Almost too tired to stretch

Stretching used to be an effortless pleasure. You don't notice flexibility when you have it. Later, when you have to work to maintain it, the term stretching exercise takes on new significance.

When I get home from work I try to hit the floor as quickly as possible for the stretching routine so I don't cool off and stiffen up. The longer I wait, the harder it is. The stances for effective stretching take strength. Otherwise you might hurt yourself worse.

This week was more like the second part of a 12-day marathon because I went to Connecticut to a family gathering on my last days off. Driving through any built-up area of this country is stressful. Then sharing time with three generations of family members and assorted spouses isn't exactly restful. We're not wildly dysfunctional but we're philosophically diverse. The only activity we all share is argument. These are usually rational discourses, but each of us holds a kernel of principle we refuse to give up. So you go to the shell of that, bounce off and try to change the subject before things get heated.

My older brother and I went for a little ride. He brought his Trice. It comes apart in about five minutes to fit in the trunk of his car. Putting it back together takes a little longer.

I should have taken the Traveler's Check completely apart and reassembled in solidarity with him, but I hate to make work for myself.
We rode first to the CVS pharmacy in the village of Niantic, to get a card for my sister's birthday. Big bro' also was looking for batteries for a vintage Nikon he had received in partial payment for helping a friend move. He therefore spent considerable time examining the battery selection while I went back outside to our bikes.

A beautiful woman in a nice sundress and well-worn SPD cycling shoes pulled up on her Jamis cross bike. I took a picture of her bike. Taking a picture of her seemed needlessly intrusive.
From the CVS we went to Book Barn's downtown location. I could walk out of there with crates of stuff, but I restrain myself. I learn a lot just by looking at the books there. For instance, thriller writer Alistair Maclean wrote a non-fiction book about Captain Cook. I'd read several of Mr. Maclean's more exciting fictional offerings without ever knowing about this more scholarly side. I still don't, really, because I did not buy the Cook book.

The store provided some much-needed caffeine, because my parents have been brewing a largely decaffeinated blend for many years. That brought us near the front counter, where a large man named James kept us instructed and entertained for much longer than we'd planned to stay there.

"I know, I'm the image of the Comic Book Guy," he said, shifting his bulk on his seat behind the counter. "To make things worse, my previous job was in a record store." He did possess and share an encyclopedic store of knowledge about nearly any subject that came up. He had the acerbic delivery, too. It was not as supercilious as the more offensive Comic Book Guy specimens can be.

As I suspected when I first saw the Trice last year, people do mistake it for some kind of weird wheelchair. My brother reported that sometimes onlookers appear astonished when he is able to rise and walk after parking it. This might explain the remarkable amount of patience motorists seem to show, compared to an upright bike going the same speed, taking up less lane. Hey, whatever works. A woman outside the CVS said, "Nice chair!" when we pulled up. She did appear nonplussed when my brother stood up and explained what the vehicle really was.

I had a few hours when I got home to prepare for the work week ahead.

Summer brings urgent repairs. It brings impulse purchases of special-order bikes. These land on top of the pile of other repairs for which we have been given a few days or a week. Little things stand out, like the front hub on a Specialized Dolce women's road bike, with the wrench flats on the bearing cone completely blocked by the curvature of the domed dust cap in the hub shell. Ta daaa! Adjustable bearings that cannot be adjusted! Innovate or Die, you stupid bastards! The hub shell itself looks a lot like an Atom hub from the early 1970s, except that the Atom has flat dust shields so the bearings can actually be adjusted and locked in position. See how much we've learned since then?

I just get sick of working on poorly-thought-out, disposable componentry. You can really see the whole panorama from factory to scrap heap, one line on the graph, resources to junk, crossing the other line which represents people scrabbling for money they can burn buying this endless conveyor belt of doomed equipment.

On Thursday, the $12,000 Beater Bike came in for some gear adjustment. Its mixed road and mountain Shimano drive train requires a lot of fussing just to work pretty well.

I had just finished fine-tuning the shifting on a Ted Wojcik touring bike with Shimano XT. That demanded extremely precise cable tension. Just what you want: a finicky touring bike. Hey, I just fix 'em.

