Correcting a long held misconception

 Conservatism in its best sense means a cautious acceptance of change. Changes have to represent actual improvement. Things get murky from there, as various factions debate what is an improvement.

Science is conservative in its insistence on peer review and repeatable results. The method is methodical in the strictest sense.

Evolution of technology throws ideas into the world to fend for themselves, often with very little testing beforehand. Get something so it sorta kinda works and throw it out there for eager early adopters to risk their lives on. That approach dominated the 1990s mountain bike tech boom. Companies competed not only to invent and refine parts and systems that actually worked, but to market whatever they made to an eager and largely uneducated public, to make customers pay for the R&D. Let riders in the field break stuff on their own dime rather than pay for exhaustive testing before unleashing the next latest and greatest transitory offering from the firehose of obsolescence.

During this time, I judged each new thing on the totality of its merits: initial function, longevity, and serviceability. Some was good. A lot was bad.

Drive train manufacturers each defended their proprietary shifting systems, which meant that we had three or four different freehub spline patterns duking it out in the marketplace for a couple of years. While I agreed that the freehub concept put the rear axle bearings in a better position to support the axle, I recalled that freewheel threads had seemed like a pretty universal standard. And that is the misconception that got corrected last week.

I'd been fortunate in my time as a rider and novice mechanic never to encounter a freewheel thread disparity. In the 1970s, anyone who tried to do their own bike work learned about nationalistic thread pitches and other variations, like Italian bottom bracket shells, weird tire sizes, things like that. Because I didn't read myself to sleep with Sutherland's every night, I missed a lot. One or two of my bikier friends had copies, but I only looked into them when I needed specific information, like spoke lengths for a wheel I was building.

So: last week I started in on a complete overhaul for a customer's 1980s Panasonic road bike. I was told that he had done a lot of his own work, but wanted to have the bike gone over professionally before a big trip he was planning this summer. The bike was old enough actually to be serviceable, so I had no misgivings. It looked well used, but not too weird.

At some point, someone had installed a sealed bottom bracket, so I wouldn't be opening that up. The pedals didn't look serviceable, either. The BB is central, often the first place I'll start. Pedals that do have serviceable bearings are the pickiest components to work on because the ball bearings themselves are tiny, and adjustment can be hard to secure. I chose to start with the rear hub.

The wheels don't match. The front has a Joy Tech hub and Araya rim, probably original. The rear wheel had a Campagnolo Record hub and a Mavic rim. The freewheel looked like a Suntour two-notch Winner 7-speed. But no brand name was visible, and the notches looked slightly atypical.

Suntour freewheels can present problems, especially the four-notch models. The tool has to be very carefully secured. The two-notch models are generally more robust, but you can't rush them.

I secured the tool in the deep recess presented by the seventh cog, so I couldn't see what was going on in there. The tool slipped when I applied leverage with the big Park wrench. I examined the damage and determined that the tool couldn't seat fully. I dug in a bin of other old freewheel tools for one that looked like it would engage more fully. No luck. It didn't mar things, but it didn't budge the freewheel, either. I started examining the various elements of the puzzle more closely.

I'd had to remove the locknut, spacers, and hub cone from the drive side to get the tool to seat. Markings on the cone indicated that it might not be English thread. That sent me to Sutherland's to look for all possible variants of the Campy hub, and freewheel threading. And there it was: French threads don't play nicely with any other type of threads. This rider had an English thread hub and had graunched a French thread freewheel onto it. It can't have gone on smoothly. That thing is never coming off.

Best guess from internet image searching, it's a Maillard.

You can overhaul a hub without removing the freewheel...sometimes. This is one of those times. It won't be as clean or quick as a complete disassembly, but it will be better than the loose and crunchy mess he had.

As I removed cones from the axle, I felt that they presented continuous resistance. This could have been from crud in the threads. But no, I noticed a tiny curl of metal coming off as I painstakingly unscrewed the cones and fought them off over the slightly buggered threads that had held in the dropouts. Once I had the axle out I could see that someone had ham-fisted the Campy cones onto a generic Asian axle. Yeah, you could do it, with steady force, as long as you don't care about the damage to the threads. The axle was also too long for the 126mm spacing of the rear triangle. I dug up a new axle with appropriate threading. 

Replacement axles used to be very reasonably priced. Now, however, very few people must be buying them, because they're stunningly expensive. Like, they were between ten and twenty bucks retail all through the 1990s and early 21st Century. Now they're more than $40. You could buy a functional Shimano RS400 rear hub for about the same money. Now, if you were fixing up something that was really good in its day, a $40 axle might make sense, especially if you enjoy thumbing your nose at the industry. The cost of a good time just keeps going up. Inflation.

The bike may originally have had only six speeds in the rear. I can't tell from shifter clicks, because the right-side downtube shifter is permanently jammed between the index and friction settings. It makes a scraping, rasping sound when you shift it. I would recommend friction shifting anyway, because it allows you to use any freewheel or cassette that will fit in there. Number of speeds doesn't matter. All of my road bikes have personalized 9-speed cassettes running with 8-speed chains.

The controlling factor on chain width, aside from whether you get interference on the cassette, is whether the front derailleur cage fits closely enough to shift efficiently between chainrings.

My acceptance of a technology reflects a constant cost-benefit analysis. The new crap might offer some specific advantages, but are they worth it for the average rider compared to the added expense and pain in the ass that they bring? The stone age simplicity of nice bike componentry from the 1970s into the 1990s provides reliability and durability to general purpose riders of all types. Racers and technical specialists, regardless of competency, will need the more temperamental, expensive tools and weapons at the cutting edge. The rest of us can have a sporty good time on the old-fashioned stuff, or a facsimile made from the remaining offerings still on the market.

In conclusion, any time you thread things together, don't keep going if they don't go smoothly. Find a copy of Sutherland's. Check out Sheldon Brown's old site. If you have multiple options in your parts stash, feel around for a combination that works easily. 

Beautifully crafted, reliable mediocrity

 Like finding an old friend's obituary on the internet when I'm looking for something else, I noticed posts reporting that Surly had discontinued the Cross Check. I knew it was on the way out when they discontinued the complete bike. You could still buy the frame, and I considered trying to stock up, but I have two already. Don't be a neurotic hoarder. But now they're gone. The ones in the wild will quickly command collector prices. 

