Big Dealerships take over bike retail

 As part of the bike industry's damage control response to the Covid-19 bike boom, major players like Specialized and Trek have cut loose dozens (at least) of small shops in what they consider minor market areas. At the same time, they have started offering online direct sales, and bought up larger independent retailers to establish concept shops for their own brand where population is more concentrated and disposable income theoretically more common.

In 2021 we managed to wrangle several Specialized ebikes for wealthy customers who ordered them fully prepaid in the fall of 2020. First the orders were delayed by the supply issues that racked every industry, but hit the bike business particularly hard. Then the Big S jacked the price on them even though they were fully paid at the original price, requiring the customer to fork out hundreds more dollars per bike. Then Specialized told us that they didn't think they could deliver the bikes, which would have required us to refund all that money. The full order arrived eventually, a bike at a time over months. We ordered electronic diagnostic equipment to communicate properly with the brains of these technological marvels. Then Specialized terminated our dealership, leaving the people who bought their bikes in good faith with no reliable product support. 

Schwinn used the dealership strategy to build and hold market share for decades. Capitalizing on the dealership concept accepted without question in automobile sales, Schwinn had its shops, where a customer could be assured that all the parts were "Schwinn Approved," and would definitely fit. They had their own size of 26X1 3/8-inch tire, so that a generic 26-inch wouldn't fit the rims on Schwinn bikes. Their shop manuals standardized procedures for their mechanics. The bikes were mostly notoriously heavy, but undeniably durable. The business model weathered competition in the 1970s bike boom, but fell apart in the mountain bike boom that followed, although a lot of that could have to do with mismanagement by the inheritors of the company, who considered the family fortune to be as indestructible as the bikes themselves.

In Concord, NH, Trek has gone into direct competition with one of its own established and popular dealers. Trek bought the Goodale's chain of shops and converted them to Trek concept shops. This included the Concord location. Sorry, S&W. You're just collateral damage.

To the bean counters, a shop network that only follows the money is a good thing. The accountants don't care if riders find themselves in a town or village many miles from an authorized service center and suddenly need a proprietary part, or "dealer-only" service on an electrical component. While I have no sympathy for riders who shackle themselves to proprietary parts and electrical components, I acknowledge that new riders don't think about those issues when they buy their great new bike. Even a lot of riders who have been doing this for years never thought to worry about the trend. The onus is on them for enabling and encouraging the bike industry to do this to us all. Only a few relentlessly annoying voices spoke out against it.

Interesting footnote: I found some ridiculously expensive rigid mountain bike forks on the QBP site the other day when I was looking for rigid 26-inch forks to retrofit customers' bikes that have cheap suspension. This indicates to me that a cult of rigid mountain bikes may be taking hold. While they still embrace the ridiculous drivetrains currently fashionable, the new converts to rigid bikes are seeking refuge from the ongoing costs of maintaining suspension, and the generally poor function and heftiness of cheap and mid-price suspension parts. By making some crazy expensive forks of space-age materials, the industry helps the convert to rigidity show the world that it's a step up, not a step back. See the price tag? For that kind of money, it's got to be good.

The big dealer concept is going to hurt Big Bicycle eventually, if not sooner. In the meantime, my advice is what it always was: buy simple, durable stuff whenever you can. Hold on for its eventual return. There may always be people who will pay too much to have a very limited and expensive experience like technical mountain biking, but I wonder how long that sort of indulgence will survive the kind of economic and social reckoning that is being forced on us by consumer society's willful neglect of the consequences of its appetites since the mid 20th Century.

The burden of ownership

Thinking more about why the bike industry needs to have more self respect, reasons for that all stem from the increasing complexity and technological vulnerability of the machines themselves. Bikes not only cost more to buy, they cost more to own. They require more vigilance from their owners. Owners can do their own inspection and maintenance or they can purchase it.

In 1979, when I emerged from years of schooling and started going to various jobs, I used a bicycle for transportation, to keep my overhead costs as low as possible. I became my own mechanic because I had access to good instruction and I could maintain my vehicle easily, even in a rented room or a small apartment. My expansion into racing was a matter of convenience. I owned a sporty bike and was riding a lot. Why not compete a little?

Competing a little soon answered that question. Racing can mess you up and destroy your bike. It's like taking the family station wagon to a "run what you brung" event and wrecking it because you're not as good in the corners as you thought you were. But in the case of bike racing you could end up unemployed for eight or ten weeks because you crumpled more than the bike.

Regardless of the odd mishap, it was very affordable to build a bike, and another bike, and another bike... I only went to a shop to buy parts, tools, and bike-specific clothing and shoes. Required maintenance was fairly quick and easy, even if I had to do a complete overhaul. I soon learned to do the overhauls in stages: hubs one week, bottom bracket another week...

Among the useful changes to componentry in the 1990s, Shimano (yes, that Shimano) provided sealed cartridge bottom brackets that you can basically ignore for years. Of course they've "improved" cranks and bottom brackets since then and made life more expensive and difficult, but you can still get the BB UN55 if you have ancient, contemptible square-taper cranks. If you're not such an animal that you can feel how much power you're losing because you don't have a big, hollow crank axle, you can still have hours of fun for a minimal investment.

Early adopters of the bicycle in the 1890s discovered this concept with the simple machines of the time. Up front cost was a bit steep, but ownership cost was quite low, as long as you didn't hit a pebble and get slammed into the gravel from high atop your wheel. Heck, even then a low-budget rider could crawl off and lick his wounds, healing like an animal, much as the uninsured do today in this great land of ours.

Even a simple bicycle can suffer damage beyond the ability of a home mechanic to repair. I've had several frame repairs done by my friend the torch wizard. Without her skills, I would have had to find someone locally or, more likely, have scrounged a frame and transferred parts to it. You'll find frame builders in surprising places, so it's worth asking around. Steel frames can be brought back from some pretty drastic looking damage. Expect to pay for that. Scrounging is generally cheaper.

Carbon frames can also be repaired. I still don't want to deal with carbon's idiosyncrasies, but at least it isn't the disposable material we were led to believe it was as it was emerging as the dominant choice in high performance bikes.

The more moving parts in a system, the more things there are to wear out. The more proprietary parts, the more you depend on a manufacturer to provide replacements. We don't have the after market parts network that automobiles have. You can't just nip down to the parts store and give them year, make and model.

