Can you afford to have fun?

 A few years ago, as the local mountain bike organization -- to use the term loosely -- was getting more aggressive about building engineered trails, one of their spokespeople would say that developing the trails would attract "people with more disposable income." This spokesperson does competent work with a tractor and a chainsaw, but doesn't depend on them for his very survival. He has always seemed like someone who doesn't have to worry about his personal finances, if you know what I mean.

"Disposable income" is another way to sort people and sift out the undesirables. Whoever they are, they have failed to measure up as potential customers. That's the only yardstick that matters in the US economy.

Bicycles started out as luxury goods way back in the 19th century. Manufacturers were surprised at the volume of sales driven by working class customers who scraped together the coin to have a mode of transportation that extended their shoe-leather cruising range and didn't require oats, hay, water, and shelter, not to mention veterinary care and eventual body disposal. Someone who lived in a boarding house could probably find a place to shoehorn in a bicycle. And bikes were built to last back then, because manufacturers mostly didn't know any better than to make something as solid as they could, and build their reputation on quality rather than marketing. Disposable income wasn't an automatic weeding system.

Most of us would prefer not to ride an ordinary, with its tall wheel -- usually the front -- and tricky handling. Nor would we gravitate to an early model of safety bicycle, with its single fixed gear and substantial weight. But the vehicles evolved rapidly into lighter, more nimble machines still built to withstand the challenges of rough roads and long distances. From their beginning, they evolved from the simplest form, without even pedals, adding each level of complexity a bit at a time to preserve the durability of simplicity while improving comfort and handling. The best of them were relatively expensive, but standards changed slowly enough that a hobbyist or someone who merely appreciated the craftsmanship and ride quality could buy a high-end bike and ride it for decades.

As Wolfeboro shifts to summer mode, I scan the vehicles using our parking lot and the people getting out of them. The vast majority of cars parking in our lot at any time of year are not there for us, and seldom for any other business in the complex. They're poaching to go downtown. With the coming of the second home crowd and their guests, the value of some vehicles can exceed the value of my house.

Disposable income is here to visit. Biking draws a fraction of the participants it did in the 1990s. The seasonal residents and visitors bring with them fashionable bikes in road, gravel, and mountain categories. Sometimes they even bring them in. Overall I see fewer people than in the 1990s to the very early 2000s. When people come in and say the town is busy I want to ask them if they were in a coma from the mid 1980s through 1999. The crowds have definitely shrunk.

Mountain biking thrived because people wanted to ride away from the roads. It died because the industry pandered to the tech-obsessed stunt performer demographic and let prices get out of control. Riders might have had other reasons to cut back on their bike use as well. The transition was blurred by the surge in road riding that bridged the transition from the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st. The industry had to re-learn how to make enticing entry-level road bikes and fill in the mid range. But then riders discovered everything that had intimidated and discouraged them about riding on the roads, and the numbers flaked away.

Various forms of road bike hinted at the possibility of the gravel category. But once cycling broke up into very specific categories, prices had to creep higher because no one was making it up in volume.

A cyclist in any category will be disposing of a lot of income to play at all, multiplied by the number of different category bikes that rider chooses to use. Tubeless tires and DOT fluid hydraulic disc brakes use highly perishable fluids that can damage the systems in which they are supposed to work. Regular maintenance draws a certain amount of money. Or you could wait for the tires or brakes to fail completely and then pay to clean up the mess they've turned into. Or quit cycling at that point, or just buy a new bike. Hard to say where you'll get it or who will work on it by that time.

I asked AI whether working in a bike shop was a good job. It basically said "no." It mentioned the chronic low pay, seasonal work load, and the suicidally thin margins that shops have to live on. I asked it how much the tools would cost for a rider to work on their own bike and it gave me a range of $30 to $1,000. It had more details about specific options, if you want to get into fixing your specific suspension system for instance. You will also have to hope that you can get parts when you need them.

