this was going to run him a bit over $200. With incidentals and a bit of a cushion, the estimate was $275.

In the process of stripping the bike down I noticed that the cable adjusters in the downtube cable stops were run out far enough to get bent, and that they were severely rusted. I dropped penetrating oil on them and let it soak for a day or two. When I tried to turn the one on the right, it twisted off and broke at the frame stop. I knew immediately that this was going to take a lot of work, if I could extract the stub at all. If I couldn't, the remaining piece would prevent me from fitting any other kind of ferrule there to use as a fixed stop. I had to win or the bike was dead. The owner would have no bike and we would get no money whatsoever for the time I had put in.

The busted adjuster

 

 The repair queue has lightened up a little from the crisis level of summer, but the complete hiatus that followed Labor Day quickly ended in a mini-surge that pushed us out to a week or more. It seems like more than half of these jobs are grimy slogs, too. But you do what you have to do. For decades I have imagined the life of someone in what we used to call the Third World, then the undeveloped world, and now the over-exploited world, working in a mud-brick stall with improvised tools to keep simple machinery operating for people who will never see our privileged lifestyle. This is the neighborhood that privileged nations -- and the consumers living in them -- roll up the windows to drive through, while simultaneously appropriating the tastier and livelier aspects of culture that might appeal to us.

Since the 1990s our shop has faced the need to salvage our investment of time and parts countless times when a stupid little detail threatens to send a repair job off the rails. Sometimes the fault lies with us, too quickly and superficially diagnosing a problem at check-in. Other times it's a serious but small thing, like a stress crack, or these rusted adjusters. It's especially tricky when someone who works very hard for their money has trusted us to help them and agreed not to bitch about the price. They're not rich whiners, chiseling for the sport of it.

No drill would line up correctly with the frame stop. Two kinds of screw extractor failed to budge the rusted remnant. Floods of penetrating oil, followed by torch flame, did not break the bond of corrosion. 

Thinking I might break the piece loose by threading a coarse screw into it and torquing on that, I found a self-tapper with an 8mm head and cranked it in, careful not to twist too exuberantly and wring that off in there.

Very slowly, the coarse screw extracted pieces of the rusted-in adjuster.

The curly piece came out initially, sparking hopes of a quick victory, but the reality is shown by the collection of filings in the threads of the screw. Working from one side and then the other of the adjuster, I cranked the screw in and backed it out, extracting tiny loads of metal filings. Eventually, the screw was able to pass all the way though.

Following that, I could get the Dremel tool to line up a little better than the big cordless drill, to cut away material that the coarse screw had left. At best I hoped to be able to set a smooth ferrule into the frame stop, leaving me with the adjusters on the shifters and rear derailleur to dial in the gears.

I'd already done some grinding with the big drill, limited severely by the angle as the chuck came up against the frame. And I broke a bit that way. The Dremel didn't line up perfectly, but the largest bit it held was small enough to pass all the way through without deviating the bore too severely. But the bits aren't designed for battles with recalcitrant metal, so it wasn't worth persisting too long with that tool.

I had a broken-off chainsaw file that fit the hole, and a pick that continued the dentist vibe generated by the sound of the Dremel.

The picking and scraping reminded my of the piece I wrote about bike mechanics and dentistry over the winter.

I noticed what looked like some of the original threads emerging as I picked out more and more of the adjuster debris. I found a bolt that looked like it might be made of some good old hard steel, and threaded it into the frame stop. Working very gradually, I used it to dress the threads and push out remaining pieces that I had not been able to dislodge with the pick. I was winning, although it was like digging your way out of a prison cell using a teaspoon. I'd tried a proper tap, but they're brittle, and don't offer a good purchase for a leverage tool in a tight space like that frame stop.

The salvage bin of derailleur parts held an adjuster that I was able to thread into the newly-cleaned frame stop.

We can win this thing. But I still had to do the left side. It had been soaking in penetrating oil for days now. Would the old adjuster cooperate and back out?

No. It wrung off without hesitation, with only minor torque. I began my now official procedure, moving from one phase to the next. It still wasn't fast, but it wasn't as slow as when I was still figuring it out.

Within a couple of hours, the left adjuster nestled in its spot and I could stomp through the rest of the assembly to swap out the drive train parts. There was only one minor glitch when I inflated the rear tire and discovered that it's too wide to fit the frame, even though it's nominally the same width as the front tire of a different brand. I swiftly dished the rear wheel slightly to gain sufficient clearance.