The more complicated the bike and the more it depends on perfect precision, the harder it is for the home hobbyist to cut out the pros and save money by doing the work themselves. You will need to pay the repair shop and wait for them to get to it. Sometimes it's quick. Often it's not, especially during the season when everyone wants their bikes. For every sophisticated function that you gain, you lose independence. You lose accessibility. You lose the durability that simplicity brings.

Humanity voted with its wallet for this. Increased expense and complexity won the popularity contest. Everything costs more because most people were fine with it. You own it now. Can you afford it?

Some swords make lousy plowshares

Early in the pandemic response in this country, transportation cycling has been held up as an emerging alternative in areas where public transportation was shutting down or scaling back. Since so many news sources are paywalled, I am not including links to footnote my assertions. Considering that gas pump handles have been rated as grossly infectious as the Broad Street community water pump that caused a cholera outbreak in London in 1854, you might want to consider cutting back on trips by car just to reduce your visits to the gas station.

In some places, people are being encouraged to go outside and get sunshine and healthful exercise away from crowds and indoor facilities like gyms and fitness clubs. In other places, the social distancing mandate amounts to virtual house arrest. This complicates your decision to bike or not. Check your local jurisdiction.

Here in New Hampshire, we actually have idiots suing the state because of the ban on large gatherings. Fortunately, the kind of people who would do that are the kind of people I routinely avoid anyway. One can only hope that they fester in their own Petri dish and leave the rest of us alone. Their suit has been dismissed by a Superior Court judge. No word on whether they will push it further. When they filed suit, the number of confirmed cases was 44, with no deaths. They cited this as a reason to carry on as usual, because so many other people had outright died of causes we consider routine, like car crashes, and influenza. Now confirmed cases stand at 78, still with no fatalities. But the day is young. Meanwhile, we are still free to ride or walk recreationally as well as for transportation.

Thinking apocalyptically, like the bullet-hoarders and panic-buyers of guns, I look at the bikes currently in vogue for their usefulness in the event of complete societal collapse. How easy would it be to rack this thing up and use it as your trusty mount through the savage landscape of a ravaged world? How long would it last without access to fresh hydraulic fluid, tire sealant, shock oil, and tinfoil chains?

Early mountain bikes were based on actual bicycles. They evoked the early geometry of safety bicycles from back when few roads were paved. They used the most widely available tire size in the world (26Xdecimal -- eg:1.75, 1.95, 2.1). This is different from 26 fractional (1 3/8, etc.). Until the explosion of suspension technology, the format remained the same even as the frame geometry tightened up to suit a sportier style of riding. Designers discovered that they didn't really need hugely long chainstays and super laid back head angles, although slack head angles have returned in the current era of motorcycle-based designs and long-travel forks.

Any mechanical transportation will eventually die out unless support industries manage to survive or reconstitute themselves. Even a chain for 6-7-8 speed wears out eventually. I wonder how long massively heavy one-inch block chains used to last? That was also before the age of derailleurs. As vigorously as I resist the over-engineered modern marvels of today, I don't pine for some 90-pound wrought iron monster fixed gear to tool around on. But that brings us to the rubber problem.

Early bikes used solid tires. Really early boneshakers used what were basically wagon wheels, with iron bands around a wooden wheel with solid spokes. Real sketchy cornering traction with those bad daddies, but of course no worries about flats. The next big innovation was solid rubber. High wheel "ordinaries" used that. As a friend of mine who rides such things observed, "we laugh at broken glass, but we're all in a dead panic when a squirrel runs out in the road." Hitting a darting rodent can launch a rider on a tall wheel into the dreaded header, a face plant from six feet up.

Scaling back to a partial apocalypse, or simply adopting the income of your ever more numerous working poor, you will be best served by a simple bike with a rigid frame and fork. This is by far the easiest to maintain, providing the most value for the dollar. A cargo bike might be nice for the big loads, but a trailer serves for the temporary need, and you can leave it home for more nimble cruising. Even a good set of racks and some panniers can increase your load carrying capability, as long as your bike will accept them. Anything too sport-oriented will not have the clearances and eyelets for solid rack mounting and stability with a light to moderate load.

Electric bikes will be tempting. They certainly have a place if everything doesn't fall apart. But in a real post-apocalyptic scenario your ebike is only as good as your charging capability. Since solar panels wear out and wind turbine blades fatigue and have to be retired, even "green energy" will become scarce. You really need to plan on muscle power alone. And various equines who might become more common again. But the rise of the bike in the late 19th Century gave people who couldn't afford to feed and house a large animal the chance to extend their cruising radius for little or no money after the initial purchase.

My own fleet has been selected with versatility in mind. While my early mountain bike acquisitions reflected the state of the art circa 1990-91, the bike I built around 1995-'96 already declined aluminum in favor of chromoly, and had a rigid fork because suspension forks were changing rapidly, and were still heavy and wobbly, even at the high end of the price range. The constant change makes any super-technical bike a poor long-term investment. But any manufactured item is only as good as the availability of parts. The industry can kill its ancestors and favor its short-lived children simply by stopping production of anything that fits the old stuff. Ultimately we will all be walking, and making shoes out of whatever we can find.

E-bikes and the illusion of something for nothing

A recent convert to the smokeless moped posted this graphic showing their growth in Europe.

It's from this article on a site called Explain That Stuff.

Electric bicycles entice the consumer with the lure of smokeless, relatively silent assistance when the going gets tough. When the flesh is weak, your personal assistant will kick in to carry you through.

A tandem weighs less and provides the chance for pleasant conversation. But a second person does weigh more than a battery pack, and doubles the chances of farts. And maybe the conversation grows wearisome.

An under-performing stoker and a dead battery both still weigh the same as their energized counterparts, but you can ditch the stoker at a coffee stop and try to recruit fresh talent. I suppose you could also scrounge up a fresh battery somewhere. As the smokeless moped expands to become a common appliance, facilities might offer battery swaps along popular routes. Maybe they do already. But with the rate of obsolescence in new technology, what are the odds that such a service could remain current -- so to speak -- with all the proliferating options? You may be stuck with the dead hulk of your 60-pound slug of a bike, even when you're left alone to do all the work.

I wonder if anyone has collected statistics on how many dead ebikes have already ended up chucked in canals.