The disposable income crowd is a competitive club. You're welcome to try to keep up. If you can't, they won't miss you.

Riding in the wrong direction

First off, congratulations are due to Alice Lethbridge on breaking Beryl Burton's 1967 record for longest distance cycled in 12 hours. A 12-hour ride is a serious physical challenge.

On a social media comment thread, I took some serious jabs for pointing out that the carbon fiber spaceship Lethbridge rode is a far cry from Beryl's 1967 rig. Some riders got what I meant, but the modernists called me an "armchair cyclist" and a "bellend." While I do love British insults, the modernists and the worshippers of competitive achievement miss my point, as usual.

Maybe the problem is the way records themselves are recorded. We get a name, a date, and a distance or time. The format itself implies equivalence in all other factors. If that were true, then the entire aero bike segment of the industry is a giant scam. If it's not a scam, then the bike needs to be featured prominently as a huge contributing factor. Yes, it diminishes the athlete. Athletes accept diminishment all the time for the sake of technologies that will make a grueling task slightly easier. One would expect -- all athletes being equal -- that improved technology would make records fall at regular intervals. But Beryl's record stood for 50 years.

This:

 

Photo credit: Road cc.

took 50 years to beat this:

There have been plenty of intermediate steps in aerodynamic evolution. No rider in all that time managed to exceed the performance of the phenomenal Beryl Burton. That leads to another point: If records are the province of phenomenal people, what do they really mean for the rest of us? They indicate a high point attainable by the right person with the right training, and they give us something to say gee whiz about. But athletes will perform on whatever is available. I bet if you compared the relative prices of Beryl's bike and Alice's, Alice's would still be more expensive, even allowing for inflation. How does that trickle down to the majority of riders?

In automobiles, evolution led to vehicles that are lighter, faster, more fuel efficient (sometimes), flimsier, harder to work on, and basically disposable. Early cars were made to stand up to the abuse of the roads they had to use. Later, the makers still stuck to the old standard under which people built things to last. Only decades of consideration led to planned obsolescence and relentless marketing. I guess it makes sense, when an industrialist has invested in a factory to produce millions of units. You want to keep that line rolling.

Automobiles are very rewarding to the average consumer. You sit in a comfy seat. You control a powerful engine. You can have climate control, an entertainment center, and arrive at your destination smelling about as good as you did when you left home. We've been trained to expend thousands of dollars on our rolling couches, and designed a whole system of plumbing through which to flush ourselves at the best speed attainable by our mechanical conveyances. That speed is influenced by the number of other conveyances in a given pipeline, not just by terrain and weather.

Bicycle designers have taken up the idea that the bodywork should obscure everything else, because air drag is the ultimate enemy. Even in bikes not designed solely to race against the clock, as much as possible gets stuffed inside. Most riders don't do their own work. I've asked before, and still not answered, whether most riders who seem hard core and fully committed only do it for the ephemeral lifetimes of one or two of these modern crustaceans.

Conspicuous consumption is one of the great shames of industrial society. There's a serious parallel to income inequality in a recreational bike that costs thousands of dollars versus a sturdy, durable ride that can still offer a bit of sporty handling, but also carry a couple of panniers full of groceries.

This summer has brought me the whole range of the modern bike experience: chasing air bubbles out of hydraulic lines, seating tubeless tires, snaking cables through the unseen labyrinth of internal routing, and performing exorcism on some electronic shifters. Meanwhile, I hear the same thing all the time about actual riding in the real world: it's scary, it's hard, and a few hundred dollars seems like a lot of money to a lot of people.

The answer is not just swan-necked, step-through cruiser bikes and crushed stone paths. And it certainly isn't "categories." I have built myself several different bikes for different applications, but they all started from basic platforms. Got a chunky one for the roughest surfaces I considerable reasonable to ride. Built a fixed gear for wet and cold weather. Got a road bike for unencumbered sporty rides. Got a go-anywhere commuter/light touring rig. All steel, all simple, all readily maintainable. That's a lot of options, and I bet that all of them together cost less than one top-end bike in road, mountain, or time trial categories.