The end of the era got me thinking about how misguided popular perception eventually destroys everything simple and true and good. I don't worship everything done the old way. I don't miss road brake levers with the cables coming out of the top. I don't miss downtube shifters. Compared to the targeted perfection that consumers are fed today, older bike technology is horribly primitive, and an actual impediment. Only in the long view does its superiority emerge. But who bothers with a long view anymore?

Riders decide what is superior for their purposes. Some will purchase their bike without thinking about how to care for it beyond a place to park it. Others will budget some amount of money to pay a technician to maintain and repair it, the way they would with a car. A few will work on their own machines with varying degrees of success. Or maybe they have a friend who can help them, who will actually take on the more intimidating tasks in their back room or basement work area.

As far as I'm concerned, hydraulic brakes, finicky shifting systems, tubeless tires, and suspension do not add enough value to make up for the increased upkeep. Someone in love with those things will put up with their many flaws for the beautiful moments they spend together. Someone brainwashed by marketing into thinking that those elements represent laudable progress will endure the troubles for as long as they want to bother playing with bikes at all. In the meantime, like some unconquered tribe that has evaded assimilation for generations, we who ride The Old Shit, keep pedaling through the background, patching and replacing inner tubes as necessary, changing cables when they fray, feeling for the chain to engage correctly on the next cog, mile after mile of pleasurable utility interrupted by simple tasks to keep the machine going and going and going.

Love is work. Love is compromise. What feels like love can be temporary. The end of a relationship depends on the type of relationship. When it's with a bicycle, it's not consensual between parties with equal freedom. It's more like a pet, only this pet can be rejuvenated many times, especially if it's an old, steel-framed pet with rim brakes and friction shifting. You have to decide whether to give it the lethal injection, or abandon it on a country road, or turn it in to a shelter, or take advantage of the bike's near immortality to rebuild it. You can even modify it, which was one of the Cross Check's greatest strengths. One of mine has been a fixed gear since I put it together. The older one has been a commuting, exploring, and light touring bike with 24 speeds (initially 21), for 23 years. It has evolved more and more practical features. And I plan to put a multi-gear setup on the fixed gear 'Check as soon as I get around to it.

With long horizontal dropouts, the Cross Check offered not only an easy setup for single speed and fixed gear riding, but an adjustable rear wheel position to change the ride and load handling, as well as accommodating some cassette and derailleur combinations that should not officially work. But versatility requires thought, and any option has its drawbacks as well as advantages. The bike industry wants you to buy multiple individual bikes perfectly set up for their latest version of each particular riding style. They'll abandon you next year, but don't think about that right now. Your bike will probably last two or three before you have enough problems to need expensive work...unless you're a mountain biker, in which case you might have stuffed it in the first three days and need a $300 derailleur. In any case, the industry hopes that you will weigh the cost of service on something they've already forgotten the spec on, versus buying the Shiny New Thing, and pick the latter.

I always approached gear purchases like they were the last one I was ever going to buy, in a life with no end in sight. Now I'm closer to the statistically likely end than the beginning, so I see the changes in the bike scene more in the context of the era that will die with my generation. I can feel sorry for the young ones who have never known the self sufficiency and reliability of simple componentry that is well made, but I can't say I'll be there to help any of them who might seek to reinstate it. There's a subculture of old steel bikes, but less and less coming into the field unless it's expensively hand built by dedicated fabricators. And even in the practical steel bike subculture there are devotees of disc brakes, and probably poor bastards beguiled by tubeless tires as well. I don't want to ask for details, because knowing would only annoy me.

For the riders who demand the ephemeral performance of the latest technology, it is vital. They could not ride in the style they have chosen if they didn't have the technological support of those machines. It's a devil's bargain that would not concern me if it hadn't invaded my profession by forcing me to decide whether to keep toiling to help them pursue their bad decisions or look for some other line of work in which I have no experience. So far, I just do the best I can to make bad designs work as well as they can, and enjoy the schadenfreude when they fail anyway due to inherent flaws. It's nowhere near as fun as fixing something that can actually be fixed and sending that rider happily back out for more pleasant adventures, but stuff like that is increasingly going the way of the Cross Check: withdrawn by the manufacturer due to decreased demand.

Bikes are everywhere. Bike parts aren’t.

Ever have one of those days where you’re occupied for hours getting nothing done? That’s most days in bike repair.

Diagnosing a bike repair requires multiple steps. What system is malfunctioning? Can it be adjusted, or is something outright broken? If something is broken, can it be fixed? If not, can it be replaced exactly? If not, can some other part fit? Is the exact part or the substitute part actually available? How long will it take to get here? What will it cost? Can I fake it with salvaged parts or widgets in the various boxes and bins we've accumulated?

Multiply the process by the number of broken parts on the bike. Add one more repetition for every additional part that turns up while you’re working on what you already identified.

A large shop, perhaps part of a chain of shops, in a heavily populated market area might manage to have a phenomenally well-stocked parts department. If a rider never leaves such an area, or only does so briefly -- and is ridiculously lucky -- they might not run into a problem with parts availability. But lots of riders live in smaller population centers or travel outside of the zone that Big Bicycle considers worthy of their attention. There are no parts stores, like NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, for bicycles.

Mountain bikes often show up encased in dried mud. Their riders tend to delay maintenance and repair until the bike is completely unrideable. I had one this week that looked like it had been buried in a salt marsh for a couple of years. These modern marvels of trail mastery have lots more moving parts than their ancestors did in the 1990s, mostly so that their riders can propel them with less caution at higher speeds under the influence of gravity.

Road riders don't tend to bash their bikes as hard and frequently. Their bikes show up with overuse injuries because they don't take hard hits that show dramatic symptoms instantly. Shift cables quietly fray under housings and bar tape. Chains wear. A broken shift cable can jam an entire shifter. Worn chains wear rear cogs too badly to accept a new chain. Gravel bikes borrow from both road and mountain categories.