The ebike relies on the illusion of something for nothing. But aside from the up front cost of purchase and the ongoing cost of charging, you face maintenance and repair of its electrical parts, and eventual decommissioning of the dead battery. You also have to horse the thing around when you're not riding it: transporting it to riding venues if you drive to ride, lugging it in and out of wherever you store it...

As you use your magic moped, you rapidly deplete its reserves of pixie dust. Energy has to go into the equation in the form of your pedaling and the all-important battery charging. Pedal-assist devotees point out that they can choose how much assistance to request, and extend their cruising range. It is still more finite than the muscle power of an acclimated rider. I don't say trained, because that carries connotations of athleticism and competition that many riders pride themselves on avoiding. But anyone who rides frequently is trained. Strength, power, and efficiency all improve with use.

The smokeless moped requires an extra type of training to learn how to interact with the power assistance. To get that go when you want it, you have to use a setting that produces a very noticeable result when you push hard on the pedals. The rider learns quickly how to feather the power to avoid wobbling -- or even getting thrown -- but it does take at least a minimal period of adaptation. My own experience comes from test riding a variety of specimens brought in for repair, and from observing new owners, or novice riders on borrowed equipment.

The bike shapes the rider. You learn how to get along with your equipment. Happy moped riders fall into the comfort zone of the machinery. I suppose someone, somewhere, has tried electric bikes and rejected them. And others push the limits of the medium and lead the charge for expanded capability. (see what I did there? I'm on fire today! Oh wait, that's just the battery overheating...).

Joking aside, compare the cost and benefit of a heavy bike dependent on outside power to make it functional versus your primitive old push bike powered by meat alone. My rationale for transportation cycling, from back in the late 1970s, still applies. I will be eating anyway. I do need physical activity to maintain my body's fitness and health. I will have a basic metabolism even at idle. The energy in my body already can be applied through the supremely efficient bicycle to move my individual self to a lot of places I need or want to go. The up front cost is the bicycle itself, and an evolved set of accessories. Most of those cost nothing to own after the initial purchase. Some are consumable at varying rates. Clothing wears out. Bike parts wear out. But by learning to use tools, and sticking to open source componentry I can maintain a bike almost indefinitely. Frames and parts can be combined in different ways to produce desired riding effects. Pump up the tires. Lube the chain. Go.

Your body is the battery. Your body is the engine. Your body is the beneficiary.

The smokeless moped does have a place in the transportation mix. As an urban commuter it offers partial exercise benefits to riders who can't get sweaty on their way to a job that might require them to look spiffy as soon as they hit the deck there. The energy required to charge them is certainly less than the amount consumed by a full-size car or truck transporting a single occupant. Electric assistance is also good for anyone weakened by age, injury, or illness. But stop calling it a bicycle with a motor when it is really more of a motor vehicle with pedals. The motorized aspect is so embedded in its nature that it can't be separated.

The motor of this specimen drives the chain from the pulling end. This avoids the problem of 20-pound wheels with a motor in the hub, and heavy electric lines that have to be detached every time you need to fix a flat, but it also gives the bike a complicated gear box and does little to reduce the chronic weight problem that afflicts all battery-powered vehicles.

Electric bikes have spawned a whole segment of componentry to meet their specific needs for tires and other parts that can stand up to their weight and the increased wear as a result of power assistance. This is better for the breed than early models that used standard bike components, but it increases yet again the number of products a shop needs to carry to be ready to serve all potential customer needs. Even if shops practice "on-time ordering" someone has to have the crap in stock.

Open source componentry means that a rider can live off the land more easily. The recent Ars Technica article cited in an earlier post sneered at rim brakes and praised disc brakes, but I can find a functional set of rim brake pads almost anywhere.  Even in a local setting, can your local service source get the parts you need for your specific vehicle? How long will it take? I'll be in and out of the shop with a set of brake pads or a chain, or a chainring, or a crank arm, or tires and tubes, or pretty much anything in about five minutes. Installation takes longer, but acquisition is a snap.

My commuting costs when I lived in a town were under $100 a year. They were probably well under $100 a year. And I didn't have to remember to plug my bike in. Even in a rural area, riding a minimum of about 30 miles commuting per day, I only have to keep up with tires, chains, and some chain lube. Because I might choose to ride more than the basic distance, I use up consumable items more quickly. But the rate of consumption is still really low unless you're racing, with its risk of crash damage, or mountain biking, for the same reasons. The harder you ride, the faster you wear everything out, including yourself. Find a balance that suits your personality.

The smokeless moped rider will not notice paying much more on a day to day basis, but the up front cost tends to be higher, and the replacement cost will mount. Given the way electronic things go, replacement will also be more frequent. Batteries die of neglect just as much as from frequent recharging. The more complex the vehicle, the more delicate are its storage needs.

Something for nothing turns out to be more costly than you think.

Race horse vs. war horse

I could have said pack horse, but I get a feeling of going into battle when I set out on the commute. I know we're not supposed to say that it's a war out there, but a cyclist on the road never knows when hostilities might break out. It's true in motor vehicles, too, but people on bikes feel their exposure more. That sense of exposure to physical harm is probably the biggest deterrent to riding.

I used to ride my road bike to work most of the time. At one time, it was a state of the art racing machine. The state of the art has moved on, but that road bike remains the lightest, swiftest machine in my little fleet. Once in a while I still pump up the tires and take it for a cruise. For the daily grind, however, I mount the sturdy Percheron, mentally armed, if not physically. The lightweight thoroughbred can only try to outrun or outmaneuver anything that threatens us. Darkness falls, we might have a couple of little battery lights if I remembered to bring them. Rain comes down, we get soaked. In cleated shoes, I can't do much walking. On dirt roads, I can get through on the road bike, but it's not at its best. If I modified it to meet more of these challenges, it would no longer be the racy cruiser, and it still wouldn't have the geometry and ruggedness to stand up to long slogs off the pavement, and skirmishes with armored cavalry.

The bike always loses when battle is seriously joined. The metaphor is just that: a state of mental preparedness. The war horse is heavy, slower than the racer, but built to take more of a beating in the feints, retreats, and evasions that make up an average commuting day. Slow to climb, slow to accelerate, it's still pure rolling hell on a downhill with a tailwind. I could ride through a brick wall.

