Buttery smooth

 

Buttery smooth. Those words kept forming in my mind as I rode this bike on its shakedown, on the grueling and not altogether enjoyable Gilford run after dropping my car off for spring service. The route is tediously familiar, with its hills and its tight, narrow stretches shoulder to fender with drivers indifferent to your survival, but it's also peaceful and beautiful for quite long portions. And, being so familiar, it was a perfect proving ground to test out this bike.

I figured it would be great, because the frame is a version of  the Surly Cross Check. If I could only own one bike, it would be a Surly Cross Check. Agile on pavement, but sure-footed on dirt, built of reliable steel and configured so that it can be adapted to many options, it's not a bike to take out with the local hammerheads on a take-no-prisoners road ride, but it will definitely get you most places you want to go if there's a mapped public right of way to get there. I built my first one to make the dirt variations of my commuting route more pleasant. It has evolved into a practical beast, with generator lighting. In the process it became a little hefty. Surly bikes aren't for weight weenies anyway. Add a few pounds of practical accessories and the package bulks up even more. 

The Traveler's Check frame on which today's bike was built has S&S couplers so that the bike can be taken apart and fit into a checkable standard size piece of luggage. I bought it when I had delusions of traveling. The first build was kind of slapped together: hence that saddle. That thing came off the bike as soon as I got home. Blue Version 1 was a fixed gear, the simplest to take apart and reassemble in a train station or airline terminal for short hops around a destination city. But that never happened, and now it won't. So I had a frame ready to build up without some of the heavy add-ons that encumber my daily commuter, to recapture some of the comfortable nimbleness of the original 'Check.

Buttery smooth. The bike rode like an extension of my body. I shouldn't be surprised, since I had built it to the same dimensions as its older sibling, but I had set the bars a little higher by leaving the fork a little longer. I was looking ahead to its touring configuration, where I might want to sit up just a little more, to take in the scenery. Fortunately, it's not so high that it kills the handling. In fact, the stem attaches higher, but drops more than on the other bike, so the bar height nets out about the same.

The first thing I noticed was that the bike seemed twitchier. But twitchier soon settled down to "more responsive." The commuter has a heavy dynamo front wheel. The SRAM dyno hub wasn't the slickest on the market to begin with, and now it's probably pushing ten years old. If I could scrape up the coin for a Schmidt I would. A generator hub has some rolling resistance all the time from the magnets. This increases slightly when the lights are switched on. You get used to that, but notice the difference on a bike that doesn't have it. Hence the impression of twitchiness on the bike with the plain front hub.

I use the lights in daylight in certain situations to enhance visibility in a few intersections where the sight lines make it worthwhile. Not having them felt like a bit of a loss. I had blinky lights for front and rear, but I like being able to pair those up with a full-size, solid beam headlight to present a more vehicular impression as I bomb into a crossroads or shoot a stretch of town traffic where drivers like to pop out of parking lot exits when they don't think anyone who can hurt them is coming. So maybe I get a more aggressive battery light for the handlebars of Blue 2.0.

I feel my age. I'm in some kind of pain most of the time. That made the performance of Blue 2.0 all the more impressive. I felt pretty crappy, but still peppy because the geometry and setup of the bike supported me so well.

The gearing is mostly the same between the two bikes. On the commuter -- code named Green now -- I have 30-36-48 for chainrings and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette of 13-15-17-19-21-24-27-30. On Blue it's 28-36-48 in the front and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette with the same cogs from 13 to 24, leading up to a 28 and a 32. I anticipated riding with a touring load, which could still happen. So the mid-range cruising gears were the same. Shift points didn't change, cadence wasn't thrown off. I might re-gear Green a little bit, though maybe not exactly the same. The great thing about friction shifting and separate cogs is that you can really customize your gearing to your specific physical and riding conditions. This adaptability has been largely eliminated by the industry. Many technolemmings have never experienced it.

The car is taking longer than planned. I'm living without it for a couple of days. That's not as casual an undertaking as it was, but you do what you have to do. I wish I still believed in pain relievers. Today's ride is Green, the fully lighted commuter, because -- hopefully -- I'll be heading out on the hell run to Gilford after work, and the sun could be setting by the time I get to the garage to retrieve my motor vehicle.

