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.

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.

Between earwax and shrapnel...

 When Shimano dedicated itself to index-only, ratcheted shifting in 1990, it ushered in a whole new era of problems in bike maintenance and repair. Not even they knew what all could go wrong. It was also the beginning of a more predatory relationship with customers. As technology proliferated through the 1990s, customers became test pilots for complicated mechanisms being rushed to market to secure a competitive sales advantage while consumers were spending indiscriminately. The industry focused its efforts on redirecting the surge of enthusiasm for riding into a surge of enthusiasm for buying things.

Some changes really are improvements, but did we really need "model years" like cars? Hell no. Lots of people would have been happy to buy bikes that looked the same from year to year and were equipped with simple componentry that performed reliably. But as soon as "Rapidfire" was introduced, the concept had to be refined to replace its initial flaws with newer, flashier ones.

Shimano warned us from the beginning to stay out of the mysterious interior of their magical devices. "You can't fix anything in there, so don't even try." At the time, one of the bike mags had a snippet about a couple of intrepid mechanics who disassembled brand new Rapidfire shifters and reassembled them exactly as they came apart, and the shifters failed to work. This implied that we wrench-monkeys couldn't handle the precision mechanism of tiny parts in perfect synchronization inside those sophisticated shifter pods. Having peeked under the hood, we could believe it. "If it quits working, replace it," said Shimano. Now I wonder if the article was disinformation to discourage exploration. 

Years later, out of necessity, we discovered that the most common reason for a Rapidfire shifter to fail is congealed factory grease. Ralph dubbed it earwax because that's what it looked and acted like. Clean out the earwax and most non-functioning Rapidfire shifters of any generation start to work again. You have to be careful to follow up with a light but persistent oil to keep the mechanism from freezing up later either from residual grease drying out or from micro-corrosion because all of those tiny levers and springs are no longer protected by the original petroleum product. Fun fact: before Shimano factory grease turns to earwax it looks a lot like pus.

When the road version hit the scene, it integrated the shifting into the brake levers. Other manufacturers had to follow suit. Asian componentry had always had an edge because it usually cost less -- sometimes a lot less -- than the top European stuff, notably the coveted Campagnolo. Campy's Ergopower shifters had better ergonomics than Shimano, by keeping the brake lever as a brake lever, and using a thumb lever for the upshift. Campy was also completely serviceable. Many parts transferred from one model year to the next. But it's pricey, and other aspects of the gruppo might guide a rider to choose Shimano. Because corporate warfare was in full swing, you had to commit to the whole package. There was little that you could mix and match. Riders suffer so that corporate coffers can benefit. The world becomes a worse place because the parties in power focus on their power rather than promoting the general welfare and ensuring domestic tranquility.

Shimano road brifters get earwax, the same as their country cousins on mountain bikes. They also suffered from another, more frequently fatal flaw: Strands of Death.

Inside a road brifter, the cable has to turn around a tight radius to travel enough to haul the rear derailleur across eight, then nine, then ten, and now 11 and 12 cogs spanning an ever wider range of diameters. The mountain shifter sits parallel to the handlebar. The pod can grow a bit to accommodate a larger wheel around which the cable is pulled. I have never seen a shift cable blow up inside a mountain shifter. But I see it all the time in Shimano road brifters. Because the shifting mechanism sticks out perpendicular to the bar, the diameter has to stay within a reasonable size to fit into a brake hood. You may have noticed how road lever bodies have gotten progressively fatter over the years. This is only partly to provide a more comfortable grip over the long road miles. That's a good cover story for the need to make more room in there for all the little ratchety bits. Even with that, the drum that the cable rides around torques the cable down pretty hard over a small area, fatiguing it in a matter of months to the point of failure.

Actual time to cable failure depends on use hours, of course. Other variables include cable quality, housing drag, gear range, and riding environment. You might go a couple of years. Conversely, if you're training a lot and racing frequently you will stress the cable more quickly.

Because Shimano's STI road units could not be opened, cable failure frequently jammed the mechanism completely. Cables don't break when you're in top gear where the head of the cable lines up conveniently with the hole through which you install and remove it. They break when you're jamming desperately on a shift to low gear under load. Maximum tension, maximum windup: blam. The cable usually blossoms instantly into a bouquet of fishhooks.