From the golden age of the rigid frame

Just before good quality friction-option top mount shifters disappeared in the beginning of the 1990s we were able to remove the under-bar shifters and saw off the shifter mounts to retrofit the old reliable shifters onto mountain bikes with butted chromoly frames, nice all-around frame geometry and cranks with the newly reinvented round chain rings.

The Rockhopper pictured above would have come with a rigid fork. Rockshox were still an after-market modification adopted first by aggressive riders who were beating on themselves and their equipment in the quest for speed on rough terrain. The $4,000 wonder bikes of today were not even science fiction back then. Riders rode bikes of steel over landscapes of natural stone and dirt and mud. Within a couple of years we would start to hear about the aerial mazes and jungle gyms in places like the Pacific Northwest, but for the moment we rode on what we found nearby, adapting our tires, riding style and expectations to local conditions.

These shifters will not be temperamental no matter how long they've been sitting around. I remember Maynard Hershon whining about primitive shifters in an essay just a couple of years after this bike was new. He was praising the new brifters Shimano had inflicted on the world as a step long overdue to bring bikes out of the 19th Century. I admit I do not long for downtube shifters on my road bike, but I've halted my evolution at barcons.

If this bike had every piece of technological puke the industry had available the refurbishment could cost another $50 or $100 to put on seven-speed compatible parts much cheesier than the original equipment. Seven speed is now below the sludge in the bottom of the barrel in the era of ten- and eleven-speed cassettes.

Check out the forged crank with individually replaceable chainrings. This on a bike that cost about $500. By mid-decade, Specialized was leading the way in cheapening once sought-after models like the Rockhopper to extract extra profit from customers who bought the latest version on the reputation of the earlier ones.

Not everything on this old beauty is pure gold. The original brakes represented an unfortunate mutation on the way to better cantilevers and even better linear pull brakes. When we put the suspension fork on, we replaced the front brake with a decent low-profile cantilever, but the rear set are original. And the brake levers themselves are still the old full-hand type, not the two-finger levers that came to prevail.

The one-inch steerer tube limits options for a new fork, but if someone wanted to return to a rigid fork I bet there are nice castoffs kicking around. The frame was built for a shorter fork than the Rockshox Indy it has now. All the good old chromoly forks can't have been melted down for paper clips already.

It's nice to see something come out of mothballs besides dead moths. New rubber, a couple of cables and a set of brake pads and this thing will be ready for fun.

Royale with Cheese

Cheesy brifters, that is.

The bike is an SE Royale 16. The parts on it are almost humorously generic.  The brifters say Shimano. The rear derailleur anounces it is a Sora.

The rims, crank, brakes and hubs say nothing. Even the tires have no eye catching labels.

The components seem pretty solid.  You could replace the cheap steel chainrings with aftermarket alloy. Put on real brake levers and some barcon shifters and you'd have a decent basic bike. But of course the bike industry assumes you cheap folks would rather have a crappy knock off of higher end shifters than something simpler and more reliable. The bike industry's secret fear is that consumers will be perfectly happy to buy reliable,  durable products that they can enjoy for many years.

I will confess I do not miss my downtube shifters. If I was racing I would want a precise and convenient shifting system.  When everyone had downtube shifters skills made the difference. Now that expensive technology has removed that particular aspect of competition, you need to buy into it. Then, thanks to industrial ADD and no small measure of avarice, you have to keep buying in even if your current gear still technically functions.  You don't take an old single action Colt revolver out to face a bunch of adversaries toting automatic weapons. In the movie you might win, but it would be a special occasion nonetheless.

Actually this whole post was an excuse to use the phrase, "Royale with cheese." Cultural mildew being what it is,  I always supply the words "with cheese" when I see or hear royale anyway.  It just cracks me up for some reason.