Beautifully crafted, reliable mediocrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't sold a bike since 1992

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

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

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

Four millimeter shift housing is like deliberately constricting your tendons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surly goes electric. What EV.

Someone I know asked someone else I know what I thought about Surly’s new electrified version of the Big Dummy, called the Big Easy. I don't know why he didn't ask me directly. Anyway, it was the first I'd heard of it, because I don't pay much attention to industry news.

While I’m no fan of smokeless mopeds, I have previously acknowledged that electric assistance makes sense for a cargo vehicle. It brings all of the undesirable complexities of motors and batteries. It does alter the power to weight calculation by adding irreducible weight even when a dead battery or other malfunction negates the power assist. But it does increase load carrying capacity when it is working as intended.

I still assert that a smokeless moped is a motor vehicle with pedals, not a bike with an auxiliary motor. If a bike seemed heavy enough to tempt you to add a motor in the first place, the extra poundage of a battery and motor will definitely discourage you from pedaling without the assist. Once you accept that motor, you’ve stepped onto the same kind of production line that led from the earliest sailing ships with steam engines to the ones with vestigial masts and then no spars at all.

The quest for power warps everything it touches. The Telemark revival of the 1980s was an attempt to increase the versatility of touring skis by using a 19th Century technique to control traditional length skis in downhill maneuvers. Touring skis are long and skinny so that they move efficiently on flat to rolling terrain. Alpine skiing -- the dominant form today -- developed only in the 20th Century when skiing finally reached the Alps. The quest for downhill power and control took over the evolution of ski gear to create skis very poorly suited to anything else. Even the Telemark revival killed itself by turning Telemark skis and boots into just another downhill-only tool. Say what you will about alpine touring gear, trudging up and up with climbing skins for the sake of the downhill run, you would not want to use that stuff, or modern Telemark stuff, to go for a rambling bushwhack where you will encounter mixed climbing and descent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Telemark skiers were tackling the whole range of terrain on skis around 70mm wide, controlled with leather boots and very basic bindings. By the late 1990s, all of that gear was mutating rapidly into the alpinesque monsters of today. It's all a risk/benefit calculation. You can get seriously mangled with long, narrow skis and non-releasable bindings. But by eliminating one aspect of risk and increasing the power of the tool for one phase of operation, the other functions were seriously diminished or lost.

In bikes, every category illustrates how the quest for one kind of power diminishes the overall versatility of the type.

A cargo bike is already shaped by specific needs. You're not likely to hop on it to go for a ride on the local pump track, or a group ride with sporty friends. But it's an investment. And the more complicated the mechanism, the more support it will need over its lifespan.

By joining the electric parade, Surly has obligated itself to support a complex product that uses expensive components over which they have very little control. The motor assembly is made by Bosch. The frame is built around that specific unit. The weight of the vehicle demands powerful hydraulic brakes. You still wouldn't use it to take the family on a summer vacation to visit the major national parks. That leads to another interesting question: National parks arose at a time when personal mobility was about to increase rapidly. Land was set aside because of various natural attractions as people were developing more and more ability to go and see those attractions. If personal mobility dwindles because people realize that it is more environmentally responsible and affordable just to live where they live and keep most of their trips short, will the justification for the grand and wonderful places crumble, opening them to the destructive extraction of finite resources? This may seem like quite a leap, but the Big Easy lists for $5,000.00 USD. It's either a car replacement or a car supplement. Extrapolating a widespread shift to relatively short-range transportation devices leads to a scenario in which a highly developed public transportation system would have to pick up where the cars and SUVs had left off. Either that or the adamant non-pedalers are simply running us down with electric behemoths instead of fossil-fuel guzzlers.

Because the Big Easy is a Surly product, it is solidly built and as simply designed as possible. I still don't want one, because its vulnerabilities outweigh its benefits, same as all the smokeless mopeds. Any complex piece of equipment is only as good as its support. Can you get parts? Are they the parts that actually need replacing? Can you get in and out of the mechanism without destroying it? Can you get good instructions and diagrams? What sort of facilities will you need to perform maintenance and repairs? I got into bikes for transportation because I could do absolutely anything I needed to do in a one-room apartment. It's a lot easier to maintain a vehicle that you can lift with one hand than it is to work on one that requires a hoist or a hydraulic lift.