Even casual recreational bikes can be disasters. People bring in a bike they bought in 1998 and say that it's only 15 years old, and that we just worked on it recently. A check of our extensive records might show that "recently" was three years ago, and the problem it had then was completely unrelated to the one it has now. Bikes are taken for granted until they fail too completely to ignore. Sort of like cars, only without the built-in weather protection of body work.

Bicycles have always challenged mechanics with different dimensions and standards applied to overall mechanisms that operated the same way. Into the beginning of the 1980s, these were mostly nationalistic variations in thread pitch and some tubing diameters. From the late 1980s onward, these differences were mostly corporate-driven, related to indexed shifting systems. These affected whole drive trains, as companies messed with cog spacing to match proprietary click shifters.

Initially, the click systems used modified progressive levers. The lever would stop in a different, distinct position for each gear. This meant that the rider usually had the option to switch to friction shifting if the synchronization went out. So the companies had to mess with cog spacing to make the stops adapt only to their patented parts. By the time SRAM beat Shimano in an unfair trade practices lawsuit, Shimano's unfair trade practices had already given it market dominance, so cog spacing became more or less standardized on their pattern. The other format was Campagnolo's, but Campy has always been a luxury brand.

Index-only shifters make perfect adjustment and synchronization essential. A bike that was high end when new from the late 1990s through today might have eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve (sometimes 13) cogs on the rear hub. Drive trains have to match all the way through by brand on the more recent bikes, as SRAM and Shimano have kept the Shifter Wars raging. As with every war, the civilian population suffers much more than the actual combatants. Do you have three, two, or one chainring? By extension, front derailleur or no front derailleur? Well into the 21st Century, the sheer number of speeds was a selling point. Three in the front and nine in the rear makes 27. Three in the front and ten in the rear makes 30. But as chains got skinnier and shifting systems had to handle more chain angle, the industry singled out the front derailleur as the source of all evil. Your high end bike now will have only 12 speeds and damn proud of it. In other words, we're back to the same gear range we had in 1980 with two in the front and six in the back, only it all costs at least three times as much and is far more failure prone. Progress!

Riders mostly don't pay attention to any of this. They buy a new bike and treat it they way they have always treated a bike, expecting the same longevity and reliability. A younger rider who has only ever known finicky index-only shifting will have worse "good old days" to look back on compared to an old geezer who remembers friction shifting and well crafted simplicity, but they both can share the realization that things have gotten steadily more costly and fall apart sooner.

We haven't even talked about suspension, disc brakes, or tubeless tires yet. A guy came in with a sheared off alloy spoke nipple on his mountain bike wheel. With a tube-type tire, it's a quick and simple fix. With a tubeless tire, its a time-consuming, messy, costly process that involves completely redoing the rim tape. An air-tight seal is absolutely essential to tubeless tires. You can't maintain that if you peel back a section of rim tape to drop in a replacement spoke nipple. The guy bought a handful of brass nipples and went off to try his own luck with it. He is free to try cutting a hole and patching it afterward, and then dealing with the almost inevitable failure of that patch, leading him eventually to redo the tape completely. That requires completely cleaning and drying the rim before meticulously applying your tape of choice and remounting the old tire or replacing it because you discover that the sidewalls are too broken down to reseal. Even applying a patch won't work unless the work area is perfectly clean and dry. 

An inner tube will press a rim tape repair into place, while also not depending on it. A tubeless tire does not have that advantage. Air pressure alone will not press the patch more firmly where you want it. Air pressure alone will work its way into any area of weakness and turn it into a leak.

Every customer who comes in interrupts the flow of work already in progress -- or the treasure hunt for needed parts so that work can continue. It's not their fault, it's just how things go. Their questions need answers. Their bike or bike part needs preliminary diagnosis. It's important to share information and knowledge, but in the meantime the bike on the stand is just sitting there. And the new work probably triggers more treasure hunting for some part we either hadn't bothered to stock or just ran out of.

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.

Can't operate without the computer

 Modern fighter jets are designed for such extreme maneuverability that they are actually unstable in regular flight. It's an exaggerated example of the difference between a tight, steep racing road bike and a touring bike, but it's a similar principle. The machine designed for competitive -- or combative -- responsiveness isn't made for inattentive cruising. The pilot or rider provide the skill necessary to operate. And, in the case of the modern warbird, the pilot gets vital assistance from onboard computer systems that coordinate the constant stream of variables challenging smooth flight. That's starting to creep into the bike world as well, with computerized shifting helping to manage infuriatingly temperamental drive trains with 12 or 13 cogs squeezed together, pulled by a chain that has side plates as skinny as razor blades.

In the workshop we depend increasingly on the computer to keep track of the deluge of information about all the parts of all the different categories of bikes across decades. I spend hours a day looking up specs and procedures for suspension, shifting, and brake systems as they have evolved since the 1990s. The bike industry may have torn the rear view mirror off and nailed the throttle to the floorboard as they stare fixedly forward and roar into a sun-blinded futurescape, but here in the present, people are dragging in all sorts of things from the near and distant past, expecting that an expert in a professional bike shop will know how to bring them back to full functionality.

We try, because we know no better. And we succeed a good bit, because we have many allies. The trick is to find the true information in the uncurated jumble of anecdote and hearsay, to learn something you didn't know before, or refresh your memory about something that got buried under a couple of tons of newer crap.

I resent it. Knowledge used to flow at a human pace. The industry might have seemed to plod, but it suited the pace of human propulsion. Technolemmings will disagree, of course, but no one can deny that we all still push the pedals with the same power that we always have. Some super-trainers and the pharmaceutically enhanced can push harder for a time. Some riders have paid for electrical assistance. Strip away those props and you're left with the same old sweaty grunt grinding away at the cranks.

Information is not knowledge. No one can possibly have experience with all of the things we're expected to know about as lowly bike technicians. Anyone who rides enough in all categories to have a depth of relevant experience in all of them won't have time to have a job, especially a job like fixing bikes. And someone who earns a living fixing bikes won't be able to afford decent bikes in all categories. And so we turn to that flaming dumpster of all human knowledge, the Internet, to hunt down enough verifiable information to keep treading water in the flood of products.

