Specialized did us a favor

 

A customer ordered this bike online from Specialized. It was one of two. He tried to assemble his own. When he hit a snag, he decided to bring this one -- his wife's -- to us without trying to do anything himself.

Because he said he managed to do everything except size the shifter cable correctly on his own bike, I expected to find the usual online bike in a box, pretty close to complete. Instead I found a project akin to doing a colonoscopy on C3PO.

This bike, a Specialized Como SL 4.0, was designed to look like a picture of a bike drawn by someone who has never looked closely at a bike. The hydraulic brake lines and shift cable are routed into the handlebar within inches of their requisite levers. The brake lines and cable housing are not seen again until they emerge near the brake calipers and rear hub respectively.

Whoever assembles this bike is expected to feed the brake lines and shifter cable from the top of the head tube into the base of the handlebar stem and out through the proper side of the bar to the correct exit. These are not sinuous cords that curl easily into the contortions necessary. The assembly video (there is no printed manual) shows the Park Tool internal cable threading tool, which is a clever and effective device. But even that is not sufficient to ease the whole trip. I don't know if the customer bought himself one or just winged it. We'll find out when he brings his flubbed effort to us.

There is absolutely no margin for error in sizing the brake lines, and nearly none with the shift cable. In the picture you can see that I tried to get away with leaving the front brake line the length that it came. This is because the line already had the barbed fitting in the end of it, and no spare fitting was provided. The TRP brake appears to be a special makeup just for Specialized. You can salvage a barbed fitting from the end of a brake line, but you can't count on being able to. I'm guessing that the remaining Specialized dealers after they downsized a few years ago have the requisite parts on hand. We have an assortment of fittings, but not these specific ones.

The front brake has a problem I still have to diagnose. The lever feel was rock hard, then suddenly went "sploot" (picture a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine). It went totally squishy, but there was no splurge of escaping brake fluid. A few pumps of the lever brought it back to a reasonable travel and resistance, but the pads are now clamped against the rotor. It's even worse than an overfilled SRAM brake, and those are pretty bad. But those are easily cured, and consistently too tight. The "sploot" indicates a mysterious ailment.

At least the fluid is mineral oil, so when it goes all over the place while I'm doing the bleed with so little room to operate it won't eat the paint off this piece of crap.

The assembly video lists the TRP bleed kit as one of the required tools, but never shows the brake lines being trimmed or the system being bled. It just shows the technician/spokesmodel uncapping the lines and connecting them to the levers. Ta daaa! Turbo: It's you only better... or some bullshit like that.

I'm happier than ever that the Big S tossed us in the dumpster after our decades supporting their brand. Their disloyalty to us saves us from having to put a good face on utter crap like this. The owner of this bike would have to work on it themselves or pay a shop to do it. I don't know what sort of loss a Specialized dealer would be expected to eat for the time consuming mess of this needless puzzle, or what an independent shop would charge for the time consuming annoyance. It's apparently supposed to be so easy even a consumer could do it. Maybe not knowing any better is an advantage. If you have no basis for comparison, it just becomes another comedy bit, like assembling flat-pack furniture. You do it once, and when the bike craps out you just replace it.

The wheel, the lever, and the inclined plane...and press fit

The wheel, the lever, and the inclined plane represent fundamental principles that underlie many more complex tools and machines. They're building blocks of more advanced technology that took us out of the stone age.

Threads use the principle of the inclined plane, to create a secure joint that can be incrementally tightened to a desired firmness (torque) at a desired rate (thread pitch)

Then came press fit. It's the equivalent of pounding it in with a rock. Sure, you are better off to squeeze it in with a controlled press -- utilizing threads on the tool -- but you're basically just shoving it in there and hoping it stays securely and functions quietly.

Yesterday was press fit day in the workshop. One bike was a carbon Salsa full suspension mountain bike that the owner cleans with a hose, "but only carefully." It had noises in the bottom bracket and headset. Videos I watched to learn more about the inner mysteries stated that press fit BBs are simple and easy to work on, but noted that you should only remove one when you are planning to install a new one. What the assembler hath pounded in there, thou shalt not pound out. And pound them out you do.

One tool, from Enduro, used gentle methods of persuasion, but all of the others called for an assistant and a hammer.

The second patient was an Orbea road bike that we've been trying to get dialed in for about a month. The parts on it were transferred from an older Orbea that had cracked. It has a mystery noise that sounded like creaky bottom bracket, but may prove to be a drive train noise amplified by the large, resonant carbon fiber frame. Fiddling with that is time consuming, and time is money. If you're getting compensated for the time, it's a win. It's unclear at this time how fully we will be compensated. When a job drags on with mysterious afflictions the billable hours get blurry.

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.

More anti-cyclist infrastructure on the Cotton Valley Trail

As if riders didn't have enough to handle at the rail crossings, now they've added these slalom gates. Gossip says that the intent is to guide riders to the exact crossing point. The goofy yellow paint and the "no shit Sherlock" arrows are more unhelpful attempts to deflect liability by belaboring the obvious.

I will say that I have observed riders winging through the crossings at stupidly oblique angles and foolishly high speeds. The ones I saw managed to pull it off, but they obviously had no idea how lucky they were. So the gates prevent a rider from slicing off the corner. But they constrict traffic during heavy use periods, when the path can be a log jam of pedestrians and riders. And any minor error in alignment -- that you might have been able to correct -- risks catching a pedal on those orange posts. They're springy, to reduce the chances of impalement, but not so floppy that you could hook a pedal and just ride through it.