No one has stopped driving cars because they don't make parts for a Duesenberg anymore. The evolution of machinery has left many fossils behind. But the extinction events seem to come along more frequently these days, driven as much by the accounting department as anything else. Just buying a product forces you to bet on the health of the company and its future prospects. When a product includes critical assemblies from multiple companies, you're at risk from every one of them.

Stuff I like

Our customer building up a fleet of Surly bikes added a Troll to the lineup this summer. Building a Surly is always a welcome relief from the crustaceans of the Carboniferous Period. I could do it all day, every day, with a big smile. So whenever I get to, it's a treat.

What the customer has requested is a more formal and premeditated version of the commuter I built from my old mountain bike. The frame has all the Surly amenities for versatility, but the underlying concept is the same as my conversion.

Our customer is not a large man. He's a good match for a frame designed around 26-inch wheels. As a gentleman tourist, he appreciates the practicality of fenders.

The bikepacking movement has led to some intriguing options in handlebars. I might even try a set of these on my commuter. Maybe after the customer has had a chance to get the tires good and dirty I'll take the bike for a test cruise. The sweep of the bars puts the control setup definitely more in the touring than the sport category.

The color of the Troll reminds me of my first car. It looks sort of brown in some light, and a warm orange when the sun hits it.

For comparison, here's my knocked-together rig, built on an old Gary Fisher Aquila. There are thousands like it on the roads and trails.

For the bikepacking market, the Troll comes with ample braze-ons for accessory attachment. A conscientious assembly includes greasing the threads for all these accessory attachment points. A normal bike will have anywhere from two to maybe 6. The Troll has thirty. Eighteen of them are on the fork.

Here I am, playing a quick 18 holes after lunch:

The Troll has disc brakes, but Surly provides the posts for rim brakes if desired. With dual-cable levers, a rider could run both! And I would be really tempted to have mysterious little electrical connectors dangling off of any accessory bolts I wasn't using for something else.

This customer has only ridden drop-bar bikes. He has not developed techniques and reflexes for a bike based on the traditional mountain bike. In addition to the usual adjustments on a new bike, we'll have to do a little orientation. The sensations of powering and steering a bike in the dirt have become so automatic for me that I don't think about them. But I notice the difference. He'll catch on quickly. I do want to see how different the handling is with those swept bars. Particularly in quick, tight turns -- such as one must do when crossing the rails on the Cotton Valley Trail -- I wonder if the bike won't feel as nimble as mine.

People ride the CVT on all sorts of sluggish junk. I'm just fussy. And this customer does not live very near Wolfeboro, so he will do most of his trail riding on a path that does not have to dance around over active rail lines.

From Bike to Band Wagon: Fat Bikes are the width of fashion

As a small shop, the place where I toil is always trying to find a niche product that fits our expertise and cash flow. So I had been monitoring the development of the fat bike market in our area.

We're located in an outer province of what might be called Snow Country. We did a good business in the mountain bike boom and managed to survive without over-extending or humiliating ourselves. Our weekly mountain bike ride was known as moderately hot -- sporty but not ferocious. We did not follow mountain biking down its intensely technical and increasingly expensive path. But I did try to maintain a good relationship with Surly. We saw the Pugsley come onto the scene. It seemed like an amusing piece of overkill for our locale.

As cross-country ski seasons became more and more unreliable we reexamined the fat bike as a tool less dependent on snow cover. But as cross-country ski seasons became more unreliable our budget diminished.

Thank goodness the fat bike has gone from a subculture to a movement. We no longer need to regret missing the niche because the niche has blown open into a fad. You can get a fat bike from Bikes Direct to the Repair Shop.com for under $700. Specialized has peeled the Fat Boy name off its old BMX bike and slapped it on a production fat bike. Kona's playing. So is Trek. And that's where I quit looking, because I got the gist.

You can even get one from WalMart. It's only a single speed, but it's only $199!

Are fat bikes going to recreate the mountain bike boom? Don't bet on it. But the surge in popularity takes the pressure off the small shop because now we can have one or two of the beasts around without making a scary commitment to six or eight expensive behemoths. We can mix in a model from a vendor we're already showing rather than trying to do right by a small company that can't offer the same kind of terms. The small companies can maintain their exclusivity and stay the right size. This means Surly won't get blown out into a multinational conglomerate and have no use for the Cross Check anymore.