For many years, I could analyze a system by looking at it. Now that is no longer true, particularly with shifting systems. The stupid idea that all the gears should be in the back, and that the cassette should span from 10 or 11 to 50 or 52 teeth has led to mutant derailleurs sensitive to angle adjustment errors of a millimeter or two. There is no fudge factor and there is no ability to improvise. Cassettes don't come apart to allow custom gearing or individual cog replacement. The industry inexorably blocks off every avenue except the One True Path of their proprietary products.

 I do believe that the future of mountain bike gearing lies in enclosed gearboxes, like motorcycles have. Derailleur systems are wonderfully simple and durable for people who want to ride a bicycle in a traditional way, even if they venture onto some unpaved roads and mild trails. But mountain biking in its current style, as a ride to nowhere, looking for entertaining features like a cross between motocross, parkour, and miniature golf, is too rough on a derailleur system. So far, the gearbox designers have not come up with a generic shape that will fit any frame, so mountain biking gets even closer to motorcycling in the sense that bikes will be more completely committed to manufacturer support. It's a step backward to very early times, when bikes were made in little factories all over the place, by machinists who made every part in house and advertised the virtues of their specific approach. The idea of cross-brand interchangeability evolved later. It broadened the appeal and versatility of the bicycle to allow a rider to venture far from the source and still have a chance to find service and repair parts. But it also hampered designers who wanted to start from a basic set of needs or desires and design to meet them, independent of existing constraints.

Gearbox transmissions highlight the difference between a human engine and a mechanical one. The "clutch" is provided by the human rider letting up on the pedals to allow the gears to complete a shift. Test riders have complained that this interrupts their rhythm and can break momentum unacceptably on steep climbs or in technical passages. So for now we're stuck with the weird derailleur systems that will shift under load and are lighter in weight, and throw money and time at them to keep them operating in the hamster wheel of modern mountain biking.

Meanwhile, it gets harder and harder to maintain a good old derailleur-geared bike with a double or a triple crank, adult-sized chainrings, and a cassette that doesn't have a low-gear cog the size of a manhole cover and a high gear cog the size of a nickel. We go to the computer again for that, even if only to compare our different vendors to see who has what, and compare prices, like the $40 (retail) 74X28 chainring versus the same size ring from another vendor, that would retail for half of that. We're headed toward scrounging the scrap heap for nearly everything, on top of the amount of salvage that has already become the norm. Recycling is good; it always was. But now we're into post-apocalyptic territory to keep what used to be normal bikes running as cobbled-together mutants in a world too modern for its own good.

The War on 74: the bike industry is threatening my granny

The right to repair is only as good as the availability of parts.

The mountain bike boom of the late 20th Century did two things (among others): it made the ISO/ETRTO 559 bead size the most widely distributed tire size in the world, and it made the 110/74 triple crank a universal standard. Those reliable points held true from the late 1980s through the 1990s, even though the bike industry started messing with chainring sizes and crank profiles by the mid 1990s, and introduced the concept of the 29er tire before the end of the century. They were trapped by their own previous success in distributing existing sizes on which they had based the first mountain bike designs.

Prior to the rise of 110/74, there were other triple crank bolt circle diameters, like Stronglight's 122, and TA's little circle of six bolts. Some early forms used the same BCD for all three rings, with the optional "granny" ring mounted on longer bolts with spacers. But triple cranks were mostly used by touring nerds, and even among tourists the majority used off the shelf double cranks with perhaps a 40-50 instead of a 42-52. As the idea of bike touring took hold, riders cobbled together what they could and headed out. Demand led supply, in the traditional way.

The Japanese component companies drove most innovation, making some nice parts for a lower price than the European manufacturers. From them we got the slant parallelogram derailleur and the 130 and 110 BCDs. As those two chainring sizes came to dominate, aftermarket component manufacturers offered numerous options for replacement rings. As the industry brought in new sizes, like 94/58, 94/56, and 4-bolt 104/64, aftermarket companies still kept up. So the industry hit the afterburner on proprietary sizes and asymmetrical bolt patterns to burn off as much competition as possible.

I wonder how much of the pathological and malignant competition in the bike industry is because founders and executives in bike companies used to race. Rather than look at the big picture of a unified world riding happily on millions of serviceable and durable (but sporty and fun) bikes, they look only at destroying their rivals and leaving a puking, miserable peloton collapsing in their wake.

I've felt confident over the years, recommending 110/74 cranks to riders who would rather be out on their bikes than shopping for parts or waiting for something to get repaired. Later, 104-64 seemed fairly stable among the newer generation of cranks as the two-piece configuration took over from the three-piece design. The most self sufficient riders accept simple equipment and learn to use it, rather than sucking up the latest convenience features in the latest temperamental shifting system.

Unfortunately, the industry finally noticed the happy escapees. The selection of 74mm inner chainrings has shriveled to just a few. The same goes for 110mm middle and outer rings. The selection of ring sizes has gotten smaller, reducing your ability to customize gearing to suit your needs. Because the 110 triple crank has been marginalized, most 110 rings are aimed at the road compact double, which uses only a few sizes. The most common pairing is 34-50, followed by 36-48 or 46. There's a fair range of 110 ring sizes just based on tooth count, but you have to look closely at the rest of the specs to see if you can make a particular ring play nicely with the others.You might find a chainring that fits the crank, but it's thin and light, designed to be used up and thrown away. You might need to use spacers the dial in the gap between rings so that the chain drops into place, rather than jamming in between rings or riding on top of one without engaging the teeth.

The pandemic-induced shortages make the shrinking selection look worse. Things might improve, but we're also up against the industry's timetable of obsolescence, so we can't know for sure when they will simply get tired of making something and cut a bunch more riders loose. And that brings us to the rest of the drive train.

A triple crank and eight-speed cassette provided a nominal 24 speeds. Riders now are now being told that they would rather have only 12 speeds, all in the cassette, with a tinfoil chain, and a derailleur that can barely manage to get the chain onto -- and off of -- a low gear cog that could be larger than 50 teeth. The chain angle is so extreme that you can't backpedal at all in the lowest gear on many bikes, and this limitation is accepted as the price of "progress." On the crank, which could be mounted to any of about a dozen bottom bracket configurations, the chainring may be mounted directly to a proprietary spline pattern, or bolted to one of a handful of new and different bolt circle diameters. Quality Bicycle Products lists 30 different BCDs.