No sooner had the $12,000 Beater Bike left than a call came in from another avid rider who has been happily thrashing the Long Haul Trucker I built for him several years ago. He keeps about a 30-pound load on the racks all the time, probably so his touring load won't be a shock to his system. Putting the bike on the stand is like an Olympic weight lift. But he's a good guy. He let me build him a bike, wheels and all, and it's holding up to his heft and riding style. It's another fussy eater, though, because he insisted on brifters instead of barcons with his LX crank, XT derailleur and wide-range gearing.

Another guy came in on Sunday needing brake fluid for the hydraulic discs on his wife's mountain bike. We don't keep that stuff on hand because the technical mountain biking demographic largely died out in our area. If we saw more demand we'd invest in more supply. Meanwhile, mountain bike stuff has gotten too tweaky and expensive to allow us to fill up the shop with stuff we might or might not unload. Mountain biking started as a niche activity and the bike industry successfully turned it back into one. They were aided by the hard core of mountain bikers who eat that stuff up, but we're talking addicts here. Not everyone who tries a substance will get addicted. The hard-core addict keeps the pusher in business, but the expense and side effects naturally limit the size of the market. The pushers either have to be fellow users or, more likely, cynical exploiters of the users who take advantage of a location convenient to large groups of them.

Because the wrong fluid can damage the brakes, your hydraulic user needs to know what he's putting in his veins. I looked it up, but I couldn't hook him up. At least he left knowing what scrip to ask the next doc for.

"Dude, I need some DOT4! I'm crashing, man!"

I returned to the battered 1960s Raleigh 3-speed I was resuscitating. I just fix 'em.

Interesting Week

This week brought in a higher class of broken bike. Victims included a hill climb conversion on a Trek Madone 5-point-something-or-other and a Klein Carbon something with a frame actually made of aluminum. It's all a blur.

The Madone needed an entire drive train. Because the front derailleur mounts to a bracket at a fixed height, it hangs a couple of centimeters above the requested chain ring. On a test ride it miraculously did not toss the chain off the high side or the low side. That doesn't mean it won't, at a critical time.

The Klein turned out to have a crack in the frame where the brake housing exits near the seat tube. The bike has internally-routed cables. The crack originates in the dent made to accommodate the cable exit. It could have been there from the beginning. The bike lives in California. I had never needed to look into that particular part of its frame on any previous visits.

The $12,000 beater bike came in, chasing down some front derailleur issues left over from its overhaul last fall. I thought I'd cured it with an old Deore relic, but that wasn't holding up. I'd tried some offbeat cable routing to see if I could conquer the compatibility issues between Shimano road and mountain drive train components. The anchor point that gave the best shifting required wrists of steel when twisting the shift lever on that brifter. A new Tiagra derailleur seems to have taken care of all the problems. Maybe.

Shimano seems to be relegating 9-speed road componentry to middle- and low-end status. Ultegra 9-speed brifters are out of stock and discontinued at Quality. You can still get R600, which by price appears to be Ultegra level, but the trend is clear. Shimano has a way of punishing their regular customers. That attitude infected most of the bike industry in the 1990s.

Continuing the 9-speed theme, another customer dropped in with a bike we'd recently tuned for his son or son-in-law. This rider had no road experience. He was using step-in pedals for the first time. The release was cranked as tight as it would go. He shied away from passing traffic, went off the road and pile drove the shifters into the ditch. He's fine and the bike appeared relatively unhurt, but the right Ultegra 9-speed brifter had apparently taken too hard a shot along with too much sand. The owner of the bike wants the levers to match, so he ordered a complete lever set instead of just a replacement right unit.

More and more customers are listening a moment longer than they used to when I extol the virtues of friction-shifting barcons.

Vacationers bring their urgent deadlines. Today we did a bash-and-tweak on some wheels from bikes that were on the rack when the family SUV got rear-ended in a small pileup on Interstate 93. Let's hear it for disk brakes! The rims just have to be straight enough to fit through the frame. The wheels actually came out better than that. And bash and tweak is such a stress reliever. No one expects perfection, so swing away.

After a week of long days and hard commutes I feel like Indiana Jones when he shot that big guy with the two swords in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I have no finesse left. Just stay out of my way.