It will be interesting to see whether Big Bicycle will figure out how to bring fat bikes down to the lower price points they would need to offer to create a boom like the 1990s. When mountain bikes first rose they did it on a fairly broad front. Once the genre was accepted it used many conventional dimensions, so the industry had little trouble producing several generations of bikes before the rampant mutation set in. Not so the fat bike. It is a product of that mutation, an overstatement of the concept of wide tires and sturdy frames. It is a caricature suddenly appreciated as art. And it is art. But a huge boom will require an international roll-out not only of the bikes themselves but of the parts they need to keep them running. It has begun, but can it continue, with an average price over $1000 US on most basic models? Ignoring the Walgoose, that is. The Bikes Direct the Repair Shop $700 price is a limited sale, according to their website.

If I know the bike industry, they will start to get destructively competitive within a year. They always seem to assume ridership and battle each other for market share, oblivious to the way their technical shenanigans burn away participants. But all that lies ahead. For now, fat is beautiful and everyone proudly displays their ample spare tires.

Exotic cross-breeds and lovable mutts

When I started paying closer attention to bicycles in 1975 a bicycle was a means of personal expression. At least it seemed that way to me, because of the people around me when I got into it.

My older brother built his touring bike from a frame with the help of Diane, who lived in the neighborhood and went to the same high school I did. She had grown up in the family machine shop, so no piece of machinery was untouchable. In high school she could build a bike from all its separate components. In less than ten years after that she could build a bike starting with unconnected tubes and lugs.

Componentry came from an international buffet of enticing offerings, limited only by your budget and whatever nationalistic threading on your frame could not be changed. In the hands of Diane, even the paint job could acquire many custom details. She specialized for a while in painting frames to match the rider's favorite beer cans. When a proud mechanic at Dade Cycle got a Strawberry she dug out an old junker and painted it up as a Blueberry.

The notion of a bicycle as a collection of parts has stuck with me forever. Ideally the total will be greater than the sum of the parts, but everything was open to tweaking, regardless of your budget. A complete-gruppo bike looked boring. Okay, all Campy Record was nice, but we're talking the old days of Record, Nuovo Record and Super Record. Their stuff is nice now, but the exotic shifting systems and carbon fiber have added extra technological headaches to what used to be a simple process of buying something beautiful for the one you love.

It's hard to find that kind of individualistic quirkiness in a lot of commercial bike shops. The industry has invested a lot in making the machinery mysterious and astounding. Thirty speeds! Frame made out of resin-impregnated hummingbird eyelashes!

With boring regularity someone will look at a price tag and say, "for that kind of money, I want a MOTOR! Haw haw haw!"

Sadly, the product that intrigues consumers the most HAS a motor, as electric bicycles are hailed as the next big thing. That's right: the smokeless moped is luring some customers back to cycling after they'd given it up, or convincing them to try it for the first time because now you don't have to face the world alone. Your helpful electron friends are waiting to lend their power so you can zip along the bike path or lane without panting, sweating or a license.

Batteries weigh the same amount charged or flat. How about rocket-assist bikes? Oh wait, it's been done. But we haven't seen a production version yet. That will keep the drivers off your ass.

I've really digressed here. I started thinking about what I value about bikes and bicycling because I think a lot about what I would have in a shop of my own. Into this mix went the newest Surly offering, the 29-er Krampus. I thought about all the bikes I own and all the bikes I could own if I had the funds. And then with a sound like a needle being snatched off a record, which to my generation signifies the abrupt end of a thought or action, my minimalist side kicks in. Skrrrrrit! Hold it!

I know what bike I would have if I had one bike. I'd keep the Traveler's Check, built up with my commuting/light touring parts. But the human engine can be fitted to many vehicles. Each one of my bikes fills a niche. Each can be modified easily to conform to changing needs within that niche.  I have given up ultra-light weight and exotic materials with no regrets at all for the sake of appropriate weight and versatility. That's what I would sell. Rather than chase the fashions and ride the breaking wave of changing technology, I offer lasting value.