Failure usually takes a while. Riders will report that the indexing has gotten unreliable, and maybe the shifter feels crunchy. But the problem can progress rapidly, from early mild symptoms to shifter-jamming catastrophe in a single ride.

Because we had to work blind in many models, digging out the fragments could take a lot of time and fail to get every piece. Then the rider would have a ghost in there, like that floating piece of cartilage in your trick knee, that floats into a bad position and then out again.

When the shift cables came off the outer end of the brifter, the housing was fully exposed and could in most cases be released from its stops without undoing the cable from the anchor bolt on the rear derailleur. Then you could check the cable for failing strands by poking the liberated bit of slack out the other side of the brifter. Once Shimano routed the shift cables under the bar tape that became impossible. But they did start putting little access hatches into the lever bodies so that broken cables would be easier to dig out. As with many of their remedial actions, they did not call attention to the improvement, probably because they did not want to acknowledge any responsibility for the prior problem.

On Saturday, a rider came in with her Trek gravel bike, complaining that she could "only get about two gears." The bike has hydraulic disc brakes, so it has brifters that have a master cylinder taking up a lot of space in the lever body. The shifting mechanism is pushed way out front, from which the cable has to travel a couple of inches just to get to the cable housing under the bar tape.

The problem clearly went all the way through the shifter.

The head of the cable was all the way down at the bottom of the slot, far from the exit hole.

We were now at the mercy of the designer of this technological marvel. I saw some fasteners: the usual tiny Phillips head screws, and a couple of aluminum Torx nuts that turned out to be T9.39857, smaller than T10, but a sloppy fit for T9. And the heads were annoyingly shallow, making it hard to keep the tool in there securely. But at least I could take the covers off to get at the mess.

 See all the broken wires in there? Even with the mechanism fully exposed it took minutes of careful searching to make sure I got all of them.

 The bike had also been equipped with those crappy coated cables that fill the cable housing with lint and dust as the coating flakes off.

Although the cables run inside the bike frame, the rear had continuous housing. I opted not to yank out the 4mm and put in 5mm because the rider was hoping to get the bike back that day, and I didn't want to risk running into a snag if any part of the system was designed to obstruct 5mm housing. Green coated cables are not as bad as the brown ones that generate a lot more lint. I bet that just going down to 1.1mm uncoated cable would free it up inside the smaller housing enough to get by for a few months. Housing change would have required redoing the bar tape, too. This way we got her out for a bit more of the somewhat nice weather we've been having since the real warm spell ended.

The season of cabbage and caffeine

As bike commuting mileage drops, and other activities don't seem to fill in like they used to, I shift from using brown rice under a lot of my slapped-together meals, to using sautéed shredded cabbage instead. Shred it fine, and cook it over medium-high heat in a little oil (your choice) with some onion and seasonings you think you'll like. In another pan I cook up whatever meat and vegetables I would have slapped onto -- or mixed with -- the rice. Separate pans work out best for the quantities I try to make, because I make enough to get a supper and two or three lunch-size portions of leftovers. A grab and go container for lunch helps speed me through my typical morning stumble toward the door.

As daylight drops, my energy drops with it. During full bike commute season, I limit my morning coffee to avoid having to stop en route to release excess fluid. I might or might not have a little jolt in the afternoon. Once we get well into October I feel like crawling into a burrow. I certainly don't feel like vaulting out of bed. I'll drain the morning pot of coffee and definitely seek it in the afternoon. Any of y'all who can get by on spring water and meditation have my admiration, but that's it. I'm sure it's great.

The growing season ends with New England's well-known psychedelic splurge as deciduous trees withdraw chlorophyll from the leaves they are about to shed.

At summer's end, we get a rush at work, of people who waited until summer was over so that they could avoid the rush. We also get people who were holding off as long as they could, to keep riding in the prime season. Thus cash flow drops precipitously, but wrench work and brain teasers actually intensify.