Based on our shop hourly rate, I should have charged about $375 just for the rusted adjuster portion of our festivities, bringing the total close to $600 for a job with an estimate of $275, max. In happier times, when we had used and new bikes more readily available, we would probably have suggested redirecting his investment toward one of them. But these are not those times. Instead we find ourselves more and more often like Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, repairing the propeller of the African Queen alongside a jungle river.

A lot of times, a problem I solve may not be a big money maker at the time, but provides the basis for other solutions later, that might get us out of a jam or factor into a more lucrative job. Knowing something can be done, I can streamline the procedure as much as possible and add it to the menu of offerings to keep bikes on the road and out of the landfill. Or maybe I learn that it's such a time-sucking loser that we learn to screen for it rigorously at check-in, to avoid the pitfall in the future. Either way it's a gain.

More tar pits than cake

 Maybe it starts with a rusted bolt, or a stripped-out socket head cap screw. Maybe a bike that was too grimy for quick diagnosis at check-in turns out to have multiple problems once the veil of crude oil and sand is wiped away. Or a suspiciously clean bike is corroded into a single block of inseparable metals because its owner has diligently hosed it off after every ride. The basic tuneup becomes a trap, capturing you for hours as you try to outwit or overpower the sticky quagmire.

A minor version would be this bike with a rear disc brake rubbing. The caliper pistons needed to be reset. To do that I needed to take the pads out. The little bolt that holds the pads in place was basically welded in there. The socket head rounded out almost instantly under the first attempts to dislodge it.

Delicate work with the drill gained me a purchase for a screw extractor.

Screw not sold separately, of course, but I found one from a different brand that fit well enough.

We can't possibly charge enough to cover the costs of some of these repairs we make to preserve the usefulness of a bike that is otherwise quite recoverable. And further time is often lost as we play phone tag to reach a customer and then try to explain what weird thing is wrong, and get authorization to fix it. In the worst cases, the tar pit opens after we've expended time and resources to nearly complete a repair before getting sucked into that "one last thing" to finish it up and clear the ticket.

Or maybe it's a simple, albeit somewhat mysterious issue that draws you in a few minutes at a time, like the mountain bike that came in during the early afternoon last Saturday. The rider reported that the chain would derail two cogs when he tried to backpedal in low gear. The bike is a Diamondback full suspension model with a 1X11 SRAM drive train.

It was never a good idea to backpedal extensively on a derailleur-gear drive train, but it has become increasingly true as more and more cogs are added, especially trying to serve a ridiculously wide range from a single chainring in front. However, mountain bikers in particular need to be able to pedal back at times, to reset their foot position for technical sections, so they should be able to get at least a full crank rotation before the inherent flaws of the system flare up. The rider said that he had formerly been able to backpedal enough, but that since he "tagged a tree with the rear derailleur" it was no longer allowing him to operate unimpeded.

To the eye, nothing looked terribly deviated, despite the tree contact. He left the bike for us to consider in due course, when it came up in the queue, but El Queso Grande thought that I might be able to kick it through very quickly, since its ailment looked to be so minor. I agreed that it would probably respond to some obvious treatment.

The derailleur hanger did turn out to be very slightly deviated. That should do it! Actually, since the derailleur is below the cassette, it would have little effect on whether the chain feeds smoothly onto the top of the cassette when the rider pedals in reverse. But maybe, just maybe, since it was the only apparent variable...

Nope. But you knew that already, didn't you?

There was a chance that the derailleur itself was bent. We've seen it before. Especially with the long, long cages needed to handle the chain wrap and cog size of super-wide gear ranges, and the intolerance of systems cramming 11 and 12 cogs into very little more than the space initially carved out for eight, tiny deviations can lead to intractable shifting and chain feed issues. But again, the derailleur is below the problem, not above it. With alignment and adjustment again dialed in, the chain still dropped.

In the process of investigation, I had to remove the rear wheel. The through axle did not want to come out. EQG theorized that the through-axle itself was bent, but it didn't seem to be. My theory is that the dropouts aren't parallel. Who knows if they ever were. The bike looked sharp at first glance, all bright orange with the brand name also in bright orange, very subtle. It could also be a way of hiding your identity so it wouldn't be blatantly associated with your crappy product. A lot of things have to be exactly right on a rear suspension swingarm and a through-axle wheel mount. It's another version of the press-in BB with misaligned bearing seats. It ain't never going to be right. Y'all had one chance to make it so, and you blew it. At least with a BB you have some chance of finding a Wheels Manufacturing thread-together unit that will put the bearings in proper alignment relative to each other, sidestepping the error in frame manufacturing. Misaligned dropouts are a tougher nut since the through-axle format does not lend itself readily to the old style of alignment tools, and materials like carbon fiber or aluminum either can't or shouldn't be tweaked.