At least one crossing also has the heavy wooden sign post inconveniently -- not to say dangerously -- close to the crossing itself. Cyclists dismount indeed. That crossing is further out, closer to Bryant Road.

The intent is always to get riders to dismount. A rider who isn't riding isn't bothering anyone. That's true on roads or paths. But it isn't really true when a knot of pedestrians and riders tangles up in the confined space of a crossing that was already too small before the addition of the slalom gates.

The drive-to-ride crowd can drive somewhere else. Mountain biking has become entirely drive-to-ride. As dedicated trail networks proliferate for purely recreational forms of cycling, large blocs of the pedaling population are neatly removed from the traffic mix and feel less need to advocate for the freedom to ride everywhere.

Long distance transportation cycling isn't highly practical for the vast majority of people, but infrastructure should still be built to accommodate riders no matter what. A rider might make short hops on a long road, and long distance riders have rights, too. Most attention gets paid to built-up areas with denser populations. This compartmentalized approach is as wrong as wildlife management plans that focus only on one species, or too small a piece of habitat. Any trail that connects two relatively major points of interest needs to be considered from the transportation as well as recreation angle. Any trail that can be connected to the rest of the transportation network is part of that network.

Coming Soon: Moped Monthly Magazine!

Someone dropped off a pile of back issues of Bicycling. One of them included a special section devoted to ebikes.

Check out the Buyer's Guide to Sidewalk Motorcycles, and articles like "Hate to Pedal? Who Doesn't?" Read reviews of selected accessories, like helmets, gloves, and weightlifting belts. Find out why your smokeless moped must have electronic shifting and computer controlled suspension.

I don't mind if people want to invent labor saving devices. But I don't recall the Bicycling Magazine of the 1970s reviewing mopeds. The fact that the power is provided by an electric motor seems to blind people to the fact that this is not a bicycle, except in the sense that the original term for motorcycle was motor-bicycle. Yes, it has pedals and uses a lot of the same componentry. That in itself is a problem, when a 50- to 75-pound vehicle is using a suspension fork and brake system designed for something that weighs 25- to 35 pounds. Wheels and tires are gradually mutating to reflect the actual loads involved. This leads to other problems when the motorcyclesque tire for a given smokeless moped gets dropped from production. I ran into this working on a couple of massively heavy models from A2B. The only tire available to fit the rims is definitely not for a 75-pound behemoth. The rubber will melt away.

The bike industry, desperate for cash after they destroyed the mountain bike boom, is grasping at every straw, including electric wires. I suggest attaching those to the genitals.

You can't stop progress. You also can't stop diarrhea.

Electric vehicles are great. They are a separate thing and need to be considered as such. Quit dumping every whacked piece of crap with pedals onto hardworking little bike shops. Improvement is one thing. Over-sophistication is something else. The minority thrilled by space age, temperamental componentry is vastly outweighed by the people who want a relief from that crap, who were perfectly satisfied with simpler mechanisms, well made, and ask only for safe riding conditions.

It's still winter here, but a pretty crappy winter, so I have too much time to think about the next season and the technological marvels that are imposed on us in a deeper and deeper pile every year. Tool up! Study up! One or two people might need something annoying and expensive worked on! Meanwhile, all the older stuff still needs its routine attention.

The industry's ideal is to make bikes that are addictively attractive, that can't be serviced. Customers will buy them, ride them into the ground, and replace them eagerly, because we all have that kind of money. What happens to the carcasses of the dead? Who cares? Maybe someone will develop a feel-good, token recycling program to salvage the 10 percent of the content that can be. And environmental groups will start reporting on how the remaining detritus has been pulled from the gullets of the last few whales, or something.

Fixing the unfixable

As I was picking congealed grease out of a Shimano Rapidfire shifter pod dating from about 1991,

I actually appreciated how solidly it was made, and how reliably it worked compared to its temperamental descendants. Early versions of a product, even one with lots of conceptual flaws, will be made much better than later versions, because the promoter doesn't want it to self destruct before establishing itself among the uninformed as a solid product. Only then do the manufacturers start watering it down to increase profits.

I hated the underlying concept, and still do. Shimano announced Rapidfire in a triumphant video that they sent out to shops before the 1990 season. We watched our copy in horror, anticipating in full detail the hell that it would unleash on mechanics and riders. We could do nothing to stop it, despite my best subversive efforts. It included the admonition that there was nothing we could fix inside these pods, so don't even try. Word in the cycling press was that intrepid mechanics had disassembled brand new units and reassembled them exactly as they had been, and they mysteriously failed to function. Whether this was true or was disinformation planted by Shimano I never found out. It implied that there was some magic Shinto pixie dust inside these units that would fall out if barbarians profaned the interior.

I plastered these cartoons all over Interbike's Philadelphia show for a couple of years:

It was, of course, to no avail. The technofascists won, leading the technolemmings off of cliff after cliff. But I digress.