Hardly a recipe for riches. Perhaps not even a recipe for much business at all. We'll see if it ever gets tested. But the other day someone drove from Albany, NY, to buy a Surly Long Haul Trucker from me. No one has ever driven a distance like that to buy any other brand of bike. Maybe we just don't carry trendy enough shit. But I'll put my money on reliable bikes for practical riders. And I'll put practical riders on reliable bikes as long as I can get them to come here. Or to wherever I happen to be operating.

Fat

Fat. It's a winter thing. The bears eat like crazy in the summer and fall and squeeze into their dens to live on stored fat. Other wild creatures follow similar routines whether they are true hibernators or not. Humans hang around indoors, eating too much and moving around too little.

I salute the highly motivated individuals who take up indoor training classes. The winter bike commuters are another intrepid bunch.

Then there are fat bikes. I looked at the Surly Pugsley as an amusing curiosity when it first came out. Fine for the upper Midwest and Alaska, it seemed out of place on our steep, rocky, muddy terrain and often icy trails.

Over the years, a fat bike subculture developed. We started to get calls about them last winter. They started appearing in photos of winter events around the area. We decided to try selling some.

I won't get hooked. I have all the bikes I need. Yep. I can pass on this one.  I don't have a problem.

So far that remains true. But as we work on selling points they sound like downright practical ideas. For instance, winter mountain bikers have used the snow machine trails since the studded tire craze of the mid 1990s. But what about those times when the surface is soft? Studs don't matter and even a wide regular mountain bike tire sinks in. With warming winters, those conditions become more common.

The fat bike may be the thing that replaces or at least seriously supplements cross-country skiing in an era of warming winters. If you want to exercise outdoors and don't want to deal with winter road biking; if you want to commute in all weather like our visitor from Alton told us he does; if you want to move at a steadier, faster pace than a walk; if you want to take advantage of the network of snow machine trails at least as extensive as the public highways, the fat bike may be your choice.

A basic Pugsley costs more than a really good racing cross-country ski package, but not that much more. Of course it is a very different experience. The racing ski is like a road bike: light, fast and limited to firm, smooth trails. This is especially true of skating skis, which need a wide, smooth, firm trail to allow the freest use of the technique. In return, the skier experiences the swiftest form of cross-country skiing, provided conditions are right. When they're wrong it can be a tedious plod. So the fat bike has to compete with less expensive touring skis or snowshoes on price. But consider this: just as the cyclocross bike can take you on dirt with confidence and on pavement without feeling like a treadmill, the fat bike can roll on snow, sand, mud or rock. It is the mountain bike writ large, at least where the rubber meets the ground. Skis or snowshoes are just more weight on your pack when you leave the snow or the snow leaves you.

A used car can cost several thousand dollars. Think what an arsenal of bikes you could put together for that amount of money. Better used cars and new cars cost many thousands more. So it's reasonable to consider a fat bike for winter, fixed gear for wet, 'cross bike for general three-season transportation and maybe a road bike for zippy fun. You could achieve this with simple componentry and steel frames for less than $4,000. The more of your own work you can do, the less you pay to build and operate these bikes.

The economic argument suffers when you consider that most of us do keep a car around for many valid reasons. I can imagine Biketopia as well as the next person, but we don't really live there yet. So the purchase of a fat bike has to compete with many other expenses in people's lives. But I did not expect it to seem even remotely practical until I rode one.

The human engine can be fitted to many different machines. People generate electricity, power boats, and propel vehicles with two, three and four wheels. Adding one with cartoonishly large tires is a small stretch. What seemed like a goofy idea and a recreational diversion now seems more like a valid addition to pedal-powered capability.

Customers either love it or hate it. The vast majority of people who come in are astonished, but accept the explanation. An interesting minority will blurt out, "Why would anyone want to ride anything like that?" That's a direct quote from at least two, one of whom surprised me because he had never seemed like a closed-minded type. And it was instantaneous and visceral, like they couldn't stop themselves from spitting out their opinion on sight. The ones who don't like it seem almost offended that anyone even built it. Everyone else seems amused and somewhat intrigued.

It will be interesting to work with fat bikes for a while to see if they really work around here. A piece of equipment has to earn its keep with me. It may pay its way with purely psychic coin, but it has to qualify for its place. Since the late 1970s every bike I've added has had to meet that standard.