The racer types are on a different trip. Sure, we have our skirmishes when we're riding the fast bike, singly or in a group, but it feels different when you're riding in rush hour -- or whatever passes for it where you live -- than on an elective ride on high performance equipment. The point of commuting and transportational cycling is to get from place to place, on a schedule. The point of recreational riding is to ride.

I've considered changing a few things to make the old racing bike more practical. Interrupter brake levers would be the first thing. They might end up being the only thing. They would improve my riding position for the dirt part of my commute, and in traffic. The lighter bike would certainly improve my average speeds on nice days. I just have to let go of the last vestiges of the racer that I never really was anyway.

Muscle memory matters, too. Because I ride most of the time on a bike set up a certain way, my reflexes are shaped to that. I catch myself reaching for brake levers that aren't there when I'm on the road bike, or test riding repaired bikes that don't have them. I quickly readjust, but if I'm going to do basically the same type of ride day after day, any bike should be configured to it.

The race horse becomes a light cavalry mount. Interrupter levers would make it easier to control the beast while swinging a saber.

The Age of the Guidebook

Part of mountain biking's evolution can be seen in how riding venues are found and promoted.

The 1990s was the Age of the Guidebook. Local riders with the ambition and the resources would produce a guide to the trails they knew, to help visiting riders find them. We discovered the trails and explored them the way explorers have always done, and produced various artifacts on paper to pass the information along.

Guidebook writers face numerous challenges, especially when a route sprawls across miles and spans more than one USGS map. In the forests of New England, landmarks may be scarce. Not every rider used a cycle computer, so mileage increments might not help. Access to the land wasn't always guaranteed. Some rides were open to locals and riders in the company of locals, but the landowner wouldn't appreciate seeing the trail featured in a public ride guide.

At the point in the early 21st Century when mountain biking died back considerably around here, the internet was still a limited resource. By the time we started to notice much demand -- or even just curiosity -- about mountain bikes again, paper maps had all but disappeared, and the internet was bulging with sites devoted to every aspect of cycling.

Cycling has developed a serious web dependency. More on that later.

For practical reasons, I gave up mountain biking around the turn of the century. The Surly Cross Check I built seemed like the perfect bike to explore public rights of way, whether paved or unpaved, without having to worry about landowner permission or trail conditions. I was inventing "gravel riding" without realizing it. It was just "riding" in the peculiar conditions of this area. Lines on the map might not still be maintained roads, but if they were on the map there had been a road at one time. In most cases, enough was left of it to let me get through. Only rarely would a road be so deteriorated that I would hesitate to use it again if I wanted to go that way.

With the resurgence of mountain bike interest, we've seen not only how the mechanical technology has changed, but how trail information has also changed. Because mountain biking has been domesticated fully or partly depending on your region, trail systems are largely purpose-built on preserved land. They're easy to map and easy to promote. Since mountain bikers are largely a drive-to-the-ride crowd, the only difference between them and any other bike path user is the type of terrain they want to encounter on the trails. The all-terrain bicycle is really a limited terrain bicycle, unless you want to expend a lot of personal miles per calorie to chug along on smooth roads on one of those beasts.

Applying the destination resort concept to mountain biking makes it easier to exploit as a purely consumer activity. Some people go to golf resorts. Some people go to lakes or seaside resorts. The mountain biking consumer goes to areas with a known and well documented concentration of riding.

When mountain biking first seized the public fancy in the latter half of the 1980s, it represented freedom and mobility. Rightly or wrongly, the public viewed the mountain bike as the perfect vehicle to ride anywhere, the pedaled equivalent of the SUV. This point of view survived into the 1990s, until the bike designers took it away by focusing on rough terrain capability at the expense of everything else. Given that focus, you no longer have a bike that anyone wants to spend much time pedaling around in search of their favorite terrain. You want to go straight to the good stuff. Choose your favorite search engine, find a venue, load the bikes on your car or truck, and go.

There is no cycling anymore

I heard a rumor today that a bike shop in a nearby town, known to specialize in mountain bikes, was planning to relocate to Wolfeboro. The owner of our shop is wondering how that will affect us.

Back in the 1990s, we withstood the attack of relentlessly undercutting competitors. That was when I noticed that competition is not really good for consumers, as we had been taught to believe. Competition weakened all the competitors, so that customers had less selection and less competent help. Our shop survived by preserving margins and performing top quality service. It didn’t hurt that we had a couple of mechanics who were smart enough to figure out how to work on the avalanche of new componentry, but dumb enough to keep trying to live on bike mechanic wages. The riding public in Wolfeboro was very well served in that time, especially when the biggest undercutter put itself out of business, and freed us up to stock more goodies.

At the time, there were mountain bikers and there were roadies, but they weren’t quite poles apart yet. Cross-country mountain bike racers were training on road bikes for aerobic fitness. But the subculture continued to evolve. The industry, fully committed to the drug dealer model of consumer marketing, kept spawning new categories to narrow the segments of the market and deepen the bite that could be taken from each addict’s wallet.

Around the time our latest looming competitor opened up in the next town to the south, the mountain biking subculture had already dismissed us as outsiders. Without even dropping by to see if we could be brought up to speed, our few remaining mountain bike customers went to the new guy.

I’ll admit outright that I had lost interest in mountain biking. None of the new equipment entices me to reconsider. The category concept really crushes small shops, even from the service angle, because customers tend not to trust someone they don’t see participating in their subculture. Also, our own sense of the componentry suffers from our inability to use all of it. Our slogan in the ‘90s was, “We really ride.” Road or mountain, we had put in the hours. Now, with every division a specialty of its own, a small shop faces an insurmountable challenge. You have to choose a specialty.

Sensing this well over a decade ago, I suggested that we stake out the practical tourist and exploratory rider demographic, as well as keeping a stock of path bikes and kid stuff for the casual recreationists and moderate fitness riders. Upper management did not commit to the concept. So here we are.

Word is, the competitor is not hurting for money. It always makes things harder when you’re fighting for your life against someone who is in the game just for a hobby. It’s yet another kick in the nards for the mythical “free market.”

All this takes place at a time when bikes are still being treated as toys and banished to segregated playgrounds. Cycling has not heeded the advice to join or die. Within the ranks of all pedalers, each subculture makes its own separate treaties with government and public opinion. Each pulls separately on the funds and expertise of any business trying to continue in the industry.

Your Personal Relationship with Cog

The departure of winter weather has brought in the first bike repair of the season.