The 1991 pod clicks solidly into gear as soon as you flush out the pus that they used for grease. It congeals into a substance we call earwax. My colleague Ralph came up with that one. He was an excellent wrench who was smart enough to get out of the business. It's been bad for his waistline, but probably good for his bottom line, to pursue his interest in computers instead of the 19th Century technology of the bicycle, dolled up with 21st Century materials as it is today.

When hackers and their malware finally make the Internet untenable, bicycles will be waiting to receive the refugees of the Digital Age.

Back to the pod from '91: it felt weird to have so few clicks. I've had to clean out many later versions, chasing more gears, so an original six-speed feels very short. But the wider spacing with fewer stops provides more margin for error. Cable tension has to be relatively accurate, but not neurosurgically precise.

Within a couple of years, the Japanese Buggernaut had enclosed the pods more completely and nearly doubled the number of parts inside. This made them less vulnerable to invading grit and mud, and generally more reliable. It also concealed the insidious activities of earwax under a Darth Vader-like black mask.

In the 1990s, the bike industry, led by Shimano, used the customers mercilessly as test pilots. You might expect such shenanigans from small companies making boutique componentry, but you saw more of it from the big players with lots of leverage. You see it today as manufacturers hump their customers in vulnerable "enthusiast" categories with model year changes intended to make addicts want another hit. There are no white hats in the big componentry business. With the coming of the Electrical Age, batteries are all the rage in everything one might electrify.

Honestly, how did any of us survive the 1970s and '80s on the paleolithic crap we had to ride? In his book, Four Against the Arctic, author David Roberts told the story of four Russian hunters in the 18th Century who survived on an island near Svalbard for six years before being rescued. He and other members of his research team observed that people from a later time, less inured to routine hardship, probably would not have survived. Indeed, look how many perished on Arctic exploration trips when their technological cocoon ripped, dumping them into the elements where Inuit survived and thrived.

We're not Arctic explorers, but we are certainly allowing ourselves to be increasingly isolated and softened by accepting more and more technological intermediaries between us and the realities of the tasks we choose to tackle. Some of these can enhance safety and functionality, but an awful lot, particularly in cycling, pander to riders in search of marginal gains at more than marginal increases in cost, and drive perfectly functional older stuff underground.

Would I miss my outlaw bravado if the stuff I use was totally mainstream? Against what would I rebel in Biketopia, with beautiful routes and intermodal interfaces everywhere? Why don't we build it and find out?

Pretty, messed up

A few days ago a rider brought in a beautiful Peter Mooney road bike with a broken rear shift cable.  Because it was a brifter, it was at risk for "strands of death." It was the second one we'd treated that day.

Because the cables inside brifters always break under tension, the stub remains inside the mechanism. The frayed ends can snag and prevent the shifter from returning to the position where everything lines up for removal and installation. Depending on the model of brifter, you may be able to dissect it somewhat to manipulate the broken strands, but any broken cable inside a brifter, particularly a Shimano brifter, could turn into an expensive problem.

This one's life was spared. I could get at the stub and coax it around as I shifted the mechanism to line everything up.

The bike was beautifully made, but flawed.

It was built when people who should have known better were slapping cable stops on the head tube. Crap like this shows you that the spirit of trial and error is still very much alive in bicycle design, especially the error part. Cable stops at the head tube were never a good idea, never would have worked, didn't need to be done, and could have been avoided after a few obscure experiments proved that point. However, they swept the industry, leading to exquisite custom frames from high-end builders with incurable cable problems due to beautifully crafted stupid design.

I can see how they thought it might work, but how many times do you have to hit yourself with a hammer to prove that it hurts?

The frame details are really impressive. 

Check out this groovy pump nubbin. It's not really a pump peg, being a round ball and all. Beautifully worked into  the seat lug, isn't it?

Head lug

Fork end

Bottom bracket shell

Most overrated headset.

Aaaand the world's most annoying bicycle computer.

I realized after the rider left that I had not taken a picture of the complete bike.

In a perfectly timed example of the advantages of primitive componentry, on my ride home, I grabbed a fistful of shifter and heard the telltale snap of cable strands breaking. I was near a spot where I planned to stop anyway, so I performed a routine roadside repair on my nice, simple barcon shifter:

No need to dig in a panic for Strands of Death. I carry spare cables because they usually break in the middle of a ride.

Time to write has been hard to find. I have to scamper off to work now, to fix a couple of smokeless mopeds that the Millionaire Motorbike Club crashed on the rail trail. I wondered when the smokeless moped crowd would start to banzai down that path. It's congested enough with dog walkers, baby strollers, people fishing, and cruisers and mountain bikes with absurdly wide handlebars. Now we have to deal with the 20 mph crowd, trying to maneuver through the tight rail crossings on sluggish, 50-pound bikes that surge forward with electrical assistance whenever you poke at the pedals.

This should be interesting.

Do you carry electric bicycles?

"Do you carry electric bicycles?"

"Are you nuts? I can barely lift one."

A customer called to see if we had, or could get, 20X3-inch tires for a couple of electric bikes someone had given him. Scraped off on him would be a better term, but we didn't know the full extent of the annoyance for many weeks.

Just finding 20X3-inch tires that matched the ones on his bikes was a treasure hunt.

These things look like motorcycle tires. No one had them in stock on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe they didn't have them in the UK either. We didn't bother to follow up with those vendors. NYCewheels in NYC listed them, but told us they were unavailable indefinitely. They offered a substitution. Hey, whatever gets this guy's rims off the ground and his three-ton pieces of crap out of our basement.