This recumbent had tire and drive train problems. Once I got it back together, I found it basically unrideable.

Everything was hooked up right. I just couldn't get it to balance well at all. It resisted that first pedal stroke to establish forward motion, and wanted to flop over immediately. This was true in any gear. It was super twitchy. It was actually a late summer arrival, but I never had time to include it in a blog entry.

Then came someone's swamp buggy.

We'd replaced the chain previously. It hadn't skipped on a test ride, but it did skip when the owner rode it in the swamp. He brought it straight back to have the cassette replaced.

The owner of this Trek Y bike from the 1990s had a hankering to try riding again. He's a classic Van Winkle. Van Winkles are the people who have been asleep for twenty years and awaken to find the world much different than the one they dozed off from.

It doesn't help that he bought the bike used from a shop owner who was a trendoid. The bike had all the cool shit from 1998, including the Rapid Rise rear derailleur. I did learn from Sheldon Brown's website that, prior to Campagnolo's invention of the parallelogram derailleur, all spring-loaded derailleurs were "low normal," meaning that they used the return spring to pull the chain toward the low (largest) rear cog rather than down toward the smallest cog. It should tell you something that Campy's introduction of the high normal parallelogram derailleur established the design that the entire industry followed until Suntour introduced the slant parallelogram derailleur in the 1960s. Even after that, the basic parallelogram remained more common until well into the 1970s. According to Sheldon Brown, other companies didn't jump on until the expiration of Suntour's original patent in 1984, but I know that Shimano was already making slant parallelogram derailleurs before that. But they've always been aggressive competitors, not above pushing the envelope of decency, not to mention legality. They got slapped for it in the 1990s when it became too egregious to ignore. Nice guys finish last.

A happy couple of tourists brought their matched Sevens in for examination and any necessary repairs. They do well with their regular home care, so the bikes needed little. I did change the bridge wires on the rear cantilever brakes, changing the stock ones that were too short for longer ones that provided a firmer lever feel.

Another tourist, coming out of a long layoff, brought his vintage 1980s Trek for a full overhaul and upgrades to prepare for a long haul continental wander, perhaps next summer. He has laid out a route that would keep him in a 72-degree average daytime temperature the whole way along a meandering route that works with both latitude and altitude to hit the desired temperature. We discussed all his options, from total replacement with a Long Haul Trucker to full restoration on the Trek. Because the Trek was an old friend, and some of us are sentimental that way, we went that way.

The bike had been fitted with new wheels. The crank had been replaced because the original one broke. The bike had been built for 27-inch wheels, and the shop he went to had replaced them with 700c. The crank was a TruVativ, and rather cheesy.

I've put 700c wheels on bikes designed around 27-inch, but only with caliper brakes. You just get a longer brake if the one that's on there does not have sufficient range to lower the pads to the smaller rim diameter. I hoped that we could replace his old brakes with something more accommodating.

The mountain bike era began using brakes like these Dia Compes. Technology advanced rapidly with higher demand, leading to brake arms that allowed for pad height adjustment as well as every other angle in alignment. But you're limited by the immovable placement of the post itself. If it's low enough, you can use a modern brake to get the pad in range with good alignment to the rim. You can see here that the mechanic who made the wheel swap years ago just angled the pads down because that was all he could do. He didn't built the guy a decent 27-inch wheel, even though there were rims available. Do it cheap, don't do it right. Right?

I ordered some linear pull brakes and the drop bar levers designed to go with them, hoping that the range of vertical adjustment would make it work. I also built the guy some 36-spoke wheels with wider rims to replace these 32s with Mavic MA2s. The MA2 was a nice enough rim in its day, but narrow for a wider touring tire. I've been getting good service out of Sun CR18s. Not only does the wider rim support the tire better, it moves the braking surface closer to the brake arm. I hoped that the combination of factors would allow the use of 700c wheels.

I could have gotten 27-inch rims for the new wheels, but the selection of rubber in 27-inch isn't as good. It's a crap shoot these days. When I geared up for touring around 1980, and when this guy did just a few years later, 27-inch seemed like the better choice for touring in North America, because 700c had not taken over. Performance clinchers themselves were fairly new technology. We figured that you could probably find a 27X1 1/4  just about anywhere at that time. Now, though, you're more likely to find a dedicated bike shop in the hinterlands, and 700c has become the road/hybrid/gravel norm. You can't plan for every contingency.