Tell me again how much better our lives are with this temperamental bullshit?

Of course I had to have the wheel in and out of those dropouts a dozen times or more as I tried cassette spacers and different cog sets to try to coax the chain line into a more cooperative orientation. I also removed the bottom bracket -- an outboard thread-in model -- to put a skinnier spacer behind the drive side to pull the crank in a tiny tad. Can't go too far, or it will act up at the high-gear end of the range. But sometimes just a little more than a millimeter can be just enough to get by.

Not this time. Nor did any cassette yield a result worth what we would have to charge for the parts and labor. I had noticed that the original cassette had a slight bend in that 42-tooth low gear, but replacing the cassette with a brand new one with a well-made, beefier 42 produced no improvement. I put the cheesy bent one back on because it made no difference.

Bent chain links can cause no end of disruption, but this chain was neither bent nor excessively worn. Hardly worn at all, in fact. Was lack of lube making the chain less laterally flexible? You couldn't prove it by me. I juiced it right up and it still hopped off.

At the end of three hours we had disassembled and reassembled the drive train multiple times and come up with absolutely nothing billable.

The wonderful world of Internet forums had no definitive guidance. There were blessed experts who had sure-fire solutions to this problem, in the same thread with the vast majority of people who said either that you should just never backpedal because the chain always derails, or suggested trying each and every thing we tried -- all of which have worked on other bikes.

There was no obvious sign that the whole bike had been bashed out of alignment by the tree encounter. And it's true that wide-range, 1X drive trains are very prone to this problem. It's another reason that I no longer feel any sense of accomplishment when one works, only a sense of foreboding, wondering when it will stop doing so, and why.

A cake tuneup, by contrast, is one on which everything goes so smoothly that the bike is on and off the stand within half an hour. These tend to happen on older bikes that have been coming to us for years. If they were thoroughly assembled, almost nothing -- and sometimes nothing at all -- will have gone out of adjustment in a year. The same is true if a tuneup was once done to full specifications. It helps if the bike is ridden with some sensitivity to its vulnerabilities, but it can still be ridden a lot. We regularly have alumni come in who have worn the chain to the point of replacement and perhaps cooked a shift cable or two, but whose hub and headset bearings are exactly where they need to be. Locknuts are called locknuts for a reason. Or a bike might need only a genuinely simple, specific repair that works as it should. But on the whole, we deal with more tar pits than cake.

Teaching the craft

 Trainee David asked a lot of questions yesterday. As we worked through each brain teaser and skill builder I thought about teaching the craft, and how many people I've taught it to over the years. In this small shop in this backwater community, it hasn't been a huge number. Partly this is because we were fortunate that a few of them stuck around for several years before escaping to greater prosperity.

The phenomenal Ralph broke out around 2005, after ten really good years. Even then, he went to Harris Cyclery, to play a season or two in the majors before immersing himself in web design as a full-time professional. He learned so quickly that it was hard to tell what he already knew. He would assimilate techniques instantly, as well as doing his own research and bringing new knowledge to us during the critical time from the mid 1990s through the turn of the century. He'd already been wrenching on his own stuff and doing work for friends as a teenage mountain biker from the late 1980s. He respected the past and understood its role as the foundation of the latest and greatest in a way that too many modernists lacked in the rise of technofascism as the mountain bike boom billowed into its climactic fireball.

Short-timers hardly count as students of the craft. We had a number of summer fill-ins of varying usefulness during the 1990s. A couple of them became reliable flat-fixers who were also not afraid to pick up a broom and empty trash cans. Others were there just for the employee discount and the prestige of working in a shop that sold mountain bikes during the brief period in which that had any cachet. They were more notable for their ability to overlook the mundane tasks for which they had actually been hired.

After Ralph we enjoyed the services of Jim A, who was hampered by a longish commute -- much farther than mine -- and less of a fascination with bikes in general. He still performed excellent work for several years, long enough to make the effort worthwhile. He cared enough to learn, which always gratifies a teacher. However, with training in physical therapy and other real career-type skills, he left to pursue those avenues rather than remain chained to a workstand as bicycling entered its decline.

From our Jackson, NH, winter staff we got the services of Big G. He'd had some interest in bikes back in the 1970s boom, as a young engineer in the Boston area. Now not such a young engineer, he had joined us for the ski seasons in 2006, and transitioned to full-year employment after we shut down in J-town in 2009. He was another student who respected and understood the value of the past in shaping the future, so he absorbed a range of skills as rapidly as he could, without trying to dismiss as unimportant the parts that might not have interested him as much.