These Ultramotor A2B bikes are the heaviest smokeless mopeds it has ever been my misfortune to try to lug around. Getting them into the shop from our basement storage area was easy enough: just wheel them around to the main door and through the shop with only a few stairs to negotiate. The main drawback to that approach is being seen in public with the thing as I walk around the building. I avoid eye contact and move as quickly as my shreds of dignity allow.

Getting the cursed hunks of scrap metal onto the work stand is another matter. Previous electric bikes, while grossly heavy and poorly balanced, have still been light enough for me to grunt them into position with a solid stance and a little luck. Bikes of a convenient height allow me to put one end on a footstool so I can pivot the other end up and clamp the seat post.

The A2B monstrosities defied such simple steps. I scanned the overhead for some place to rig some sort of cord system to lift them. In our old and heavily mutilated building, I did not see anything overhead that I would trust with the dangling weight of this ridiculous contraption.

Eventually I settled on using the stand itself, tying the lower end of the rig to a low point on the bike to try to get the seatpost up to the height of the clamp. But how to increase my mechanical advantage, which was the whole point of rigging a hoist?

Thanks to my father's taste in nautical widgetry, I had a fully functional Harken dinghy block on my key ring. I could have used a couple more, but it gave me something along with the high-friction upper end going over the work stand arm. I could at least lift the behemoth.

It was still an awkward wrestling match until Beth came through in the middle of it and brought the stability of a woman's touch.

"This must weigh a hundred pounds!" she said. "Why is it so heavy?"

In typical electric bike fashion, even a simple thing like a tire change turns into a twiddly fiddle with bullcrap. I had to trace the motor wiring back to detachable connectors, one of which had been heavily mummified with electrical tape, and then drop out the rear wheel, which weighs 19 pounds. The front wheel is pretty simple, with a normal hub and disc brakes. It still managed to hang up in the forks for no obvious reason. Maybe it just didn't want the rear wheel to get all the attention.

I disassembled the lifting tackle before I went home. The bike is still in the stand. I have more Harken blocks and other handy bits at home to make a smoother-running purchase for lowering this bike and lifting the other one.

I'm debating whether to leave a tackle system at the shop all the time, carry the pieces with me when I commute, or bring the parts each time the need arises. The shop should probably have a lift on hand in case some e-bike victim comes in for emergency repairs during the more active cycling season. As Baby Boomers age and younger generations who think electric things are cool come along, we will probably see more hefty two-wheelers on which the pedals are more decorative than useful.

The industry already offers lifts for heavy loads like this. They're not cheap, of course. If I can set a good anchor overhead, it will be cheaper and almost as easy to keep lifting tackle on hand, rather than lay out the coin for a fancy new work stand. There's added satisfaction in hoisting someone's electric monster like a dead animal carcass rather than investing in a fancy, high-tech lift that exalts it.

Another "Valley of Death" rim

This is a Bontrager AT550 hybrid rim, 622X20 mm. It has the troublesome Valley of Death, where inner tubes meet a premature end. The skinny rubber rim strip can slip aside, uncovering a tiny fang on a spoke nipple. The inflated tube distends down into that deep channel, stretching unevenly. Sometimes tubes fail just from that. In other cases, the thinned part in the channel is more vulnerable to chafe.

Throw in the life line!

Ordinary clothesline fills the ditch. You have to allow for the valve hole.

Then top it with rim tape.

This cumbersome process brought to you by The Bike Industry and the fine re-labelers at Trek.

Satanic Serpent

Jake the Satanic Serpent came back to the workshop about three weeks ago because the shifting had gone crunchy again after another abusive mud wallow.

"Gloucester isn't until late September," said the owner. "I don't plan on riding it until a couple of weeks before that." He was referring to the big cyclocross race in Gloucester, Mass. in the fall. He said he would be riding his road bike for the spring and summer, so not to rush the 'cross bike.

I gratefully triaged around the Satanic Serpent, grappling with more urgent repairs for people who wanted their bikes now, not four months from now. I knew the urgent work would let up at some point in the summer so I could spend the hours of brain-frying quality time the Kona would demand.

Today the Serpent's owner called requesting the bike be ready for him to ride tomorrow. And he didn't call first thing in the morning, either. It was mid afternoon and I was still finishing a repair for someone who expected it today. So at 3:30 p.m. I started on the grungy 'cross bike.

The rear shifting was all out of whack. Mere silt and grime could account for all the symptoms. With every cog the industry adds to a cassette the shifting gets more sensitive to minuscule variations in cable tension. And somehow the rider had managed to get a kink in the rear derailleur cable about an inch above the anchor bolt. This would actually come into play when shifting to the lowest gear.

The first time around I had left one piece of 4mm cable housing -- the section from the brifter to the inline adjuster -- because it was under the tape. Reevaluating the cable routing I decided to replace it with a longer section of 5 mm to move the inline adjuster from a high position near the bar to a low position. The high position had almost eliminated a kink where the housing entered the adjuster, but a much lower position would eliminate it entirely. And the new housing would be 5mm with brass ferrules, so the cable should slide more easily through it.