I also dug up an old mountain bike crank for the bike, with nice forged arms and 5-bolt chainrings. Things were coming together. But the brakes weren't going to work. Those mounting posts were just too high. With the pads all the way down, they still had to be angled down to get anywhere near the rim. And it wasn't near enough.

After consultation, the customer decided to go with a Surly Long Haul Trucker frame, onto which I would put all of the upgrade and restoration parts. The crank I found for him is the same model I have been using since 1992, when it started out on my Stumpjumper, then moved to the Gary Fisher frame with which I replaced the Specialized, and later went onto the Surly Cross Check I've been riding since 2000. It's one of the few accidentally durable things made by Shimano. It probably helps that I'm not much of a sprinter. Even chasing a truck draft I seldom get out of the saddle.

Into this whole lineup of touring bikes came a near-neighbor of mine (less than 4 miles apart is right next door in rural areas) with his 1970s Raleigh Competition. He's another person who "used to work in a bike shop" and is still enjoying the swag.

It's all Campagnolo Gran Sport, with the less-common three-bolt crank.

The handlebars, a solid 40+ years old, are bent down slightly on one side. That's a bad sign, considering that the handlebar industry recommends replacement every three years. We all know that expiration dates are mainly designed to get you to buy more stuff, but I have seen older handlebars snap off next to the stem after two or three decades. When they outright droop it's a good hint that you might want to renew that particular critical piece. Other than that, the job is just a straightforward  overhaul and some tires from this century.

Into the midst of all this archaeology come the day-to-day weird jobs like this John Deere pedal car with the cranks falling out.

Hell has nine circles. So does this thing.

The pulling threads on the right side are twice as deep as normal, for no discernible reason. But the fun doesn't end there. The threads were also buggered in a way that made it impossible to get the crank puller to thread in at all. This is after I had to remove absolutely every piece of shrouding from the fully enclosed drive train to undo every nut and bolt to take tension off the chain.

I removed the left crank arm and slid the BB out through the right side, since it was falling out that side already. Then I braced the right crank arm in the vise so I could gently and precisely persuade the  axle to drop out of the crank arm, using a drift and a small sledgehammer.

The BB is mounted to a bolted-on bracket that was attached backwards to the frame, so that the BB cartridge couldn't be installed the right way around. Normal use would unscrew it from the frame. I unbolted the mounting bracket and reinstalled it the right way around. The people who assembled this thing clearly did not understand its bike-derived components at all. And I don't know how they ever got the chain on it, because I had to add a half-link just to get it onto the sprockets.

Speaking of not understanding bike parts, this has been the year for people putting the pedals in the wrong crank arms. When it won't go in straight and it's binding up like a bastard, why do you keep graunching on it? But they do. Then I get to extract the pedals -- if they haven't fallen out of the stripped-out holes already -- and either re-tap or replace the crank arms. One of those cases came in just last week. It's one of those repairs where you can't really give an estimate without trying to fix it first, to see if there's enough metal left to tap.

Still in the crank and pedal department, one of the local riders is a lad -- now an adult -- who spends hours a day riding all over town on whatever mountain bike he is putting to the test at the moment. He isn't an official product tester, but he definitely puts them all through the wringer of long, continuous use. He's not a jumper or a sprinter. He just goes. And goes. And goes. When he finally brings a bike in because the gears skip or the shifting is funky, we'll discover something like the bottom bracket shell completely broken loose from the seat tube. Worn-out chains are just par for the course. It's the special touches that elevate it from the mundane. This time, his chain had fallen off the front, and neither he nor his father could get it back on. Something was jammed up. Well I guess so.

He was "just riding along." The crank arm bolts are tight. Something inside ain't right.

And there it is:

The axle is snapped right off. At least it's a simple fix. We plugged in a new BB cartridge and off he went again.