New England has always had five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and "none of the above," but now they're more jumbled up than ever. We're definitely in none of the above right now. It can get as warm as it likes, and we still won't see growing plants for another month and a half. Still, if we don't get appreciable snow in that time, more cyclists will emerge. Or we could get slammed. Water-soaked ground won't refreeze, so a bunch of snow won't reinvigorate winter fun.

Of course this first patient is a dedicated roadie.  He told me he took this bike out for 53 miles a couple of days ago. That right there is a dedicated roadie thing to say. We know how far we went. It's not an approximate 50-55. It's fifty-three. Sometimes it's 53.7 or 52.89.

He told the tech who checked the bike in that the bottom bracket is noisy. Also, as a rider who has experienced fraying shift cables inside a brifter, he wanted those checked as well.

The bottom bracket is fine. He's just ridden the bearings out of his plastic-bodied Look Keo pedals. And his chain was worn out.

How do you know if the chain on your road bike is worn out? Answer a couple of simple questions:

Does your bike have 10 or more cogs in the rear gear set?

Has it been a month since your last new chain?

If you answered yes to those, you need a chain.

The cable for the right shifter had started to break, so I replaced that. The cable for the left shifter had a weird little kink in it, close to the swaged end inside the brifter, so I changed that one, too. We should be good to go, right?

When I ran the bike through the gears, I had to dial in a little more cable tension to get it to carry the chain up cog hill to the lowest gear. This is normal. I'd had the housings out, and they had to reseat. I started shifting back down to the high gears. First click: one cog. Second click: four cogs. Third click: chain chatter and finally a shift. The chain moved reluctantly the rest of the way.

Sometimes the cable has gotten hung up somewhere so it didn't get proper tension. I disconnected it,  checked the lead, and hooked it back up. No improvement. I popped the housings out of their stops to confirm that linear wires weren't pushing through any of the ferrules. With the derailleur disconnected, I held the cable while operating the shifter. The ratchet was definitely releasing too much on a couple of those intermediate clicks.

I flooded the brifter with spray lube and let it sit overnight. This morning it might have been slightly better on the first run through, but not on the second or third or any that followed. I doused it a couple more times. You can't do much else to Shimano brifters.

The maddening part is that he had no complaints about the shifting when he brought the bike in. I didn't do anything to it. You can't really. You might graunch on a shift really hard and jam the unit, but that's more common with certain front shifters than with rear ones.

Earwax -- the congealed factory lube that creates the illusion that a shifter is worn out -- will affect the shifting up and down. Clicks disappear. The lever just whiffs, catching nothing. That isn't the case with this unit. The ratchet engages too positively, and dumps several positions at once before the pawls click into place. I've seen it on other Shimano-equipped bikes. But why did I have to be standing there when it decided to happen to this one?

Because the rider has had more than one frayed cable since he bought the bike, there could be one or more tiny fragments of old wire that have finally migrated into position to jam things up. Or some hair-fine spring or little ratchet tooth could have broken off. The bike dates back to about 2012. In modern bike years, that makes it an old piece of junk.

Sophisticated mechanisms stand between you and your personal experience of riding. Mysterious, unfixable controls make shifting easier until they make it impossible. They act as intermediaries in your personal relationship with cogs. As with so many human complexities, we could choose to refuse, but the majority simply accepts that this is advanced, improved technology. The sleek, the expensive, the excruciatingly engineered, they're here to help us. It's part of the price you pay.

I imagine that riders said grumpy things about the newfangled derailleurs in all their wacky permutations as that technology was emerging. The thing is, all that stuff was outside the bike. There were internally geared hubs. There were hidden mysteries. But anything could be opened with the right tools. Someone could fix it. You yourself might learn. It's not brain surgery. It would deepen your personal experience, if you chose. And most minor malfunctions, such as they were, could be treated by the roadside. Minor. I said minor.

As soon as you have to pay someone to fix your stuff, you have to pay that person enough to stay alive and available. There have been bike shops for years, and those shops have had mechanics. But on simpler machinery, a mechanic could handle more jobs in less time for less money per job, compared to now, when the parts themselves take a good chunk out of the wallet, and the technician might have to deal with internal cable routing, hydraulics, exotic materials, electronics, a new tire size every year, and still shovel through a pile of box-store bikes and path cruisers to clear the repair docket. Parts are more and more expensive for shops to stock. Mechanics need to be smart enough to figure out all the different machinery, dumb enough to work for bike mechanic money, and loyal -- or trapped -- enough to stick around.

The simpler your bike is, the more you can do for yourself, and the less will go wrong in the first place. The friction shifters on my bikes will handle eight or nine speeds. I might even be able to swing ten, but I refuse to start using tinfoil chains. The index-dependent systems lock you into a manufacturer's offerings. Ten speed used to be top shelf. Now it's lower middle class. Parts are wearing out? Buy a new bike. You know you want to.

I can't do it. Forget the money. If I'd scored bestselling novel with movie rights money, I still couldn't do it. It's wasteful and it's enslavement. The personal is political. The personal is commercial. The personal is downright industrial. But you can still limit the intrusion to preserve as much of your direct relationship with the world as possible. The bike was a perfect machine for transforming human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too, if you're really adept on your fixed-gear. Multiple speeds increased its versatility without terribly degrading its essential simplicity. Only when innovators turned it into a semi-automatic weapon did things start to go wrong.

It's hard to find a high quality bike without complicated shifting. You can still find some with barcons as original equipment. The industry is so committed to other things that no other point of view can get much economic leverage. We're being dragged in another direction: tubeless tires, hydraulics, electrical things,... If you want something different, you have to hunt it down, and maybe build it up yourself.

Industry icon advances service boutique concept

At the beginning of the week, my employer directed my attention to an opinion piece in Bicycle Retailer, written by Onza founder Dan Sotelo. In it, Sotelo described the end of the independent bicycle dealer and suggested that service take the forefront for brick and mortar establishments. This includes assisted on-line shopping. He described the service boutique concept I had been thinking about for about ten years. It included in-store terminals so that we could help our customers choose compatible, high-quality parts and bikes.