With all the usual rigamarole, I removed the old cable, leaving a guiding sheath in place through the down tube.  I untaped the bars far enough to remove the 4mm housing and slid the old cable out of the brifter. I measured new housing, cut it, and slid the cable through it. Fed the cable through the guiding sheath. Pulled the sheath. Slid on the little chafe-guard that covers the cable where it emerges from the down tube. Ran the cable to the rear derailleur and anchored it. Then messed, messed, messed with the tension. And messed with it some more. Couldn't get it to shift up the cassette to lower gears. More tension...until it finally lifts, one cog at a time, click...click...click...and will not shift into low gear no matter what. Check the limit screw, okay. More tension. More tension. More tension. It makes the last shift.

Hit the return lever. Nothing. Three clicks to get it to drop one cog. Ratchet ratchet ratchet it down to the bottom. Ease off some tension. It sort of works through nine cogs, just gets ten. Eleven? Absolutely not. Big ring, small ring, makes no difference. It either shifts pretty badly or really badly.

I pulled the cable again to make further refinements to the housing to get the smoothest curve with no tight bends or kinks. That didn't help. Changed the chain from a KMC to a brand-name Shi-no, just in case the derailleur and cassette were particularly loyal. Another waste of time.

From the beginning, the cables have had a raspy sound and feel as they pass into and out of the down tube. The entry and exit holes are just big enough for the cable. I can't shine a light and paste an eyeball up there to see what might be snagging things in the interior. Really skinny fiber optic cameras cost some serious coin.

By 6 p.m. I was ready to use a fire ax to open it up. I called the customer about twenty minutes later to tell him he could ride it this way if he really wanted to use it now, and bring it back midweek and forget about it for a while. I need to be able to spend several hours with this piece of crap, figuring out where the drag is coming from.

By 6:30 I headed out into the cloudy evening to trudge home.

Housing crunch

And so my season begins. Local rider brings in the bike he got somewhere else because the shifting went bad on him during his abusive first ride.

Kona Jake the Snake cyclocross bike. New 105 11-speed. "I read that it's hard to adjust," he said. "So I brought it to you."

"I kept twisting the barrel adjusters the whole ride," he went on. "It was never right." He added that the ride group wallowed through a lot of mud and snow.

The way the internal cable routing was done, the shift cables can't be cross routed. That would have helped with the angle up front. Either way, longer housing will feed it more smoothly into the stops. The in-line barrel adjusters need to be moved closer to the handlebars because the housing can't be led to the opposite sides of the head tube. All this could have been done by an imaginative mechanic during assembly. Now it will cost him a couple of shift cables and some new housing. As they're done now, the plastic ferrules on the constrictive 4mm housing are already kinking after about 50 miles.

This kind of rescue operation after some other mechanic's ethical lapse or simple inexperience really makes me tired. I could just dial it in as closely as I can and tell him he'll have to live with it, but I want to see if it can be improved. In terms of ultra modern bike componentry, that means, "be made to work more or less adequately for as much as a couple of months."

I already noticed that the housing for the rear cable disc brake aims upward, where it will surely collect water. So that'll be rusting in within months. But it's got eleven speeds. And carbon forks. Oo, baby. Value added.

Something sounds raspy in the impenetrable interior of the cable path through the frame. The bike came with the same weird, brown cables that Big G's Roubaix had, with some shreddy coating on them. On this bike, wads of scuffed-off coating are wedged like old snake skin at friction points in the system. Who knows how much of that is binding the new cable inside the down tube where no one can get at it.

With new cables and better-aligned housing, the shifting still won't dial in. But as you slog through the mud in your three or four working gears out of 22 (I'm being optimistic), you can rest assured your bike looks really sharp and is aerodynamically its most efficient, thanks to the internal cable routing.

As so often happens, you have to do the job to see if the job can be done. So after the extra rigamarole of a routine internal cable change I'm only a little better off than I was before. I'll know after more fiddling whether I can raise this annoying piece of crap to an acceptable level of function.

Oh, snap!

At the end of the day yesterday a customer brought in this early 1970s Viscount fork. This was the sinister fork of death from the ten-speed era. Tim McNamara and Sheldon Brown already wrote an article about Lambert/Viscount, so I won't go into detail. They offered a lot of value at their price point compared to the rest of the industry, until you found out about the forks that snap off. The steel steerer would separate from the aluminum crown. They were recalled in 1978 after Yamaha bought Viscount, and replaced with steel forks.

Just a few hours earlier I had phoned Shimano to get a Crank of Death recall kit. The new and the old in irresponsible design.

My Negative is your Positive

Looking at that Trek tri bike from last week I suddenly missed the days when we used to go to Interbike. Back in the 1990s we did it for competitive reasons. The mountain bike business was festering and foaming with runaway innovation and reinvention of 1890s technology. Shops competed savagely. Consumers drove many miles to save a few dollars. You had to be informed if you wanted to survive.

We had a dozen smartasses a day back then, sneering at us if we didn't have a snappy answer about every product they'd just read about in Obsessive Tech Weenie Monthly. Interbike was our chance to see nearly everything for a coming year, and collect price information from our competitors.

It also allowed me to lodge doomed protests like these cartoons:

Still as valid today. And the Japanese Juggernaut has been joined by America's conglomerate answer, SRAM, destroyer of worlds. It was a dark day when they ate Sachs-Sedis. But you have to go on.