Packing on the pounds

My commuting bike has gotten heavier over the winter. As so often happens, the gains were gradual. Some were invisible.

Over the years I have added a tool or two to the emergency kit. I made cleat covers to carry in case I have a bad mechanical breakdown and have to walk a while, or need to go into the grocery store. Even in the bright months I was carrying a small headlight, a blinky tail light and some reflector leg bands. A mesh shopping bag and a plastic bag line the bottom of the rack pack, over top of the spare shift cable or two.

I resisted full fenders for years, but the comfort and cleanliness for both rider and bike make too much sense. They went on last fall.

The move to generator lighting added a measurable amount of weight and a minor amount of complexity. The sidewall generator wasn't too heavy, but mounting it was fiddly and marred the frame. The hub dynamo seems a little heavier than the sidewall unit, but the wiring is neater. With full-power lighting available I can probably ditch the little battery light. I might also switch back to my regular front wheel for the height of summer, disabling the generator light but reducing weight and resistance. It's a tough call. All the things I've added have turned my lean, mean, dirt-spattered exploring bike into a dreadnought of considerable capability.

Surly offers the Big Dummy cargo bike. All my modifications have turned my Cross Check into at least a Little Idiot.

Last Sunday I rode the first full commute of 2011. I didn't get to ride on the day we saw temperatures in the low 60s. As always, when we get a warm shot like that in March we get punished for weeks afterward. We keep getting little nuisance snowstorms that make a treacherous mess out of my commuting route. I'll defend my right of way with all the power of the law and my middle finger when conditions are even remotely reasonable, but sudden blinding snow laying down a slippery paste on a sometimes busy highway puts more than myself at risk. Then the icy rind left over, or the dry morning that leads to a wet or snowy afternoon further complicates the early season.

My bike and I are both avoiding the scale. April sneaks up on us under cover of the stubborn snow still piled around the house and covering the ground in the woods and our home clearing. It would be too easy to stay in the den, napping. It would be too easy to forget to do my taxes!

Sitting here writing it's also easy to be late to work. Oops.

Rational Cycles

How would one finance a company that offered simple platforms on the basic frame types and wheel sizes to knowledgeable shops where the technical staff could customize them for individual riders' needs?

Would it even be worth it?

In the olden days, the early 1990s, bike companies already offered too many models, but the models they offered were all based on simple and similar configurations.  Road bikes received little attention, but in the mountain and the emerging hybrid category you got a lighter, more precisely made version of the same basic bike as you went up in price point.  A rider could buy in at their chosen price level and have the shop fine-tune the setup from there.  It did not provide instant gratification, but a good shop could make a lot of changes quickly if the rider so desired.

Mountain biking rode the crest of its popularity right then.  It was a bike for the people in an inclusive culture far removed from the perceived snootiness of road riders or the obsessiveness of tri-geeks.  The mountain bike's simplicity and durability made it appealing.

Racing's warlike qualities brought down the inclusive culture along with the simplicity and affordability as hyper-competitive cyclists and sponsors formed a military-industrial complex with the bike industry to push the frontiers of engineering far away from the happy doofuses riding their fat-tired steeds on streets and trails like carefree children.

The industry will argue that the cheap mountain bike of today has many more features than the pig iron of 1990-'92. I have to agree, progress has been made.  But not every sweeping change has been real progress.

I digress, as usual.

To introduce a line of rational bikes, a business would need more buying power than a single shop can muster.  I've tried using Surly frames and bikes, as well as used frames and bikes as a basis for customization with only limited success.  Even with access to wholesale pricing on product, I can't glean enough margin to make a bigger play. Real custom bike customers are looking for more impressive products, as a rule.  The people who could benefit from the gradual enticement of an upgradable bike often can't get their heads around the initial investment.  Surly and similar offerings seem affordable to those of us who have been involved a while, but we're already hooked.

In Resort Town, our year-round cycling community is too small to support much of a shop anyway.  We have our knowledge and tools, but don't generate enough revenue to support a lot of inventory.  Using cross-country skiing as a winter line is just masochistic, given the way the winters and the ski industry have been treating Nordic.  High-zoot Nordic shops get sucked into stone grinding, but how many Nordic skiers really want to pay to have their bases surgically removed and then expensively rewaxed?  Drugs are the best analogy to that kind of commitment to speed, but drugs are more available, less weather dependent and, on the whole, less labor intensive.  That explains the larger number of drug addicts than performance-obsessed Nordic skiers.