The germ of my assisted online shopping concept started at the end of the age of mail order, when the 1 1/8" threadless headset became the most common standard, and suspension forks were evolving year by year. Someone with a four-year-old fork with blown-out seals could get a newer model on closeout from a mail order source and have us plug it into the bike for only a little more than a full rebuild would cost on a fork that had seen hard use and might have more issues than just seals and bushings. Yeah, it's parts replacement instead of mechanics, but it was also more cost effective and got the customer into something newer that might be supported by the manufacturer for a bit longer.

For as long as there have been internet sources, our shop has welcomed the purchasers of those bikes and parts to get the service they will so desperately need to turn their on-line deal into something reliably usable. We also service big-box boat anchors, with the caveat that something made to low standards will never achieve high standards.

Something assembled far away, by technicians working for low wages, will not provide years of reliable service right out of the box. You may be able to slap the pedals and handlebars on it and ride it, like the advertising says, but it will have been built to industry standards, not to the higher standard that really confers some longevity in the real world.

Last week, a guy brought in a fixed-gear winter trainer I'd built for him in about 1997. All the bearings were still in adjustment. Granted it isn't his primary ride, but it has to have seen some mileage in 20 years. His road bike of about the same vintage was similarly in adjustment, with more use. It had also needed a few tuneups through the years, because of the temperamental nature of brifters, but the structural fundamentals -- any bearing that could be adjusted and needed to be properly secured -- had remained where they were properly assembled.

Because so many people are either bored or intimidated by the inner workings of their simple machinery, they will flock in even for mediocre service by technicians barely worthy of the name. I'd been thinking about a piece titled "Their bikes are beneath them" to explore the concept. The less discerning will take any work that doesn't obviously fail, just for the sake of having someone else do it. Real riders who, for some reason, have not learned how to maintain their own steeds will look for a higher level of precision.

I decided years ago that my standard was, "best possible outcome for this particular bike." The big-box boat anchor will always be horrible at best. If I can bring it up to horrible from abysmal, that's the goal. If a bike has been abused or neglected, it cannot be perfected. But it can usually be better. I try to discuss the customer's goals when the bike is checked in, but I don't always do the check in, or the bikes come in during a rush of business in which we have no time to make a detailed inspection. And sometimes I just feel solitary and uncommunicative. Sorry, folks. Workin' on that. "Grumpiness of mechanic does not reflect quality of work." In fact, the inverse may be true, but that's another whole essay.

Low quality and high technology both work against the mechanic in search of the closest thing to perfection. While the purchasers of low-end bikes tend to acknowledge the notorious crude workmanship and shoddy materials found at that price point, some of them have to be coaxed through a short learning curve to get there. Much of an independent bike shop's customer contact falls into the category of counseling. Owners of expensive bikes can present much greater challenges, because they feel that purchase price should confer some immunity to malfunction. That was actually true, about 30-40 years ago. Well, mostly true. The equipment was all made to the same pattern. Expensive equipment was made much more precisely, out of better materials. Maynard Hershon decried "a 21st Century shifter held in place by a 19th Century wingnut," but the wingnut worked. When it loosened, a quick twist snugged it up again. On a high-end bike, you got a high-end wingnut. And the matching faces of the shifter held together by that nut -- actually a machine screw -- were more precisely matched. I don't miss down tube shifters, but I also don't scorn the wingnut purely on the basis of its ancient origins. Your 21st Century bike is propelled by a human built on a very ancient design.

For a small shop in a rural town, providing assisted internet shopping may not pay for the computer terminal necessary to give the customer a place from which to browse. Even in a more populated area, customers who like internet shopping because it is convenient as well as cheap will not make a special trip to the bike shop when they don't suffer that much from the inconvenience of selecting the wrong thing. They're already accustomed to shipping things back and forth a few times, or just making the best of it when something arrives that isn't quite right. Internet shopping puts a lot of product in circulation, and eventually leads a customer in desperation to seek out the nearest surviving bike shop to try to put things right. That may be the best we can hope for.

Promoting service likewise calls for a gamble by the shop that a certain clientele will flock to the dinner bell if a certain service is offered. Suspension service on mountain bikes springs immediately to mind, because that was one of the major dividing points when the stunt man style of riding took mountain biking down a carefully constructed course of obstacles and jumps, away from the main stream of general pedaling. Suspension and hydraulics require clean work spaces, dedicated to that work if possible. It's harder and more time consuming to try to do decent service on something that requires clean oil and grit-free seals, when you're working in a small clearing on a bench that sees regular invasions of grimy junk. So you need infrastructure. Then you need tools.

Tools are a profit center for specialty parts manufacturers. They don't do shops any favors on price. Maybe if a shop is part of a well-funded chain it can get a better deal, but that's a world apart from mine. The true disciples will tithe as necessary to remain in good standing with the faith. The world of esoteric bike parts is minuscule in the global economy, so the price of specialty tools also reflects their relative rarity in the ocean of cash flow. But it's still major coin for subsistence farms like our little outpost.

When bikes were simpler and the range of diversity was narrower, we could benefit from the summer influx of cyclists of all sorts. We would stock some things that were too rich for the local market, like internal parts for Campy Ergopower brifters, just to rescue the vacations of unfortunate riders who happened to be here when the little ratchet spring failed, rather than at home. A little bouquet of them gathers dust even now, on a hook above one of the work benches.

With both electric bikes and electronic shifting gaining market share, we're faced with more expensive investments in tools and parts to prepare for technology we do not endorse, which seldom drops in. Living as we do on a slim margin, we are canaries in the coal mine of bike industry economics. No one pays attention to the dead canaries anymore, except to sweep up the carcasses before rolling out a red carpet for the next wave of expensive bullshit. Maybe some day the electronic technology will settle down to the ageless reliability of a 19th Century wingnut. Until then, it's just a magnet for foolish money buying into a conveyor belt of obsolescence.

Since the 1990s, the bike industry has used customers as test pilots. They do not call attention to this, so customers think they're buying something that not only represents the state of the art, but also durability. I suppose as younger generations grow up without the memory of a 24-inch single speed that lasted for all the decades that seemed to pass between age 8 and 14, the idea that a bike is durable will fade from human expectation. But it seems remarkably persistent for now.