I suppose there were people who thought the new metal tools were foolish luxury when you could just pick up a piece of flint and chip it into whatever tool shape you needed. No fire required! No ore to mine and refine! Rock on, with Flint! Am I that bad? I think not.

My main objection to the bike industry's elaborations is that they eliminate valid choices for many riders, simply for the sake of the industry's economies of scale. They change the norm to suit themselves and to serve the limited clientele that could actually benefit from the complex technology dumped on us to replace what had been simply sufficient. Even within the higher price points of the super sophisticated technology a consumer has to be careful. The bike industry has never been reluctant to throw unready product into the marketplace to let paying customers do the R&D. Maybe the stuff basically works, but it's full of bugs that bite the early adopters. That's your reward for customer loyalty. Trust us! Go ahead!

After the mountain bike boom died and Interbike moved to Vegas on dates inconvenient for us we lost interest. Everything had gone quiet. We could keep up with the slower pace without going to the trouble and expense of a trip to the trade show. We weren't getting dragged through the mud about specs and prices the way we did in the frenzied years of The Boom. Only recently did I wish I'd been able to go for educational purposes. It still may not be worth the price of the trip, but it would give me a chance to see in real life whatever Great New Things were coming out of the industry's fire hose of obsolescence. With that information I can help customers make better decisions, or at least less bad ones.

Take the recent Trek for instance. Our customer did not consult us about it before purchasing, but say he had. If I had seen the beast at a trade show I would already have spotted the suspect bits and could tell him to be leery. Or another customer, who bought a wheel without taking into account the two different spline depths on Shimano-compatible freehub bodies, which limit your choice of cassettes.

You might advise me to read more, and you'd have a point. The bike industry and its adoring press repulse me enough to discourage me from reading a whole lot about their stuff, especially when the writeups aren't clinically critical of designs all the way down to fundamental principles. Maybe the editors and writers gave up on the ocean of crap years ago and now settle for simply describing the oily sheen on the turd-flecked surface in aesthetic terms. Or maybe they really are true believers.

I could fill a book with my observations of what technology really does provide advantages and to whom. For some riders, tinfoil chains, 18-cog cassettes and brifters are as necessary as machine guns were to modern industrialized warfare. But a rock never jams or misfires. Do you need a machine gun? Is it really worth buying, maintaining and toting around all the time? If the answer is yes, get the machine gun. My problem is that the industry always assumes the answer is yes. And when they do offer you a rock, it's a cheap, crumbly rock. And you have trouble finding much in between the rock and the machine gun.

Good stuff is out there. It goes to trade shows. The hands-on experience is far better than trying to analyze something from pictures and a written description, or even a video. At Interbike I could poke around at my own pace, generally undisturbed by booth attendants who were busy trolling for orders from the real buyers. I could look at something from whatever angle I wanted, for as long as I wanted. I don't know if I'll actually go to a trade show again, but it does seem worthwhile when it had not for so long.

My negative is your positive. I'm the guy who grabs your collar and yanks you back so you don't walk off a cliff while admiring a beautiful sunset. I'm the guy who warns you you're about to step in dog crap because you're looking up at the colorful fall foliage. While you're distracted by the attractions I'm looking for hornet's nests and poison ivy. I'm never going to be a cheerleader for anything, but that doesn't mean I hate everything. Take advantage of that. I may make you feel like an idiot for sucking up the propaganda and buying the sparkly new thing, but that's the first step on the road to deeper understanding of your tools, what they can do for you and what the industry that markets them to you really owes you. They owe you solid value and really good explanations, for a start.

More gems of design

A customer -- formerly a triathlete at a professional or near professional level -- brought in this used Trek something or other he found on line to replace his mid- 1990s Aegis. He just wanted a cassette and some quick release skewers for the spiffy carbon wheels he bought. Our leader suggested he should bring the bike so we could make sure there were no weird compatibility issues.

The wheels will work. But what I would take to be an expensive bike has some pretty cheesy details.

These plugs on the top tube press into threaded bosses spaced as if for a bottle cage. They don't seem likely to pop out, but they also do not exclude water. The widened bit that holds them into the bosses does not fill and protect the threads the way a properly greased bolt would.

Every set of bosses has the same cheesy plugs. But that turns out to be a minor concern. See below:

When you need to replace the rear brake cable you'll probably just buy a new bike. I love how the brake arms just disappear into the frame. The cap screws that secure the cover have sockets for dinky little hex wrenches, so they'll probably round right out when you try to break them loose after their long service on the bottom of the bike.

Furthermore, the problem of a few inadequately plugged little holes loses a lot of significance when you pull off this squishy plastic shrouding to reveal a good sized tunnel going into the frame. 

This shot shows the rusted fasteners inside the hollow stem through which the cables run down to the top tube. Nearly every bolt was corroded on this bike. It probably saw a lot of trainer use, bringing downpours of sweat.

A visit from stupid wheels

The rider had noticed that one spoke in his front wheel was so loose it hit the computer pickup on every revolution. Fortunately he did not pull it out sideways and then twist it around an adjacent spoke. Riders who do that often make the repair significantly more complicated and expensive than it would have been if they'd found a less drastic way to secure it while they made their way home.

What the rider did not notice was the similarly wobbly condition of the rear wheel. It's behind him, after all.