There have been others who worked earnestly and well, but really had better things to do, and hurried to them at the earliest opportunity. Who can blame them? A complete bike mechanic needs to be able to deal with technology that spans almost a century, and may face any of it within five minutes of each other, on any given day.

Most of the people to whom I have taught the craft no longer practice it. Most of the people alongside whom I learned it no longer practice it, either. Lifers are the minority in this business. The business side does tend to crush the fun out of it.

Trainee David is off to the Marine Corps in July. That will be the last we see of him unless he comes back to visit the shut-ins, the way a youngster named Ray, who was a shop fixture for a few years until shortly before I came on board, drops back in from time to time now after a career in the Navy and in commercial aviation.

The pandemic-induced bike boom continues, along with the shortages in complete bikes and in service parts. This distorts our sense of what we really need in the long term, because the present level of intensity seems impossible to sustain. I also wonder whether the intensity seems greater because of the almost nonexistent supply. If we were sitting on fat inventory, along with every other shop with similar bounty, would we get cleaned out, or would a satiated population come through to pick and poke and chisel for discounts? I noted already how the seekers are no longer just looking for anything they can pedal. They've refined their search to specific categories, and even to specific models.

The return to freer movement in society, as we find new norms reminiscent of the old norms, will be slower than people hope. Its final form will be shaped by a multitude of factors in public taste and medical necessity, as well as economic and environmental considerations, as ongoing neglected problems all come to a crisis point along with the pandemic and its aftermath. This makes it nearly impossible to chart a course into trackless ocean beset with mist and mirage. When will supplies come back? Where will they come from? Who will still want what?

All of this, coupled with chronically abysmal levels of pay, make it nearly impossible to entice anyone to sign on for a career -- or even a few solid years -- as a really good bike mechanic. My first mentor, Diane, got out of the shop scene in the early 1980s and has operated as an independent with her own little machine shop ever since. She has supplemented her income by working on aircraft restorations and other endeavors, including the now shuttered Victory Bicycles, which made accurate replica ordinary bikes (penny farthings) that were sold internationally. Her curiosity about bicycles and their history led her back past the ordinary to the draisine. Talk about owning one of every category!

My second mentor appears still to be a prime mover in the craft, operating the East Coast Bicycle Academy in Harrisonburg, VA. At the time I had no idea that the craft was my future. Indeed, for nine years after leaving the shop where I worked for him, in Alexandria, VA, for a scant nine months, I worked in the yacht industry, in an outdoor outfitter store, and clung to the fringes of the world of journalism before I dropped back into the bike business for temporary supplemental income. Still, despite my youthful arrogance and general density, I absorbed a few fundamental principles that have served me well. That means they have served my customers well, as I applied them to every service issue. Thanks, Les. He found a good refuge for his base of operations. If the whole tinsel and plastic castle of obscenely expensive and ridiculously complicated machines collapses tomorrow, people like Diane and Les will assure that the completely satisfactory and much more locally serviceable machines of the prior era will be ready to emerge and claim their place again as the most efficient way to translate human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too for you insanely skilled fixed-gear riders.

There go my Google reviews...

 When I arrived to start my work week on Wednesday, a set of fat bike wheels waited in the workshop. The customer had tried to mount his own tubeless studded tires, and had failed, so he brought them to us.

I was not intimidated by the challenge, having successfully mounted more sets of tubeless mountain bike tires than I can remember. The number isn't huge, but I do my best to forget them as soon as I finish. I've had my ups and downs learning about the aggravating and overly complicated technology so dear to some riders. On mountain bikes a tubeless system makes a little bit of sense, as long as the rider is willing to put up with the inconvenience of their installation and care.

I laugh every time I read anything that extols the weight savings of a tubeless system on a fat bike. Really? You're on a 30-pound clownmobile and all of a sudden to you want to pare a few grams? I have mounted at least one set of tubeless tires on fat bike rims, but I believe I got lucky when that went smoothly.

Nothing went smoothly on this week's merry romp through technolemming hell. The tires were not new. The rims were very wide. The floor of them was not well shaped to catch the bead of the big, floppy 27.5-inch casing. Yep. Twenty-six-inch tires five inches wide weren't behemoth enough. We had to go 27.5.