Seven or 666?

Still working on the $12,000 beater bike, I finally achieved smooth front shifting after four derailleurs and four bottom bracket configurations on top of the new chain rings and several shift cables. I started to think the bike was possessed.

The funniest part is the derailleur. What works? Not the modernest marvel I could order. No, what shifts cleanly is a Deore from about 1991. It matches up with that misapplied Ultegra brifter like it was born to do it. But is it worthy of a $12,000 bike? I put the question to the owner. He says he'll try it.

The new XT derailleur I was trying to install to replace the worn-out XTR would fray the shift cable every time I tightened the anchor bolt. I burned through five or six cables while trying different configurations. Remember, kids: bad design is not a manufacturing defect! No warranty for you!

Our parts bin now has an XT front derailleur and an XTR Octalink V1 bottom bracket (116.5) that we may never use. We'll probably place the derailleur, but who is going to need that BB?

I ordered the wide BB after I couldn't get the chain to drop to the granny with the old one, because the front derailleur was already folded up as tightly as it would go. Only moving the chain rings outward would put them under the dreailleur in that position. Since it's hard to find detailed dimensions on current componentry, let alone obsolete stuff, I didn't find out until the new BB arived that the axle only sticks beyond the end of the bearing cartridge as far as it does on the 109.5 mm Ultegra BB that was already in the bike.

The XTR unit came with spacers for different chain lines. Interestingly, neither chain line listed in the spec sheet that came with the BB matched what I measured on this bike, so I was on my own. The BB that finally worked was the original one with 1.5 or 2 mm of spacers behind the flange of the drive side of the bearing cartridge. The new one would have worked as well that way, but his left crank arm would have been dangling way off the left side, making the tread measurement of his bike much wider than before. Since Seven supposedly chooses every dimension of their bikes to match customer specifications, I didn't want to widen the stance of the pedals when it was supposedly carefully calculated. So we ate the new bottom bracket.

The bike has been picked up by the owner's staff, to await its rider's return in the spring. He's off to wherever he winters, whether that's the mercantile centers of Megalopolis or Utah ski country.

The $12,000 Beater Bike

A wealthy summer resident dropped off his Seven Odonata at the end of Labor Day weekend.

"Give it a complete overhaul and anything it needs," he said.

With all that titanium I worried that I might not be able blast some things loose. The bike is about ten years old, but he's never asked us to go further than a tuneup on it. I don't know what care it might have had at the owner's other homes, or if this is just his New Hampshire ride.

I found good news and bad news in the BB shell. Whoever assembled the bike had used enough anti-seize compound to keep it from welding itself in. That was good. When the first cup came out, about half a pint of water poured out of the frame behind it. That was bad. I would have thought so, anyway, but I have trouble understanding how it is to have immense wealth.

This bike isn't as abused as the Seven that came through our shop a couple of summers ago, with the stem held into the steerer tube entirely by corrosion, without even a bolt in place, but it clearly gets ridden as obliviously as any Schwinn Varsity. The steerer tube was rusted, but nothing had rusted solid. I haven't seen him ride in the rain, but maybe he has the staff hose the bike down when they're washing the extensive fleet of family cars.

The chain has worn halfway through the cage of the XTR front derailleur. The owner rides with headphones, so he wouldn't hear the chain rubbing. The damage has made shifting in the front almost impossible.

Strip away the enormous price tag and the image of the brand name, and it is just a bike. Within the owner's economic bracket it's a fairly minor purchase. In 1998 or'99 he probably paid about six or seven thousand for it. The $12,000 in the title refers to the upper end of the price range for Seven's current corresponding model, the ID8.

This bike is so old, XTR was eight-speed. The XTR drive train is controlled by Ultegra 9-speed brifters with no discernible extra click. It's a strange expensive mutt. I was able to track down a new set of chainrings. The front derailleur is giving me more trouble. I have not turned up a top-swing, bottom pull derailleur that will fit into the tight clearance between the rear tire and the seat tube. The carbon section of the tube feels less substantial than on full carbon bikes designed to accept a derailleur clamp. The original derailleur clamped the titanium section closer to the bottom bracket. On Monday I can call Seven to see what my options are.