In the 1880s, the newborn bike industry was surprised by how many working-class people shelled out what was a hefty amount of money to buy a penny-farthing ordinary bike. They had not realized how many potential customers would recognize the value of such simple personal transportation. But that was when the purchase price was by far the biggest financial hurdle to ownership. The value continued with the advent of the safety bicycle, and even persisted well past the middle of the 20th Century. Minor increases in complexity did not lead to precipitous drops in reliability. An earnestly striving human could enjoy a nicer lifestyle that rewarded both frugality and personal effort. Because it was hard to exploit monetarily, it has been hammered relentlessly by the modern world. I don't see a business model that can overcome that philosophical divide. Meanwhile, for all you strivers out there, I'll do my best to help you keep your bike going.

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.

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?

Lighter bikes mean weaker riders

When you get a lighter bike, it feels unbelievably agile and quick. For weeks, you feel like a superhero. For months you smile at the sight of that exceptional new extension of your personal power.

Then you get used to it.

If your goal is to hang with and beat out a peloton of racers or serious pretenders, and if your budget extends to regular upgrades, you can get the genuine advantage of lighter and lighter equipment as it hits the market. But most of us have to stick with a bike for a long time, and may prefer that.

I don't suggest that riders should seek out the clunkiest chunk of gas pipe to push around. I do suggest that weight weenies are deep in addiction. I'm also waiting for a bike so light that the rider has to be on it just to keep it on the ground. You have to tie it down when you park it. I mean something less bulky than what Albert Santos-Dumont already made. Looks like he's pedaling it, right?

He famously tooled around the skies of Paris, visiting friends while avoiding traffic congestion and on-street parking issues. Thinking of an e-bike? Consider a personal dirigible instead. Talk about flying up the hills!

Unfortunately, history bursts my balloon on this one. All accounts I can find say that the airships were propelled by small engines of some kind. I feel quite deflated. But modern inventors have taken up the cause.

Parking over public transportation might get very interesting.

Headwinds would be a new kind of hell when you could actually get blown backwards for miles.

Meanwhile, here on the ground, I look at the industry's annual offerings, and the adoring press that lauds latest and lightest and then return affectionately to my longtime companions, grateful for their simple needs and rewarding company.

Speed at all costs

A triathlete friend of mine is making her final campaign at full Iron Man  distance, in November.

Endurance athletics serve a therapeutic purpose for her. She has also worked as a professional trainer and event organizer, because she wants to share the benefits that her obsession has brought her.

For this last big race, she asked me whether she should invest in a state of the art time trial bike. But the budget she set would not get her a bike at the quality level of her venerable Serotta.

The arms race behind the bike race goes unacknowledged.

A lineup of TT bikes featured on road.cc illustrates the most evolved wind-cheating machines to enable a well-trained rider to go slightly less pathetically slowly compared to any vehicle people are actually impressed with. An absolute nightmare to work on, these ultra-sophisticated machines will set you back thousands of dollars -- in some cases upwards of $10,000 -- to get the full wind tunnel tested package of aerodynamic benefits. And you will still get dropped by a rusted-out Nissan that burns a quart of oil in 50 miles and costs a third as much. Much less than a third if you bought a really expensive bike. Or some twit with an e-bike will come tooling past you, vaping.

When Greg Lemond unleashed the aero on Laurent Fignon in 1989, it made aero bikes socially acceptable. It launched the movement to quit making bikes that looked like they were made by meticulous artisans and more like something engineered by the military-industrial complex.

At first, aero enhancements consisted of streamlined helmets and removable aero handlebars. Bike frames still had round tubes! And lugs! Rider position made a huge difference, established by the clip-on aero bar.

Soon, of course, bars were specifically designed and bikes were specially constructed to adopt each aerodynamic enhancement allowed by the governing authorities. This was also the age of the triathlon, where very little cycling tradition weighed down the innovators, and a free-spending population of willing test pilots purchased the latest implements to gain whatever advantage they could.

In any arms race, whoever develops a weapon first enjoys a clear advantage. Once everyone has the widget, that becomes the new level playing field, forcing further advancements to gain a new technological edge. At the same time, the old ways have been obliterated. When the competition is unlimited and existential, the rising tide of technology represents advancement for the whole species. This is also true in non-military contexts. Take transportation, for instance. Ships evolved sails. Sailing ships evolved through various shapes, swifter or more efficient for their given task, until powered vessels set a new standard in speed and maneuverability. On roads, the bicycle initiated the age of mass-produced personal transportation, but the automobile and its variants soon eclipsed pedal power.

Since we're only racing against each other on our bikes, we could set the standard anywhere we want. Does it really make a difference if average time trial times are a minute or two faster now than they were 20 years ago? It doesn't make the event any more exciting to watch, just more expensive to conduct. When everyone has only the slickest bike they can afford, the margin of victory could be in the wallet, not in the training, skill, and determination of the athletes. Or, if everyone has equally slick bikes, the equipment disappears from the equation. Everyone could be on Raleigh Choppers, or vintage Schwinn Paramounts.

The time trial position is not comfortable. The bikes are not versatile. Some are more aerodynamic than others, in ways that may be hard to tell by looks or price tag. And, as I said, they're absolute nightmares to work on. Humans have their urge to excel. There are worse things to blow money on than the pursuit of a few seconds over 40 kilometers. But if all the expense is just to be equal, the problem is artificially induced.

Economies run on induced problems. And maybe the aero bike of today will lead to the pedal-powered personal aircraft of tomorrow. I doubt if even that would spawn an industry strong enough to shape whole political systems and the course of nations, the way internal combustion has.

For now, my friend has to make the best of the equipment she has, with a snazzier back wheel and a new aero helmet, because she lacks the coin to place a much heftier bet on a bike that will turn heads in the transition area. The spacelanders

 she'll be sharing the course with present an intimidating army. The ones that live up to their advertising will actually confer an advantage upon their well-funded (or tapped out) riders. How much of an advantage is hard to say. And is it worth it? That's even harder to say. Ten grand for the ephemeral satisfaction of standing on a podium that will be gone forever, ten minutes after the award ceremony? Or maybe just to achieve a personal best time, down in the anonymous wad of barely differentiated finishers? Look! Here comes that vaping guy on the e-bike again.

Put a fork in it...it's done

A friend had a mid-1990s Iron Horse with a blown-out Marzocchi fork. After brief consideration of rebuilding or replacing the suspension fork, he went for a basic rigid fork.

Step one: prepare the mechanic.