I had to check and adjust the tension in both wheels. Simple enough.  But the spokes are in pairs.

You can only turn the nipples one flat at a time. When you're tightening spokes that are flappy loose, that slows things right down.

You don't have to build a better mousetrap, just a weird looking one. The mice will laugh, but so will you, all the way to the bank. You're not out to trap mice. You're out to trap purchasers.

Stromer Tar Pit

Sunday, Mr. X pulled up in the back parking lot with his brand-new Stromer ST 1 Platinum on the bike rack of his SUV. The rear brake had gone mushy on this one exactly as it had on the other black diamond-frame bike in the batch I just assembled.

I was glad I had ordered a new bleed kit to replace the improvised one from the 1990s that our shop had used on Magura rim brakes. Along with all the other sucking chest wounds in the repair shop I told Mr. X I would have the bike ready for Monday morning when his gang was going for a ride. I'd already done it on one bike with a less than optimal tool kit. It should be a snap, right?

I put the bike in the stand, removed the neoprene sleeve over the wiring on the chain stay, unhooked all the wiring connections, cut the various zip ties, broke loose the 19mm axle nuts and maneuvered the 25-pound rear wheel out of the dropouts past the derailleur. I removed the brake pads and inserted the block to hold back the pistons in the brake caliper. Next I undid the forward mounting bolt to help orient the caliper vertically once the bike was positioned with the front wheel up at the ceiling. That had to be tied to a pipe in the overhead to hold it straight so the brake lever would remain in the proper attitude.

The latter maneuvers required a stepladder, as does the bleeding process itself on these bikes.

Once the bike was positioned I could hook up the syringes of the bleed kit to the fittings on the caliper and the brake lever.

Magura's video, in addition to being dubbed in English so Bernd the technician's lips keep moving after the narration has stopped, shows the bleeding procedure on a front brake on a conventional mountain bike. It's quick! It's easy! It's fun for the whole family! Need the caliper oriented vertically? It basically is already. Piece of cake.

Even though our new bleed kit supposedly has the fittings for Magura brakes, they don't fit exactly right. Magura's own kit is a lot more money and the fittings shown in the catalog look identical to the ones on our old rim brake kit, which also does not fit the new disc brakes precisely. So there's a bit of weeping and the chance of air being introduced during the procedure to eliminate air from the system.

Between interruptions from customers I worked my way through the bleed and reassembled the bike: untie, lower, clean caliper, insert pads, reinstall 25-pound rear wheel, reconnect wiring, and, finally, test squeeze the brake lever.

Totally dead. It was now 15 minutes to closing time and I was supposed to ride an hour home in time to shove down a bit of supper before some guests came over to share a birthday cake the cellist had made for me. But I'd told Mr. X we would have this done. I had to try at least one more time.

Tired of lugging that 25-pound rear wheel around, for this round of bleeding I removed the caliper completely from the bike, cut the remaining zip ties to allow it to hang down below the bottom bracket and screwed it to a wooden framework I scrounged up that happened to be a convenient shape and size. While this did not put the caliper and lever ends in exactly easy reach it was easier than going up and down a stepladder over and over. I was able to fill and bleed the system in half an hour.

Successful bleeding of the brakes on these two brand new $4,000 Stromer electric bicycles does not answer the question, "why did they need bleeding in the first place?" I had seen a sheen of fluid around the vicinity of the caliper on both bikes, but there was no big stain in the box when I unpacked them or a massive dripping mess to indicate where the system had emptied itself catastrophically. There was just that little schmear. It looks as if the halves of the caliper do not mate quite correctly, but nothing is obviously warped or loose. I won't be surprised to see a Stromer or Magura brake recall on MT 2 disc brakes before the year is out. But why only on the two black men's bikes and not on the white and red step-through models?

I've given up on getting a lot of two-way communication from Stromer. They're obviously too busy selling these things to worry about a few that don't work, even if the bikes belong to some of the richest people in the country. It's nice to see they're not letting their heads be turned by all that dough. You can see their point, can't you? The rich folks have already spent their money. That makes them no more use than any other customer who has already purchased the product. Time to move on to new conquests.

I'm not sure when loyalty to old customers became a liability and the quest for new new new ones became the mark of success. I guess it's all part of the growth philosophy that drives corporate planning and cancer. An old customer is only as good as the money they're willing to spend on your new product. And since the products are poorly thought out and badly supported, new customers are your only hope. Go for the people who haven't heard about you yet!

Stupid Design: Specialized Stout Wheel

Routine tune up. Inflating the rear tire. FSSSSSSSSHHHHHH! The tube fails.  Okay, this happens. Let's go in there and see what happened.

The hole in the tube was opposite the valve on the inner surface, toward the rim, not the road. The rim strip had slipped aside because of the stupid shape of the rim floor.

Note how it has the pointless and always destructive channel within a channel design that serves no structural purpose and always leads to tube problems. In this case, the machining for the spoke holes creates a sharp edge that slices the tube when the rim strip inevitably slides to one side because the secondary channel does not provide a stable surface to hold it where you want it. 

Way to innovate. "Innovate or Die," their tough guy slogan says. So what's their excuse for crap like this? Closer examination shows the rim was made for Specialized by Alex. So, way to subcontract, guys. 