Undaunted by what I did not know lay ahead, I did not rush to begin the job, dealing with a few other things first. For instance, the compressor died last week, and the new compressor was still sitting in the dark, dank basement in a box. So first I had to go down and up and down and up and down and up with tools and a flashlight, figuring out what I needed to hook up the new compressor to the existing system of air lines that feed our several outlets. The new one was ostensibly identical to the one that just died, but the master connection was different, requiring me to scrounge in our many repositories of potentially useful bits and pieces to find one that fit. Some time after lunch I went through my normal tried-and-true procedure, getting the beads onto the rim, hanging the wheel on the arm of the workstand, pouring in the requisite amount of sealant, and blasting it with compressed air.

I applied nozzle to valve stem and got...nowhere.

Demonstrating Bernoulli's principle in action, the flow of compressed air into the cavernous bowels of the floppy tire casing actually pulled the beads away from the sides of the rim. Sensing that it was probably hopeless, I tried several different ways to apply circumferential pressure to the casing to get the skirts of the bead to catch just long enough to get wafted on their way, but no luck. I headed to the Internet for guidance.

Lots of suggestions came up, including spraying a volatile aerosol into the casing and igniting it, seating the beads with an explosion. The success rate looked like about 50 percent, with the other 50 percent leading to variously humorous incendiary catastrophes. No one was doing it for a paying customer.

Videos abound, of course, of smoothly edited best-case scenarios that don't feature pyromaniacs, that make tubeless tires look like simplicity itself to mount and maintain. Kiss my ass.

Out of all this I figured I would try the suggestion to install the tire with a tube in it to set the beads, and then dislodge only as much as necessary of one bead to allow me to extract the tube and only have to re-set the remaining bead. This meant, of course, removing the  tire and extracting the sealant that I had poured in when I expected routine success. Time is money, y'all, and when the method works it's pure gold.

We didn't have any 27.5 fat tubes. I figured a 26 would do for this exercise, since girth was of primary importance. Lacking any salvaged fatties, that meant spooging up a brand-new tube with the sealant residue I had been unable to wipe completely from the inside of the casing. I did what I had to do: seated the beads, gingerly unseated the one, dragged the tube out through the gap, and applied the air again. I had already pulled the valve core out, to deliver the maximum volume possible through the dinky barrel of a Presta stem.

The bead looked tantalizingly close, but no matter what I did I could not get it to engage the rim floor and blow the rest of the way out to its proper seat. Lay the wheel on its side, nope. Squeeze it here, there, and there, nope. I tried more positions than the Kama Sutra. I even did some bondage, wrapping a 29er tube around the outer circumference to squeeze everything in evenly.

Closing time came and went. I hung it up so that I wouldn't stomp it into a pretzel. On Thursday morning the battle resumed.

All the tire needed was something to provide momentary resistance so that pressure would build up inside the tire rather than having a rapid stream of air flow through it. I looked around for shaving cream. Various personal care products have accumulated around the shop over the years, so it wasn't too far-fetched. Unfortunately, the can of Barbasol that I could see in my mind's eye remained a mirage. My reasoning was that the foam would provide an ephemeral dam, and the soap would be no worse than the soapy water recommended to lubricate stubborn beads. I wasn't going to schlog the whole casing full of it, although that would be a good joke. I also thought about whipped cream, because the nitrous propellant wouldn't react with the sealant either. But the milk would sour eventually. It might be okay during the cold months, but come spring it would get nasty.

Some mechanics referred to the "split tube" method of sealing a rim. It was conceived to seal non-tubeless rims, but I believed that a variation of it would provide the resistance I needed at very little weight penalty (lol), and without the need to clean and dry the rim to add adhesive-backed tape layers, as many posters suggested. The less I  have to depend on glue, the better.

A 24-inch mountain bike tube offered the ideal circumference and width. That meant that I had to do a treasure hunt to find a couple of punctured ones to cut up, because I wasn't going to butcher new tubes for this annoying project. Then I had to cut my two prizes carefully to get strips that covered the area I needed, no more and no less.

I could shove the rubber strip into the casing of the tire already on the rim, and position it beneath the floppy beads before carefully positioning the beads to minimize the gap. I put the 29er tube on it again before I hit it with the air. No good. Resisting the urge to start wailing on it with a large wrench, I lifted it down from the work stand and bounced it lightly on the floor in a couple of places, while attempting to keep the air flow going into the valve stem. Abruptly the beads billowed outward. The tire gradually seated.

The rubber strip, of course, had shifted so that the edge of it was visible in a couple of places at the edge of the rim. In the official split tube method, the rubber strip is supposed to overlap the rim all the way around. The bead seemed to be sealing okay. I was not going to take anything apart in search of cosmetic perfection.

Having perfected my method, it would be a simple matter to install the final version on the remaining wheel, right? 