Nordic is actually another sport with the fun technologized out of it.  It seemed so timeless and simple in the 1980s...a little wider ski, a little more rugged boot might make my exploring experience more fun.  What's this skating stuff? Hmmm. Wish the trails were wider and more uniformly smooth.

The bike industry has been groping for years for a product that will excite consumer interest as much as the mountain bike did.  We have production versions of all the variations shops used to configure for their customers, as well as motor-driven cycles in various guises for those who don't really want to pedal.  Maybe the thing to do instead is reinvent the mountain bike in its appealing simplicity with only a few genuine improvements, like better brakes, and a return to top-mount shifters.  Maybe all you have to do to get lightning to strike twice is put up the right lightning rod.

Enjoying a bike tour while it's still legal.

My 13-year-old nephew-in-law left today after a week up here at Camp Scavengewood. He's a great guest. He actually enjoys the quiet, at least for the week he's here. A second week might drive him over the brink.

This morning we took a 14-mile tour along the Ossipee River.

This was our first river stop, at the boat ramp on Route 153 by the Route 25 bridge. With all the rain, the river is as high as it is in the spring.

Next we rode to the Ossipee Lake Dam and hiked down the trail to the lower end of the island between the river channels coming from the two sections of the dam. I rode some of it, but it's really easy to bounce off a root and take a dive into the river from parts of the trail.
It's not totally clear from this picture, but a tall maple has either washed out from high water or blown down from thunderstorm winds. The leaves out in the river come from its submerged crown.

Surly in the wild

Cool heads prevail. This is near where I test the river every other week. Nephew-in-law tests it for coolness and wetness. Today was hot and sunny for a change.

It takes so long to get anywhere...

We had to stop along Route 25

For these

Before riding on to Route 153 by Ossipee River to get a pint of raspberries.

Back on 25, the cellist started laughing at a lighted warning sign that said "Crack Fill, Next Six Miles. Expect Minor Delays." Unfortunately, it was surprisingly hard to photograph in the bright summer afternoon.

Keep your shorts snugged up and your jersey pulled down.

My wife's got a nice-looking pair

Except for one or two details, the cellist's bikes on the Cross Check platform are complete. The red one is set up as a rainy-day fixed gear. The Traveler's Check has her multi-gear configuration. The Planet Bike Cascadia fenders will fit either bike in case we set up for a longer tour some time.

The fixed gear sports a 36-spoke rear wheel with flip-flop hub, awaiting a half link to set the chain so both sides are usable. I could have sworn I had a 3/32" half link in my stash. Can't find it now, though.

On the front is the 32-spoke wheel that came with her Cross Check Complete. I put the new 36-spoke front wheel I just built on the bike more likely to carry a load. I have to order some parts to make her a 36-spoke 9-speed rear. I couldn't believe QBP listed no 36-hole DT hubs. The only 36-hole rear hubs in any of three supplier catalogs I checked were Shimano. I'll have to choke down my objection to non-serviceable freehubs for the sake of a spokier wheel for loaded touring. What the hell is DT thinking? They had a 36 last year. I've put a Shi'no 105 on the list to order. I have a couple of days to search a little more.

Good Design is Intuitive

I was completely sold on those top-mount brake levers on the Cross Check in the first ten seconds this morning.

Going down my eroded dirt and gravel driveway, I wanted to slow down to check for approaching traffic before pulling out. Intuitively, I used the iterrupter lever on the front brake, as if I'd always had it. Perfect.

Later, in town, I rode in the multi-variable environment on Main Street with my hands on the top levers. I could see better than when I'm more extended on the hoods and I could stop instantly for darting pedestrians or other sudden intrusions.

Out on the road I could tell the levers were there, but never felt they interfered with any of my favorite cruising positions.

I would not slap them on any bike, but they're perfect for this one. Setting them wide the way I did leaves room for light and handlebar-bag brackets whenever I might add them. If I transfer the multi-gear setup to the Traveler's Check for a trip that might call for it everything will work just as well.