Now I have to figure out how to shim that space. The filler we use on the much worse Alex RP 15 rims is a little too chunky for this space. The RP 15 rims cause internal blowouts because their channel is so deep. These Specialized Alex disc brake rims present a slightly different problem with their built in tube slicers. 

Welcome to the work week

The first thing that greeted me was a Cannondale full suspension 29er with a loose front derailleur. It's a direct mount, so I had to remove the crank and front derailleur get to the bracket.  Then I removed the bracket mounting screw applied thread locker and reinstalled it before remounting the derailleur with new thread lock on all its screws. Once the derailleur was tight, the fact that it was weirdly bent became much more obvious. I got it shifting adequately, but it should be replaced. The guy was hot to go ride it, so he took it as it was.

From there I moved on to a seriously underestimated repair. Never mind the details. It reminded me to post a note about adjuster tuning cheap caliper brakes.

Adjuster tuning is a lazy shortcut used by sloppy or inexperienced mechanics. They turn out the barrel adjusters on derailleurs and brakes rather than taking up slack at the anchor bolt. But on cheap bikes with wide tires (and expensive bikes with embarrassingly inadequate quick releases) adjuster tuning allows you to get the wheel out or in without deflating the tire.

Today's Raleigh cruiser was a good candidate for adjuster tuning on the brakes. It was a good candidate for a lot of other things, too, but the owner told us exactly what he wanted and was willing to pay. Whatever you say. I write a standard disclaimer on the repair form in those cases: No other work requested or performed. If something looks really deadly I'll note that, too.

Pretty-looking crap

The front derailleur on the cellist's bike suddenly stranded the chain on the big ring and refused to bring it back. It's a problem I've seen several times before with Shimano front derailleurs.

One end of the return spring is held by a tiny aluminum nub. After a while, the aluminum can't hold back the spring steel and simply wipes away. This usually happens when the rider has shifted the derailleur out as far as it will go, putting maximum strain on the return spring against its inadequate stop.

The Sora derailleur I just got to replace the cellist's broken Tiagra has just as tiny a bit of aluminum holding the return spring. It's pretty, but no better than the strength of its designed-in fatal flaw.

Usually I scavenge parts off a broken derailleur and throw the rest in the recycling. But I might try to bend the spring on this latest casualty to see if I can get it to bear on the thickest part of the arm. It could go forever like that. More likely the spring will snap. But there's nothing to lose. It's scrap metal as it stands.

An immaculately tailored tissue paper suit.

Based on my observation of the mechanical work that comes out of a shop in our region renowned for its bike fitting expertise, I'm starting to believe that the fit guys are like the body shop guys whose cars look stupendous, but run like crap.

Proper fit is important. Whether it is really the millimetric science that some of its practitioners would have us believe is debatable, but I certainly respect the technicians who have invested in equipment and training to be able to set up an athlete on a bicycle with enough precision and confidence to put that worry out of the athlete's mind. Make room for other concerns, like nutrition, training schedule and whether to start doping.

The thing about fitters is that they seem to care only about the position of the rider on the bike, not about the function of the bike itself. For instance, when one of them reconfigured a Surly Pacer I had set up for a customer who wanted a bad-weather version of her triathlon bike, he put a very steep-rise, short stem on it when converting it to the drop-bar road riding position from the aero-bar position I had set up to duplicate her tri bike exactly. I had even used the cast-off bar and stem from her tri bike. I'd made a finely-calculated effort to replicate her riding position and she had been pleased with the result. But then when she wanted to change the bike over to a different use she decided to use some shop credit at Fits R Us. I'm all about saving a buck, but damn. Fits R Us put on a stem that wrecks the handling of the bike. When I test rode it recently after some adjustments it was horribly squirrelly. It may put my friend in the perfect biomechanical position on a trainer, but it really stinks when actually riding.

I haven't told my friend because she doesn't mind it. But if I had been doing the fit I would have used a fork with a longer steerer so I could put the bars higher without using either a steep-rise stem or one of those ugly bolted-on stem risers.

At least the handling of this bike proves my theory about the effect of stem angle on bike handling. The connection points of rider to bike are not just points in space. The shape of the linkages matters.

The problem may not be fitters in general, it may be Fits R Us in particular. I have worked on bikes fitted by other practitioners, but in many cases the riders fall into a size range that requires no radical component choices.

A fitter will adapt a rider's bike to the human form without questioning the materials used in its construction, just as a tailor could fit you to an immaculately fitted tissue paper suit. It would be an ephemeral piece of rubbish, but you would look great in it while it lasted. When it comes to stupid design elements like 4 mm shift housing and head-tube cable stops, the fitters have nothing to say about it. Brifters that choke on a broken shift cable are fine with them, too. They'll make sure that the hard, narrow seat with carbon shell, titanium rails and a covering of endangered condor hide ($589.95 and free freight) is at the perfect height and angle. The carbon-fiber bar and stem, the 17-speed electronic shift controls and hydraulic brake levers will sit in the exact position for ultimate performance.

When faced with anyone who has developed Position Neurosis I send them to a professional fitter. I just don't have the showmanship to sound thoroughly convincing to a rider who needs the perfect combination of medical science and psychobabble to be able to put their fear of bad bike fit behind them. I'm glad someone is willing to exploit this population for profit help these poor people. It saves me a lot of time.