First I had to remove the non-studded tire that the customer had left in place when he threw in the towel. It was full of sealant, of course, of a different color and unknown type, so that had to go. I had to get rid of the fluid in the tire and clean the rim bed. Then the studded tire for this wheel -- the rear -- was as dirty and gritty as it had been since it was pulled off the rim last spring. Great. I cleaned things up a bit and moved ahead happily with my assuredly successful mounting technique. Starting from a bare rim (except for the existing rim tape that I wasn't going to fut with), I could lay in the 24-inch rubber strip before slipping the beads of the studded tire into the accommodating middle of the rim channel. So far so good. I was going to set the beads before I poured in the sealant this time.

Everything in position, I applied the air and heard the now-familiar rush of no help at all, charging through the interior at 120 psi. Clearly it needed a little something it wasn't getting. I picked up the bottle of sealant, which needs to be shaken vigorously for an hour and a half before every application, and every 22 seconds during installation, to squirt a bit along the beads to create what I hoped would be enough surface tension to work. That, combined with the 29-er tube around the outside, and strategic floor bouncing, finally did the trick. Then I had to deflate the damn thing so I could inject the sealant through the valve stem. The whole time I dreaded the sight of the beads pulling away from the rim. Properly seated, they're not supposed to, but tubeless tires are from Hell. Setting them with fire is actually fully appropriate.

It was now about 45 minutes after closing time. This is one reason I eat supper at 10 p.m. so many nights. Get home, light the fires, feed the cats, clean the litter boxes, prep and cook my own food, muck out the email inbox. Then it's off to dreamland some time after midnight, to be dragged across the jagged lava fields of morning when the alarm goes off in the predawn darkness. I knew better than to call triumphantly to report success. One or both of these tires would be flat by morning.

This morning, the rear tire, the dirty one, lay shriveled on the floor. Fortunately, its beads were still firmly in place, even though it, too, had little bits of the rubber rim strip showing under the bead line in places. No worries. I gave it a shake and roll to distribute sealant, put some air in it, and danced with it some more. The other tire had held up overnight. I added more pressure and listened to the hissing so I would know how to tilt it to get the sealant to concentrate there. It quieted. I put them both in post-op recovery for a couple of hours.

What to charge for this messy job that monopolized hours of shop time? My formula for jobs that I don't really like is to push the price up until the customer winces, but pays it. That way I know I'm getting the absolute maximum that the trade will support. Once people become inured to it, nudge it up again, unless I've learned either to like it or to streamline it sufficiently that it doesn't occupy too much time and energy. We gain nothing by giving the false impression that a particular category of service is casual and worth little. It's especially irksome to get pushback on pricing when a customer has tried it themselves and seen what a bugger it is, and they still want it for cheap. Specialty shops suffer from a tradition in which the staff are either fellow addicts who do it for the love -- which at times was truer of me -- or co-dependent sycophants who need approval.

Years ago we used to change the dinky little pneumatic tires on a certain brand of roller ski, that came with solid plastic wheels with a bead seat diameter of no more than three inches. There wasn't anything to hold onto, and you couldn't use tools or you would puncture the tube. Our listed price for tire changes was something like ten bucks. One big moose of a guy was bringing in a tire job a week. I'd finally had enough. The next one he brought in I charged $35 per wheel. His wife picked up the wheels. Not knowing anything about the price he'd been paying, she just forked over and took them home. I waited. The phone rang. It was the moose. He was a bit irate.

"What's with that price?" he asked.

"Why do you bring the tires to us to fix?" I asked him.

"Because they're horrible to work on! My thumbs get all ripped up, it's impossible --"

"Precisely," I said. Right through the phone I heard the light come on in his brain. No more complaints about the price. He could fight his own battles, find someone who would do the job for less, or come pay us to take the pain. We were both relieved when split rims came out, ending the bitter battles with the tiny, evil wheels. 

Initially I put a price of $140 on today's tag. Then, checking prices on line, I felt like I might be pushing it, so I dropped it to $120. On a forum I found people complaining about a shop charging $100 to mount a set of tubeless tires. Forum posters love to pour scorn all over bike shops and their service departments. I saw that hundred bucks and went, "damn right! I know exactly where you're coming from." But average prices among the addicts and sycophants run down around $20-$40. They do us all a disservice.

I have no vested interest in tubeless technology working. I see it as a complete pain in the ass for extremely dubious gains for the average rider. But as long as shops are willing to endure the nuisance and riders are willing to learn to do their own work, the tubeless will always be with us. Indeed, I fear that we will soon be unable to buy a decent rim that doesn't have a "tubeless-ready" bead, making regular tube type tires harder to handle for those of us who haven't run off the cliff with the rest of the herd. Is that the right word for a group of lemmings? You could certainly call it a pride. They head for that cliff full of hubris.