Trainee David wanted to adjust the bearings in his XT pedals before an upcoming 'cross race. I helped him figure out how to get in there.

Modern bike componentry comes in two forms: stuff you can't take apart, and stuff you can take apart that will make you wish you hadn't. This is the latter. Of course you can find chirpy forum posts about how easy and fun it is, from people who claim to do it every one month/six months/year, but it's seldom more obvious that no manufacturer actually wants you to fix anything than when you try. The left pedal has some irreducible slop in it, either from a worn (not readily available) bushing or from the loss of an equally unavailable rubber seal. The rubber seal shouldn't be structural. None of the forum chirpers refer to it as load bearing. But David's has vanished somewhere in the vastness of the New England cyclocross circuit, and now the pedal clicks and wiggles no matter how tight the adjustable bearings are. The metal bushing is present, and looks about the same as the one in the right pedal. The pedal shaft itself is a bit worn, possibly from riding too long with a loose bearing. But the right pedal bearings were equally loose before we adjusted them, and that pedal is tight and smooth now. The only obvious difference is the lack of the rubber seal in the left one. And you can spend hours poking around on the Internet to see if anyone really knows, without ever finding out for sure.

The Campy Gran Sport pedals on the old Raleigh are classic cup and cone bearings. Campagnolo Record pedals were so securely closed that they would run smoothly for years. On that level of Campy, pedals and bottom brackets had a reverse threaded section that expelled dirt as you rode. They didn't do it on the lower models, but you're still not dealing with microscopic bearings sitting in an almost imaginary race. Step-in pedals have higher cornering clearance and other added values for the competitive rider. We've all been trained to beat things up and wear them out rather than keep them going through years of appreciative, moderate use. Repair attempts these days are usually just a preamble to justify replacement. You keep it up as long as you can afford it.

These are the darkest nights, even though they are not the longest. The trees have not entirely gone bare, so the forest shadows are dense black. These are the spookiest nights as well. Half naked trees raise bony arms against what you can see of the sky. Any wind makes the branches creak and rattle like a marching skeletal army, while dry leaves skitter like rats on the forest floor you can barely discern even with a good light. The sight of another person sparks a moment of misgiving rather than sociability. What's anyone doing out here now? Only a weirdo would be out in the woods in the dark. You guzzle some caffeinated courage before heading out on the lonely ride toward home.

Serious Injury or Death

Danger is all around us. An almost infinite number of things could go wrong at any moment. Some computer program might be able to measure the probabilities in something close to real time, but most of us just have to live on our luck. By and large that luck is surprisingly good, considering the massive risks people take all the time and get away with it.

Bicycles are seen as safe, stupid little machines. Bike mechanics aren't considered "real" mechanics, because we don't have to deal with powerful engines. Bike riders are contemptible, wobbling along slowly. Adults on bikes need to "grow up." Bikes are toys. Bike crashes are slapstick comedy, unless it's you, skimming along the tarmac, feeling skin burn away, or feeling the snap of bone and ligament from a more vertical landing.

Bikes are also seen as terribly dangerous, the act of balancing on two wheels an affront to the laws of nature. A bike rider is a daredevil, especially riding on the road. And there are the obvious daredevils on mountain bikes, launching sick tricks off of every available drop.

Bikes themselves might as well be made out of stone, the way most people treat them. They leave them out in the weather, neglect maintenance, and basically treat them they way they treat cars. But a car has its house with it all the time, like a turtle has its shell. And the mechanical parts of a motor vehicle can be made more robustly, because even a small car has power to spare, compared to the .25 hp of a human engine pushing the pedals.

Serious component failures are rare. The massive crank recall of 1997, when Shimano had to replace millions of cranks on bikes sold worldwide, was the last -- and the first -- really enormous safety crisis, created by Shimano's design aesthetic favoring skinnier and skinnier alloy crank arms. But cracking cranks have always been a problem. My first experience with them was back in the early 1980s, when Campagnolo Super Record cranks were cracking, as were any other brands trying to make their cranks look like Campy's. Stress concentrates at the spider, where too thin a web of aluminum between the crank arm and the spider can start to crack in non-structural metal. If you spot the nascent crack soon enough, you can file away the material with the crack in it, and prevent it from traveling into the load-bearing metal. If you know the problem could occur, you can file away the web before a crack even starts, rounding out the radius to remove the stress riser. Wait too long, and the crack gets into real meat. Then the crank is doomed.