Nice derailleurs that will work with a rational 24-speed system have become rare. Wider chains and sturdier cassettes have moved down to the bottom level of quality. Middle and upper end derailleurs are designed to work with the weird new cassettes and the rare double chainring crank using mostly dinky rings.

Cassettes themselves present another treasure hunt. Between what's unavailable because of the pandemic, and what the industry has deemed no longer necessary, finding your favorite gear keeps getting harder. Back in mid-August I built a 9-speed cassette for someone who couldn't begin to appreciate the ingenuity involved, since it's "just a bicycle." But I fix what can be fixed, because it should be fixed.

The Cog Farm saves the day again.

 

It's all made more difficult when a rider requires indexed shifting. Anyone who needs the gears to click into place will have little patience with something that requires finesse and accommodation. They want gears on demand. What makes it easy at the user interface is always more complicated under the shell.

A whole generation of riders has grown up with the idea that you use up a bike and throw it out as a complete unit, the way we do with our cars. There's a certain amount of Frankenbiking, but their failure may be as satisfying as success, as long as it's entertaining. The most recent home hobby project to come to us for help was four boys and a dad trying to bolt a 110cc motor onto an old Gary Fisher mountain bike. That hints at numerous trips to the ER. Get it on video, kids! Fortunately, all I had to do was pull a crank arm for them and provide a replacement with sufficient flare to clear the width of the motor. The motor was not mounted, so all I really saw was a beat-up old mountain bike and its eager test pilots eyeballing the dimensions and declaring victory.

When I spec a bike now, I try to make it as future-proof as possible. In addition to finding parts that meet the rider's current needs, I try to predict whether the consumable parts like chains, chainrings, and cassettes, will be there for the rider when they're needed. This only gets harder year by year. Mostly we have to be content to get out of the current crisis and worry about the future when it gets here. It's how humans do things.

Century-hopping again

If it has pedals and still rolls, sooner or later we get asked to fix it. I'm waiting for someone to bring in a stone wheel with a wooden crankset mounted through the center of it. At the same time, we're expected to keep up enthusiastically with the ever more costly and less durable offerings of the bike industry to its hostages customers.

One day recently, the leap was directly from about 2011 to the late 1940s.

This beast has had maddeningly imprecise shifting since it was new. Its owner was told several years ago by another shop that the only chain it should ever have was a particular Shimano model that had just been discontinued. They didn't tell him it had been discontinued, only that our shop had put on "the wrong chain," and that he should only ever use the magical CN7900 or something. His bike had Dura Ace ten speed, from when ten speed was the top of the line. Now it's middle class. The magic chain has been gone for a long time, and his particular specimen is totally thrashed. The bike shifts sluggishly, severely handicapped by the internal cable routing and forced use of 4mm shift housing, due to the configuration of the cable stops. This bike was never going to shift well, and now it shifts worse. The customer told us to leave the worn out chain and cassette on there, because he is emotionally unready to let the talismans go, even though they clearly do not work anymore. Maybe he'll score some artifacts on eBay or someplace, to eke out a few more years of acceptable mediocrity. We'll install whatever he asks us to.

Immediately following this 21st Century marvel of engineering was this BSA Streamlight in pretty rough shape:

The customer wanted to restore it to rideable condition. It hardly seemed possible for less than several hundred dollars, but when she described her intended use I agreed to the most basic repairs as long as she understood that the bike would not be very safe for extended riding or steep hills. It's nice to bring it back from complete oblivion to limited use.

Bikes can be hard to date accurately because records are often lost or incomplete. This is true of even a seminal brand like BSA. It's "just a bicycle." Starting at the back of the bike, I saw the Sturmey Archer hub, blackened by a coat of greasy dirt, and wondered if the bike was a latter-day knockoff. They're still made in India. It seems like a strange bit of nostalgia for the British Empire. However, the obvious age of the bike overall favored its authenticity as an original. But did it predate the TI buyout in 1957? The Sturmey Archer hub would say no. But when I scraped away the grime I found a date code of 1979. That indicated that this was a replacement wheel. The trigger control on the handlebar was also much later than the rest of the bike, having a plastic lever. This rear wheel and control had been added later.

Everything forward of the rear hub moved back in time.

The fully enclosed chain case has access ports at the rear dropout and around the crank itself to provide sufficient access for routine work like fixing a flat tire or replacing a chain.

Rod brakes are weird. I guess they're a step forward from a spoon brake that presses on the tread face of the tire (tyre?), but it still seems like a heavy, cumbersome rig compared to cable-actuated brakes. The way they meet the rim is interesting, too. They're less affected by a wheel knocked out of true, but they're less powerful overall. Then again, compared to early caliper brakes on steel rims, the difference in braking power isn't that large. Brakes were something you used to slow yourself down before the inevitable impact with something solid, especially in wet weather.

The rear brake is in really rough shape, but it not only still worked, it was still adjustable. I would not have thought that penetrating oil would recover the rust-encased lumps that vaguely resembled threaded connections, but it not only did so, it did it quickly and easily.

The trim on this bike would have been very pretty when the chrome was new.

The dynamo hub really set the date range for the bike. 

 

This style appears to have been made from the late 1940s to about 1950. The lights are gone from the bike, but the hub came in handy for research.

You can even find brake pads for the rod brakes, though not from any of our usual suppliers. The sun truly never sets on the British Empire. Some, but not all, parts seem to be available for the linkages, too. Meanwhile, the pads that the bike has are adequate for the kind of short-hop, mild terrain riding the owner wants to do around the village and the campus of a private school.

The bike was actually much easier to work on than any modern marvels from the 21st Century. It was from back when people were so stupid that they built things to last, and to be maintained. I guess that's why the old companies either went out of business altogether or sold their names to modern managers who would milk the image of tradition and slap the label on modern dispos-a-bikes at all price levels. Durability does not help cash flow. Stuff that lasts and is repairable satisfies demand too thoroughly. 