The customer made a face when he saw the bill. I didn't stick around while he checked out, but I guess he gave further evidence that he didn't consider it reasonable. Here's the deal: when you get someone to do work for you, you are buying a piece of their life. That's true no matter what the work is.  If it was too hard or too dirty or beneath you, or whatever else compels you to get someone else to do it, you are buying another person's time and effort. It's nice when it turns out not to cost a lot, relative to what you thought it should or would. 

When I adopted the bicycle as a vehicle both practical and pleasurable, its simplicity was a huge part of its appeal. Don't complain to me if fashionable complexity has made it inaccessible, temperamental, and expensive. It was the market's choice to make, and as far as I'm concerned it did not choose wisely.

Internal cable routing is better

Bike frames are built to withstand pedaling forces, cornering forces, and road shock. These all impact the structure in sort of broad, general ways. Cable forces put point loads on very small areas of the frame. They're not huge forces, but the strength required to hold up to them is quite different from the more distributed stress of being a bicycle. 

Internal cable routing may seem like a needlessly complicated answer to a relatively trivial problem of air drag -- because it is -- but it also strikes me as a better way to load the carbon fiber frame, compared to attaching external cable stops. Because I don't build my life around the latest technology, I may have missed a memo on this. I focus on the annoyance of working on things that I can't see and can't reach. Belatedly I realized that it's probably easier and stronger to make reinforced entry and exit holes than it is so attach external anchor points.

A few years ago, Specialized road bikes even came with instructions not to pull on the external cables to seat the housings as we would with metal frames with welded cable stops. The stops on these carbon frames could pop off if pulled outward. External stops on all carbon bikes displayed various ways to reinforce the bond, including little pop rivets.

It's still a pain in the ass. If it went away I would not miss it.

On metal frames, holes may be a liability. Back in the 1990s I found cracks in an aluminum Klein frame at the entry hole for an internally routed brake cable. Aluminum being aluminum, this represented a potentially terminal condition. There seemed to be no good way to stop the crack from spreading in the thin metal, at least not with the skills and equipment available in our shop. The owner seemed angry at us for finding it. But to know is to be responsible. We couldn't just let him ride on it without knowing his risk.

Not every shop agrees. A customer brought in a Dahon folding bike to get a flat tire fixed. He complained that he had taken the bike to a shop where he lives, to get tuned up and have the tubes replaced. The shop did the tuneup, but didn't do the tires. As he went on at some length, he mentioned that the other shop had told him there was a hairline crack in the head tube. Without explaining the dangers of abrupt catastrophic failure in aluminum, they took his money for the tuneup and told him to "keep an eye on it."

The bike had been fitted with a very tall stem riser, atop a very short head tube.

Leverage is an amazing thing. The "hairline" crack was not hard to find.

We refused to work on his bike and advised him to junk it. Considering that we left him with the flat tire, he wasn't likely to jump on it soon.

Next up was a brake bleed on a mountain bike. There are two kinds of bleed: the classic removal of air from the line, and the more medieval leeching of excess fluid when someone filled the system without resetting the pistons first, leading to hot-weather lockups. This bike only needed the latter, which was nice. But some idiot somewhere had cut the rear brake line so short that I don't know why the rider hasn't torn it loose just making a tight turn, or in a mild crash that yanks the bars around.

I could go on, but the morning is evaporating quickly, and a long queue of repairs is still piled up at work.

I haven't sold a bike since 1992

The fun started to go out of the bike business with the arrival of index-only shifting systems in 1990. For a couple of years we could get top-mount shifters with friction option for mountain bikes. We took pride and pleasure in converting bikes back to the versatility and true freedom of friction shifting. But then supplies ran out, and all we could do was sort through the proprietary horseshit being dumped on us to find the least worst. I quit selling bikes and started just letting people buy them. I wanted no part in describing much of what we were forced to offer as "improvements."

Proprietary shifting systems were just the first wedge. Even before index-only systems, Shimano and Suntour used slightly different cog spacing, and other factors to enforce customer loyalty/entrapment. However, you could sometimes fudge something together using a merger of parts that worked well enough. And the friction option eliminated all issues except chain width. Chain width became a non-issue if you used a Sedisport chain, which you would want to do anyway. This was true until the advent of 9-speed, anyway. Manufacturers shifted their competitive aggression to other factors.