Here is an example of a web crack that got away:

You have to look really closely to spot them. That's where you benefit from the vigilant eye of an experienced not-a-real-mechanic who has seen quite a few of these over the years of a misspent life. This particular crank, a Sugino made for Specialized, could never have been saved, because of the shape of the back side of the crank arm. It's hollowed out back there, and has casting residues that create permanent stress risers immune to filing. Too bad, too. It's a pretty crank. The cracks only revealed themselves by the pattern of the oily grime that had adhered to them, hidden in the rest of the oily grime that had accumulated on the surface of the crank.

We play the game "Scratch or Crack?" a lot in the workshop. For instance, here is a Shimano Ultegra Hollowtech crank belonging to a rider who should be concerned about the load-bearing capability of his components:

Rubbing against a badly adjusted front derailleur cage, the arm has been scored, but hasn't cracked...yet. Hollowtech cranks are breaking, but Shimano has yet to acknowledge it with an official bulletin or recall. It's just street knowledge among not-real-mechanics.

Any lightweight component subjected to vigorous riding can eventually fail. As manufacturers try to make parts as light as possible, they will shave down the margin of safety, slap on warning labels, and call it good. You, the consumer, have the ultimate responsibility to accept or reject their creation. It gets much harder when the manufacturers stop making anything nicely finished but a bit more robust, and you have to keep up with the latest number of cogs in order to buy top of the line parts. We have some poor bastard who wants to put Di2 shifting on his "old" bike with mechanical 10-speed Dura Ace. Haaaa! You're what... five years too late? Three years? I don't keep up with the ephemeral crap the way I should, because we don't sell much of it in our market area, and I keep hoping that it will just go away. And it does go away, but only to be replaced by worse ephemeral crap.

Here is another entry in Scratch or Crack:

This one was just a scratch. But you have to take every one seriously.

Rims are another common site for cracks. But you can't ignore hub flanges, handlebars, stems...you can't ignore anything, really. I've found frame cracks and fork cracks as well. I spotted cracks in the crown of a guy's Cannondale Lefty fork that would have led to a nasty face plant. Aluminum and carbon fiber each fail more quickly and more abruptly than steel or titanium, so spotting cracks becomes more urgent with these inescapably common materials. Carbon in particular will just disappear when it reaches its load limit. It doesn't bend. It breaks. Properly designed and manufactured, it will function perfectly well for an almost indefinite period. Parts that can be made more ruggedly, like crank arms and stems, can hide a little reserve strength under a negligible bit of extra weight. Frames present greater design challenges, because a shape and wall thickness amply strong to stand up to the normal loads of hard riding will still be vulnerable to highly probable mishaps like collisions or simply having the bike fall over against something with a hard corner to it. Sure, a nice metal frame might dent in a case like that, but small dents are only a cosmetic problem. It takes a pretty deep dent to render the bike unridable.

Any time you are dependent on a machine, you could end up stranded. The simpler the machine, the better the odds that it will continue to function, provided it was well enough designed and built in the first place. But it has to do what you want it to do, which invites complexity. And even a fixed gear has plenty of parts that can break. Whatever you ride just remember to take a close look at it from time to time. Good luck out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOL! Biopace is back!

It starts with a spot of good news for a change: a driver in Oregon, who killed a bicyclist in a drug-fueled road rage incident, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. What a refreshing far cry from the usual slap on the wrist, or even complete acquittal, that usually follows the killing of a cyclist by a motorist.

As I was reading the article, I noticed the ads on the road.cc site announcing Shitno's latest marvel: Oval chainrings! Proven effective, once again, after a nice long sleep of decades since the last time they were discredited and discarded. If anything indicates the health of the road cycling market and the corresponding gullibility of the well-heeled but casual participants who will believe anything, it is the reintroduction of this tired old concept yet again.