Remember: the business model for modern consumer goods is cocaine. It's expensive, addictive, and creates a compulsion to replace it even when you know it is ultimately destroying you. That's true of just about anything sold in the last 40 years. Sometimes there's an evolutionary excuse for it, as when personal computers and mobile phones went through their early development. Even that technology has reached a point where it can't drive forward as aggressively, because too many users are lagging behind, and the industry can't afford to burn them off. But still it tries. In the bike world, a slowing effect accompanied the near stagnation that had settled over the general industry before COVID, while specialty areas catering to addicts continued to dangle enticing offerings before them. And smokeless mopeds have continued to grow based on the dreams and illusions of a large susceptible population.

Cosmetic surgeries delayed by COVID-19

 From time to time, someone will ask us to replace every rusted part on their bike, purely for appearance. This might involve just a few bolts or lots of spotted chrome. Or they might ask if we have some miraculous treatment that will make the marks of neglect and/or cheap metal and plating disappear, returning the parts to their original luster.

Usually, once we explain the expense of such a procedure, they sigh and relent. We will do what we can, where we can, but most treatments that don't involve replacing parts require some amount of abrasion which will make the part more susceptible to surface corrosion. We do get the rare individual who declares that they will pay whatever it costs to have their jewel polished to its brightest, even if that means replacing perfectly functional and barely disfigured brake sets, for instance. And this is almost never on a bike of great value or historical significance. It's often on undistinguished, mid-grade bikes somewhere between three and 15 years old.

It's particularly irksome if the bike was kept in an abusive environment and will be returning to the same. One customer said that he'd kept his road bike -- which he snapped up for some great price -- in a damp shed, and now wanted it completely re-sparkled so that he could then clamp it into a trainer and sweat all over it. He had the mistaken impression that indoor riding would baby the bike rather than abusing it structurally and chemically.

If you hadn't gotten the memo: trainer riding is abuse. Bikes are held firmly, unable to flex and move to absorb rider inputs the way they can in regular riding. At the same time, sweat that would blow away in the apparent and actual wind drops straight onto everything, where the salts are left to work relentlessly. What never sleeps?

You can rinse and wipe the bike, but that never gets everything. Trainer duty is often the last stop in a bike's life, for a rider who has newer bikes to take out and show a good time.

For these rusty bits we were authorized to order complete replacement brake sets. As extravagant as that might be at the best of times, now with the Covid parts famine, it's a long wait. And we're less inclined to eat the freight on frivolous purchases, too. The guy did finally set an upper limit on the repair, but the last thing he told us was that he was selling the bike. So does he still care about how shiny everything is?

Other special projects have come in, too. The rider who stomped the ratchet ring out of his Bontrager hub ordered parts to convert the bike to SRAM 12-speed. Intimidated by the 14 bottom bracket standards and numerous crank axle sizes, he handed off to us to select a bottom bracket for him.

Whenever possible I use a Wheels Manufacturing thread-together bottom bracket in press-fit configurations, to avoid as many of the inherent flaws of press fit as possible. A thread-together unit keeps its bearings aligned to each other, so that they don't wear prematurely if the bearing seats in the frame itself were machined inaccurately or if they've gotten buggered from having bearing sets pounded out and pressed in a few times. Sadly for this rider, Proprietary Bullshit Strikes Again! There is no thread-together unit for this 92mm shell from Trek. He's best served to get the SRAM unit and replace it often, as the industry intended. They really delight in humping their faithful customers. But that's just consumer goods marketing in general. Loyal purchasers of "health" insurance see their premiums climb steadily. Loyal customers of wireless phone companies don't get the sweet "switch and save" inducements. Computer purchasers get rewarded with mysterious changes that make the machines slow down steadily after about the first week. I had a wonderful little Samsung tablet that I loved to carry with me to work. It allowed for all sorts of stuff beyond the capability of my phone, without the need for a full computer. Within a year it was a sluggish waste of pack weight. I nursed it along for a while. It helped save me after my computer got stolen in a break-in, but even then I was struggling to get it to do what I needed. That was pretty much its last hurrah. Thank you for your business! Maybe next time we'll use lube!

Three Specialized kids 12-inch bikes have come in without their proprietary training wheels. Loving parents or grandparents use the bikes for several kids in succession, and can't keep track of where they put the training wheels when they take them off. During the Covid famine, we were not able to get the Specialized training wheels, which bolt to a separate point on the frame rather than fitting over the rear axle in the traditional way. I love how that works, but things go wrong. Owners lose the whole wheel set or, more commonly, just lost the threaded knobs that attach the wheels to the bike frame. Knobs not sold separately. A lot of bike parts share thread sizes in common, but not these. I haven't thrown a thread gauge on there to see what it is, because the most recent customer managed to find the wheels (without the knobs), but had stripped out the holes in the frame. I inserted a couple of carriage bolts that matched some knobs we had lying around in a salvage bin, to make the wheel mount an outie rather than an innie. We have little choice: the axles on Specialized kid bike wheels are too short to support a traditional training wheel, and replacement generic kid bike wheels have been out of stock.

A couple brought their cheap smokeless mopeds in for tuneups, particularly the brakes. Their bikes used cable disc brakes, which can be a better choice than hydraulic for many customers, but only if they actually work. These wouldn't even slow the bikes down, even after they had been adjusted. It was a bit of a puzzle to figure out how to get the pads out at all to check them for wear and contamination. The pads resembled the round type used on Avid BB5 brakes, but they're smaller, so BB5 pads will not fit. The only information we could find on line about them was a forum post in which someone said that they bought a complete set of cheap, off-brand calipers with pads in them to replace the original cheap, off brand calipers when the first set of pads wore out. By all means, let's send more crap to the landfill.

I know that auto repair places will use a rebuilt caliper with pads installed as a one-step solution to stuck pistons and scorched pads, as drivers in salty environments know too well. But the stuck calipers get sent back out to a rebuilder to be reconditioned and returned to the general supply of repair parts. No one is doing that in the bike biz that I know of, and it would hardly be worth it on calipers that were cheap crap at the outset.