We interrupt this cable housing to bring you these levers

I'd been thinking about adding interrupter brake levers since I first saw them. Many times on the roughest dirt roads and technical trails I'd wished I had convenient brake levers when riding up and back on the tops of the bars. I've also wished for them when riding slowly, touring with slower riders. In both situations I want to sit up and look around.

Adding these will definitely limit my positions on the top of the bars. That had kept me from trying them. Overall, I hope they make this bike more versatile. I set them wider than the reinforced center section to add more light-mounting positions above the bar now that the levers and different cable routing take up space below it. I can easily fit four Planet Bike Beamers now. I could probably fit a fifth one under the bars on the right (bike right, not photo right). That's gettin' crazy.

Beatermania

Jim Ayyy got his rain bike this far before dragging it home for final touches. His hilly route discourages him from building a fixed-gear. Perhaps crunchy derailleurs and wet rim brakes will change his mind. He did look into various internally-geared hubs, but wanted to keep costs near nil. The snazzy yellow fenders represent the largest expenditure on this project so far. I believe everything else was salvaged. The frame was Arf's first fixed gear. He moved on, first to a Surly Steamroller, then to his own web design business.

Jim Ayyy says the setup is very uncomfortable. A Technomic stem and wider bars will push the investment higher, but it needs to be finished so we can go into a drought.

This thing has been frustrating me for months. Pulled from a trash pile in Arlington, VA, the basic carcass looked like a good starting point on which to build a trashmo commuter for my nephew. He doesn't have protected bike storage where he spends his summers, so a really nice bike would suffer needless exposure.

My older brother (Orang Basikal) salvaged the wreck and brought it to me with some parts. But then, one little hitch at a time, it got worse instead of better. The rear wheel is too bent for bash-and-tweak. The BB is corroded too solidly into the frame to come out. The Shimano Crank of Death replacement parts kit requires a new BB to fit the crank they send. Meanwhile, I haven't been able to find a crank that fits the spindle length in the current BB.

Used bike bandits conned my boss into selling a pile of junkers in the shop basement for cheap money at the end of winter, before I was back from our seasonal second location. A lot of raw material got away when that happened.

I just need to talk the nephew into riding a single speed, which I could knock together for him in jig time. Just not on this frame, because it has VD.

Variations on a Theme

My Blue, the commuting/traveling fixed gear, and the cellist's Blue, with her regular touring and exploring setup.

Getting the drop on Blue

After trying two arrangements with the time trial bars I really missed having the positions a drop bar offers. I had a set of 46 cm Salsa Bell Lap cyclocross bars left over from a project based on a Cross Check complete bike. The drops flare to a whopping 50 centimeters, which feels pretty weird, but the other proportions of the bar feel pretty good. The weird, wide drops aren't that bad. They actually ease some shoulder strain I get from holding my hands in perfect alignment with my more normal drop bars.

Open-face stems allow for experiments like this. The brake lever clamp is hinged. The whole change took minutes

One drawback to the drop bar: on every other drop bar bike I own I have regular road levers. In any urgent situation I reach automatically for the front brake. With the TT bar the whole setup was strange so I had no automatic response to a crisis. With the drop bar, but no road brake lever, I have been reaching to where the brake lever isn't. One way or another I will get trained out of that.

Two for the Road

The Traveler's Check

And an exploring bike for a friend

Knock Down, Drag Out

The cellist's Traveler's Check is finished. I need to get a picture of it for the records and to post here. So that's one knocked down.

A triathlete who trusts me to do her race prep has picked up her bike and paid for it. Two down.

The MTB I'm putting together for the Conservation Commission chairman is still on the stand. I hoped to deliver it after last night's meeting, but it is dragging out an extra day. That's because the previous two jobs also dragged out.

I need a BB and to build a wheel to get the cellist's fixed gear ready enough for her to use. She will have to swap the seat and post, and front wheel, from her TC to use the fixed gear built on her old Cross Check frame.

If I get wicked motivated I might build up the front wheel for her fixie, too. I brought home a couple of salvageable 36-hole used hubs. If one of them comes out feeling smooth enough after the overhaul, I can nab a fistful of spokes and throw it all together.

Once she picks a new saddle she'll have two complete bikes.

I just need to quit fooling around on the computer and get back to work.