Oval chainrings have been cropping up for about as long as there have been chainrings. They appear, they kill the cadence of an entire generation, and they submerge again. No less a luminary than the great Sheldon Brown thought that they were the cat's ass, thus proving that even the wisest have their susceptibilities. You can read his articles, conduct your own experiments, and decide for yourself. Thanks to Shimano's fundamental philosophy that no bad idea should ever die out, you will now get a new issue of parts to work with before the tide turns again. And maybe it never will, seeing that every activity has broken into smaller and smaller fragments of specialization, and manufacturers can apparently produce surgically small production runs to exploit ignorant enthusiasm generated by the marketing department.

You can tell I'm excited, can't you? Just turning friggin' cartwheels of joy that we're going to trundle out another raft of bullshit to dump on the bike market. Elliptical chainrings might actually be an excellent asset when trying to pedal your electric behemoth with a dead battery. So there's that. And now that we've killed the front derailleur you don't have to worry about the documented tendency of oval chainrings to cut chains during a hard front shift. Mountain bikes with Biopace rings were the original chain choppers in the early 1990s. The temperamental connecting pins of Shimano Hyperglide chains helped significantly with the spread of this problem.

Sheldon Brown's article on Biopace documents Shimano's wooing of the triathlon, mountain, and recreational road market segments with high-cam Biopace, followed by their carefully choreographed walkback through Biopace HP (low cam), and the triumphant announcement in the early 1990s of Superglide!!! Not only did this boast "new" chain tooth profiles -- reminiscent of their "W-Cut" chainrings circa 1980 for those who had been paying attention -- but they also utilized the latest computer-designed engineering breakthrough: Constant Radius. In other words, ROUND. The entire process took roughly a decade and contributed to Shimano's market dominance during the twilight of the road bike boom, the rise of triathlon, and the first surge of production mountain bikes. If you ever wanted proof that marketing trumps genuine product quality and support, Shimano provides a textbook example. It is but one among many from the tumultuous 1980s down to the present day, because their tactics have become the norm. Make something work well enough, hype the crap out of it, and abandon it as quickly as possible so that no one really gets a fix on it. Always claim that product changes are "for improvement."

With a modicum of engineering, ample capital, and a complete dearth of conscience, wealth can be yours.

As Sheldon pointed out, the concept works for riders who don't need a high cadence, or smooth, fast acceleration. He even claimed that they worked well for him on his fixed-gears, but John Allen, who now tends Sheldon's sites, reports the opposite. I side with Mr. Allen. My fixed gears have always exhibited enough change in chain tension just from irregularities in the round rings and cogs I already use. I never wanted to risk throwing a chain at high revs because I was using a non-round ring.

No doubt these turkeys will make their way onto new mountain bikes, since mountain bikers are one of the few market segments throwing down serious coin these days. But how much longer can that last anyway? The fundamentals of the entire industrialized economy are going to have to be overhauled pronto if we're not going to bake the atmosphere right off of this little muddy rock we call home. Disposable income might become an unsupportable luxury. If your pedal-powered machine isn't practical transportation at that point, you'd better be one of the few, the filthy rich, to keep playing at all.

Oval chainrings would serve on a cargo bike or other transportational machine, especially among riders who are adamantly opposed to looking the slightest bit racy. Nothing says "not a racer" quite like a good 60 rpm cadence. Then again, decades ago a top-caliber rider I had the good fortune to ride with said that top time trialists of the day (early 1980s) were running about 75 rpm in monster gears, because that netted out faster than spinning higher rpms in a gear low enough to spin at higher rpms. Hence the success of marketing original Biopace to triathletes, time trialists, and early mountain bikers, all of whom had more reasons to spin slowly than to rev up in the round.

Back when I first got lured back into the bike game, in 1989, Biopace was already fading. I did my best to help it on its way, recommending conversion to round chainrings for any rider willing to listen. I'm ready to do that again, but riders are all less willing to listen to real people in shops, now that they have YouTube and forums full of experienced misinformation. So I can also just clean things off, patch them together, and let riders find their own way through the welter of marketing blather. I know what I like, and what I will keep looking for, as long as I can find it.