I thought about this yesterday as it took me hours to replace cables and housings on a Specialized Roubaix. All cables run internally. The customer wanted everything changed. To change shift cables, you have to run a sleeve over the old cable before unthreading it, to guide the new cable properly through the inaccessible interior of the frame. Because the rider wanted new housing, I had to untape the handlebar. Because he wisely heeded our advice to upgrade to 5mm housing, I had to change the in-line tension adjuster on the front derailleur cable, which is made to fit only 4mm.

Four millimeter shift housing is like deliberately constricting your tendons.

The brake housing was continuous, meaning that the housing itself disappears into the frame and emerges all the way back on the chainstay next to the rear disc brake caliper. The segment is so short and the bend so tight that I had to remove the caliper from the frame to get the housing out of it. This was partly because the ferrule was corroded into the cable adjuster, but also because the emergent section was so short. The section also aims upward, inviting water to wick its way into the housing. The cable I removed was rusty in that area.

To feed new housing, you first want to feed a new cable, and then extract the housing, so that you can feed the new housing up the new cable. Using the old cable you run the risk that the cable will fray as you feed the housing up it, snarling everything in the inaccessible darkness.

This is complete bullshit. The supposed advantages of internal cable routing are utterly meaningless to the average rider, even the average racer. How many non-professional, casual participants have ever lost a crit -- or even a road race -- because of the air drag on their externally-routed shift and brake wires? For that matter, in most amateur time trials, you'll have the Richie Riches who own dedicated TT bikes and then you'll have everyone else doing their best on whatever they have.

Racers will race on whatever they can get. When a competition involves a machine, a competitor will want the best machine, hopefully better than anyone else's machine, to get an unfair advantage. This drives technological innovation, leading to ever-evolving rules about what's allowed. A new advantage rapidly becomes the new norm. All it does, most of the time, is make the machines more expensive and harder to work on.

The Roubaix had looked pretty new when I started on it, but I soon realized that it was merely suspiciously clean. I suspected that the owner is a hoser. This turned out to be the case. The corroded bits were not from exposure to the weather, they were from exposure to misguided care. Do not clean your bike with flowing water. This is especially true with internal cable routing and other modern stylistic embellishments that look protective but aren't.

The bike has Specialized's Future Shock suspension. The rider had thought that the headset needed adjustment, but he was feeling crunchiness in the shock absorber mounted in the steerer tube. When I disassembled that collection of nesting parts held together with small bolts, I found rust in the parts that seemed well protected inside the frame. The shock uses a design similar to Cannondale's Headshok, with needle bearings riding on flat strips of metal. It's protected from above by a rubber boot, but water can seep in below the plastic cover that sits like a little rain hat over the frame at the head tube.

The boot only seals the top, but water comes from all directions. Put this bike on a roof rack and drive 60 miles per hour in a rainstorm. Clean it with a hose, high pressure or not. Water finds a way. I opened up the mechanism enough to get some oil into the needle bearings. That smoothed things out a bit.

On the other end of the shop, Torin was working on two obsolete Cannondale mountain bikes, one with a Lefty fork, and one with a Fox F100 fork fit with a reducing headset into the oversize Cannondale head tube. Both bikes were old enough to have 26-inch wheels.

The F100 fork has a leaky seal. It dates from the period in which we were seeing no mountain bike customers, so were paying little attention to the state of the art.  Our most active riders were all into road bikes at the time, and our most numerous customers were looking for hybrids and comfort bikes for the expanding system of recreation paths in the area. Finding parts looks like yet another treasure hunt. We'll pass on that. The suspension guru from a shop that enthusiastically served mountain bikers in Alton is now working at a shop in Concord. I have no problem handing off a problem to an expert in the field. As for the Lefty, only a Cannondale dealer can service that. We've been able to get some parts from Cannondale Experts, but we don't have the latest tools and factory support.

I said I haven't sold a bike since 1992, but that's not strictly true. Whenever possible I have sold bikes that combine some genuine improvements with the traditional simplicity and longevity of bikes from the mid and late 20th Century. They don't have complicated and inconvenient convenience features, or bulbous, modernistic frames. They're too sensible to be popular. Mostly they come from Surly, but there are other sources, like Rivendell.

Whenever someone says to me that their bike is 20 or 30 years old and they feel like they should get rid of it and get a nice new one, I tell them to let me have a look at it first. If it's a nice old bike in good shape, I tell them to invest in a few modern touches that improve on the simplicity rather than a whole new bike that obliterates it.

If someone wants a technical mountain bike or anything else excruciatingly "categorized" I nudge them toward their own research and let them pick their own poison. I'll assemble it, maintain it (for a price), and repair it to the best of my ability and the industry's indulgence, but I won't recommend anything.