The two bikes, nominally identical, had minor differences. Maybe one of the bikes was an "upgrade." They both had the same crappy brakes, but for some reason one of them had 8mm socket head crank bolts, while the other one had fake 8mm bolts simulated by a molded plastic cap covering a regular 14mm hex head.

Speaking of cheap bolts, I've been noticing more and more socket head cap screws and bolts that are a sloppy fit on the wrench, and made of soft metal that rounds out immediately under no more than a normal amount of torque for their size.

This has gotten bad enough that I regularly replace things like 4mm stem bolts preventively, because there's no point in even tightening the cheap OEM parts. It's a one-way trip with cheap fasteners. It fits neatly with the dispos-a-bike concept of modern industry ethics. Who's ever gong to undo something once it's assembled, however badly? They got a lot of units at the best possible price for themselves, and shoveled them out the door. Buyer beware. The problem is, you can't just tell consumers to buy something more expensive to avoid the shoddy, because expensive stuff is made to keep addicts hooked until the new and improved version makes them fork out again.

Economically, it makes perfect sense. Thrift doesn't keep money in motion. A long buying cycle leaves factories barely ticking over as they wait for the next surge of demand. Wasteful consumption creates jobs, even as it plunders and pollutes the environment and turns labor into a mere line item. Depressed wages feed demand for cheap products which feed the need for cheap labor which depresses wages... You could go for a bike ride to cheer up, provided that your tubeless tires have remained sealed, your brake fluid is reasonably fresh, your suspension hasn't collapsed, and your shifters don't need new batteries.

We sipped a bit of the Kool Aid and brought in a couple of Fuji smokeless mopeds. They have rear hub motors and downtube-mounted batteries, so they're very heavy in the rear. Under a full charge at maximum assist, I wonder how readily they would pop a wheelie. To keep the weight down, they do come with a carbon fiber chain guard.

Just kidding, it's fake carbon. Nifty print, though.

The owner's manual is a bit intimidating.

Pacific Glory Worldwide. The dragon awakens and claims its own. Nicely grandiose. Largely accurate.

Speaking of things that aren't carbon, a long-time summer customer of legendary frugality asked us to find him a replacement frame for his carbon bike, which had cracked after decades of use. He wants to transplant the entire parts gruppo from  the old bike to a new frame. Carbon? I hear you can get that repaired and it works great. I actually know two riders competing on repaired carbon frames. 

Carbon! It says right on it.

Whoops. Not carbon. That bike only has carbon in the seat stays and fork blades. The rest is good old, perishable aluminum. And it had perished undeniably.

He really should pick out his own frame. He won't find a brand new carbon frame with a standard threaded BB shell, but there are adapters. We also assigned his brother in law to needle him into buying a thoroughly modern marvel like the rest of the roadies in the family have. While we wait to see how that evolves, the bike hangs in our shop, moving from hook to hook as it gets in the way of one thing after another. Almost no one will ever take my advice to turn the calendar back a couple of decades and build a nice steel bike with friction shifting and conventional wheels. Ride more! Tweak less! Too boring.

Fifty years of bike technology in a typical day

 This scrappy old street dog is actually only 48 years old, according to its owner, but fifty is a nice round number. And on any day we might see stuff at least that old, or older.

Looking at the Nishiki head tube badge, I didn't notice for a while that the bike was actually "Produced for American Eagle." 

 

Interestingly, little color accents on the fork blades are German colors, not American. There's nothing red, white, and blue anywhere on this bike, at least not all together in one spot.

Für deutschen adler?

The bike is designed for touring. Lots of people were happy to ride something like this across the continent in the 1970s. The owner said that it came with fenders and a set of lights. He did not keep those, but the bike still has its randonneur handlebars.

Randonneur bars are kind of brilliant. The tops rise from the center and are sometimes swept slightly back. This provides higher hand positions and back angles for the rider, but still mounts to a stem with a negative rise, for better handling overall.

Because the steering axis of a bicycle is not vertical, stem angle changes how the steering feels. The shape of the connection changes how your weight controls the system. A stem that drops forward of the steering axis tends to center itself better than one in which the stem rises above 90 degrees to the steering axis. The steeper the rise, the more noticeable the effect. You can get used to anything, but once you know you can't overlook it. It's very annoying. That's why on so many of my bike builds after the advent of threadless headsets I left the steerer tubes long, piled up the spacers, and mounted stems with an angle of 90 degrees or less.

The bike industry reinvented the randonneur bar, as seen on some Specialized Roubaix models and elsewhere. The newer version has a wing top for more comfortable hand support, and rises more abruptly. They can do this because stems almost all have open clamps to allow for more weirdly-shaped handlebars that no longer have to thread the needle of an old-style single-bolt clamp.

You could really go on a Safari with this bike, or so the name implies.

Double eyelets on the fork would take fender stays and either a front rack or the more common handlebar bag with bungee cord stabilizers that hooked in down at the dropout.

The crank says American Flyer

The rear derailleur was bent. This was repairable in the Dark Ages of friction shifting:

Less repairable was the Suntour freewheel.

 I liked Suntour freewheels, but they had a tendency on occasion to disassemble themselves while you were riding, allowing the innumerable tiny ball bearings to fall out along many yards of highway. You could theoretically purchase replacement ball bearings and spend a meticulous hour putting the freewheel back together, provided that the pawls hadn't also escaped, but more often you would just buy a new freewheel and graunch down on the outer plate that held the whole apparatus together before trusting it. But the failure could be catastrophic. The worst case I saw was on a climb in Northern California, near Rockport. The rider's freewheel on his loaded touring bike came apart and cracked the flange of his nice Campagnolo Record hub. He and his riding companion had to camp on the side of the road for the night and hitchhike back to the nearest bike shop the next day, to get a wheel and freewheel so that they could resume their northward journey.

Time traveling forward to the present, the 21st Century is represented by this tubeless road wheel:

Tubeless tires for bikes barely make the slightest bit of sense for mountain bikers who could be riding on serrated ledges and over a certain size of angular stones while running fashionably low pressures, but even there I hear them lament that they burped a tire on one of those hazards and ended up with a flat tire anyway, often harder to reinflate in the field than a stupid old inner tube would have been. Your magic juice can leak out, making a seal to the rim difficult or impossible to attain. This is why tubeless riders carry a tube with them.

Setting up a rim and tire for high road pressures really highlights the absurdity of applying the latest fad to every category of bicycling. Road pressures severely challenge the sealing technology that evolved at very low off-road pressures. The process makes gluing tubulars look almost casual.

Gluing tubulars is potentially very messy, but at least you can see what you're doing. Move deliberately and methodically and you will succeed. 

Mounting road tubeless puts you at the mercy of microscopic discrepancies that somehow manage to be immune to the properties of the drippy sealant you have to pour into the casing. The setup shown in the picture, on the first attempt, was okay up to about 60 psi. It would not hold anything above that, no matter how I waved the wheel around to distribute the sealant. It was leaking into the rim somewhere. 

The original stem looked cool, but the rubber seal area at the base of it was rectangular, meaning that it covered less rim along one dimension than the other. Also, the rim tape had not bonded well enough, even though that was hard to judge by looking. I replaced the stem and peeled the tape, deep-cleaned the rim with alcohol, and then baked the wheel in the convection oven we use to heat-treat skis for glide waxing, to dry it absolutely thoroughly. That seemed to do the trick. The tire settled in at 90-100 psi and held it to the end of that day. I declared victory and called the customer. He said someone would be in to pick it up for him. My work week ended, and I left for three days.

When I returned to the shop, the bike was still hanging there. I pinched the front tire. It had gone down to squeezably soft. I reinflated it and heard hissing into the rim. Resisting an urge to take a fire ax to the goddam thing, I tried tightening the lock nut at the base of the stem. The hissing worsened. I removed the groovy plastic shim included with the wheel and went straight for lock nut against rim. Before tightening that, I removed the lock nut and pushed the stem into the rim so I could inject sealant around it to coat the base of it. Then I tightened the stem, re-seated the beads, and inflated the tire. It eventually seemed to hold quietly. I had barely walked away from this when the customer's father came in to get the bike. I said nothing to him or to El Queso Grande, who was handling the transaction. The tire was rock hard and seemed ready to ride, but I guarantee it will be back within a day or two. I can decide then whether to go for the tire levers or the fire ax.

The tubeless department had been getting a little chaotic, so I found a bigger receptacle for our tubeless paraphernalia.

The three-speed that this rim tape came out of may have been much older than fifty years.

I could barely make out some inscriptions in Aramaic on these scroll fragments.

A smokeless moped with a flat tire provided official acknowledgment that ebikes are mopeds:

An old Cannondale showcases the destructive interaction of human sweat and aluminum:

When I attempted to coax a stuck ferrule out of the cable stop on the frame, the stop popped off instead, because the aluminum was so oxidized. The deterioration is eating into the frame itself.

The frame also has some nasty dents from chain suck. It is now destined to be recycled into beer cans. Cheers!

The parts shortage this season led us to farm old inner tubes when common sizes went out of stock and would vanish instantly from suppliers' shelves when they became available again.

On to the next thing: This visiting rider said that he was having a heck of a time getting his gears to stay adjusted. At first he focused our attention on the front derailleur, because it's one of those Shimano models where you have to follow a six-page PDF of instructions to hook up the cable and set the tension. Eventually, though, he also mentioned that the rear shifting was incorrigible, too. Shimano's higher end mechanical shifting systems seem designed primarily to make people want electronic shifters.

The bike wins the award for Worst Internal Cable Routing, but that's a highly competitive category. I don't expect this entry to hold the crown for long.

The bike had those crappy brown-coated cables that get abraded almost immediately. Cable fuzz causes drag, especially inside the standard undersized 4mm shift housing.

This bike did have a full cover over the bottom bracket cable guides, protecting against a major entry point for dirt and water in internally-routed cable systems. The hatch cover was full of carbon dust from the cables abrading the cable guides, and a thick dusting of cable fuzz that had worn off of the wires themselves. 

Step one is always to yank out the brown cables and get some 1.1mm stainless wires in there. Step two is often to replace the housing with 5mm if the frame will allow. But when I was trying to thread the new cables I discovered that he had a bigger problem than cable fuzz and skinny housing.

The problem turned out to be the cable stop on the top tube, where the shift wires enter the frame for their dark journey through the mysterious interior.

 

 

That little doohickey inside the tube is supposed to be on top of the tube. It managed to fall inside, but would not come back out the same way. I had to remove the fork, which fortunately gave me access to the inside of the top tube. 

If you own a bike like this, expect to fork out a lot for repairs.

 

Someone had wrapped Teflon tape around the cable stop to try to wedge it into the hole in the top tube, but that merely reduced the width of the flange that is supposed to keep the stop from dropping in. I peeled the tape away, and reduced the size of the opening from the back edge, where the stop has a longer flange, to enhance the overlap of the narrower flange across the front. It was a bit of a hack job, but much of what we do is meatball surgery for riders who not only need a bike repair, but have limited time. This is bike service in a resort town.

We do have our year-round residents. I believe the doting Dad who wanted us to change the grip-style shifter on his daughter's 24-inch mountain bike to a trigger-style shifter endures the winters with us and doesn't just cherry-pick the summers.

The close-reach kid levers on the brakes don't leave a lot of room for the index-finger lever of the shifter pod.

Finger trap made in China.

Fortunately, kid fingers are small enough to work in the space available, and the pivot of the brake lever keeps it from pinching down on the upshifting finger. A larger lever, shut down to accommodate the daughter's diminutive digits, would end up just as close.

Two department store bikes came in at separate times for separate things and I noticed these helpful stickers on the fork:

We have frequently seen cheaper bikes with the forks mounted backwards, either by the owner or by a disinterested grunt at a big box store who was numbing his way through the assemblies for a management and clientele that don't know the difference. This sticker may help to reduce the frequency of that error.

After a brief hiatus immediately after Labor Day, repairs have picked up again, though not to the flooding volume of spring and summer. And many of the problems continue to be weird and time consuming on top of the lottery odds of finding parts that you need.