The frame has some classic 1990s bullshit frame details

"Innovation" was the word of the decade. Setting aside the innovations that were actually from the 1890s, there was a lot of weird looking stuff marketed as technical advancement. Before the suspension revolution obliterated the old world, mountain bikes were a lot like any bike. They started out as beater bikes, after all. So the facade of innovation was decorated with tweaks to the traditional diamond frame, some of which did enhance strength and performance. Others either did nothing or were outright wrong turns. In any case, their days were numbered, as the spring-and-linkage crowd worked in their secret labs on the new species that would change the sport forever.

With a fork in it, it's done.

The new mountain bikes can take more pounding and eat up gnarlier terrain, at the cost of more moving parts and more systems to maintain: hydraulic brakes, pivots pivots pivots, shock absorbers, seals seals seals... Yes, the riding experience is either more comfortable or more rad. You also need a heftier budget in both money and time to keep one in top shape...or even just functional. Or you can ride it into the ground, as many people do, and replace it -- or abandon the activity -- when the bike finally fails completely.

No deal with the devil

A guy who used to ride mountain bikes with us in the 1990s, before the needs of family life took him off the trails, wandered back into the shop a few weeks ago with a neighbor's garden cart wheel in need of a tire. While he was there, he spotted the fat bikes and was intrigued enough to test out a couple.

He decided he really liked the Fuji Wendigo. He was going to go home and lobby for it. Meanwhile, because he had mentioned serious neck issues, we put together the parts we would need to raise the handlebars to accommodate his fused vertebrae.

He'd been a ghost for years, so we did not fret when he submerged again for a week or so. Then, suddenly, he popped back in today to say he couldn't buy the bike.

I expected it would be the usual spousal veto. This frequently hinges on the release of funds from a family budget that may be strained by all the boring bullshit of real life. But no. He's come up with an angle we had truly never heard before.

"Do you know what a Wendigo is?" he asked. Steve said he did. He'd looked it up on line when we got the bikes. It's some freaky demon of ancient North American legend: Exactly the sort of thing a bike industry enthralled with their badass image would name a bike model. Think of the Surly Krampus. At least the Krampus is only a seasonal demon.

"I can't buy this bike," said our customer. "If I believe in God and good and stuff, then I have to believe in evil and Satan and all that. The Wendigo is a horrible creature. I can't support that."

When the discussion moves from componentry to theology, the ramifications of the sale become cosmic. It's all fun and games until you believe you are actually living on a planet with supernatural monsters that eat people's flesh. Our buddy Bob's observation shoves religious faith smack into the middle of modern consumerism in the age of science. I have to refuse to believe in such monsters, because I ride a lonely commute entirely in the dark, once autumn arrives. What am I going to do, load up on silver weapons and crucifixes? That shit weighs a ton. But I'm not going to mess with Bob's concept of his immortal soul just to cleave him away from some coin and move a bike off the sales floor.

This is hardly an issue to trouble the bean counters of the bike industry. Guys like Bob are scarce enough to ignore. On the other hand, some marketing idiot's choice of a badass name for a bike model will likely cost us a sale. Bob may be rare, but I doubt if he is unique. How many other potential customers turn away, perhaps without saying anything to anyone, because they're turned off by the juvenile embrace of an evil image?

Krampus at least rides shotgun with a saint.

The badass crowd will say if you can't stand the names, don't buy the bikes. "If you don't like what we're sayin', we ain't talkin' to you!" It's fun to have your group identity and sense of pride. If you're okay with who you offend and why, keep it up. It's a free country. It's silly and pointless, but so much of life can be described that way that it doesn't really matter. I was just fascinated by the intersection of supernatural belief, marketing bullshit, and inanimate machinery.

Bob went home to contemplate his options, because he really likes the bike. Only after he had left did I think that he might justify the purchase by being the man of God who tames the demon, and bends it to the will of good. But that might be considered prideful, and then he'd be in worse trouble.

I am not mocking his beliefs. I don't share his beliefs, but the issues are his own to sort out. If he is concerned enough to tell us all this, we're not going to brush it off. People can be very serious about the care of their souls.

I'm getting too old for this

The bike business does not respect age. Not surprising when you consider that a young adult can propel and maneuver the vehicle to its greatest potential. Not too young; the best riders need seasoned muscles and honed skills. But at a certain point a rider can no longer keep up.

Bicycling in general encompasses an array of machinery and techniques suitable for all ages. Bikes for children are mostly toys, or perhaps prepare them for what they might some day achieve in bicycling's real theater. Bikes for older riders reflect what people past their prime can still manage to be.

Certain elders achieve the status of wise men. Owners of companies, famous innovators, retired racers all can manage to make the young pups shut up for at least a minute. But put one of these silver-tops in a greasy apron in a little shop in some nowhere town and the young guns would not know to be impressed. And if the greasy old geezer turning wrenches has never been one of those luminaries in the first place, the world really passes them by.

In what passed for the glory days, my physical prime happened to coincide with the mountain bike boom and my skills and style happened to be slightly better than average. This is no modest understatement. My edge was very slim. Mechanical skills and analytical ability made up the rest of my powers, but these were certainly enhanced by the number of people I could leave puking behind me on a long climb. The fact that I was puking to stay in front of them, and chasing faster riders, was excused by the fact that nearly all of us were chasing someone faster. If I could stay ahead of two thirds or three quarters of a ride group, that was solid enough. I knew that all the riders ahead of me were puking to stay out there.

There's a lot of puking, actual or metaphorical, in the prime of cycling. And a lot of acid reflux in your declining years.

Briefly, the local mountain bike crowd shifted to road riding before succumbing to the various ailments of aging athletes. Mountain biking itself went off a cliff, literally. Even if I was in my prime, I would not want to ride in the modern style, on the modern arthropod.

The fragmented bike market does not need hard-driving, monomaniacal riders as much as it needs experienced observers and interpreters. But some of its segments still feed on the intensity of the competitor. Lots of riders claim to understand their lower place in the hierarchy, but when they ride you know they're listening to the narration of their private video, or at least feeling the savage satisfaction of chasing down their quarry, real or imagined. An awful lot of people who come into a shop look at the people who work there and mentally assess whether they would be the chasers or the chased.

Actually, an awful lot of people don't come into bike shops anymore. Not in Resort Town, anyway. Even when there was money to be made, it was not easy because it attracted a lot of competition. We left all of them in the dust eventually, but now the dust settles on us, on a course nearly deserted. The segmented market seeks asylum in enclaves of its own disciples. You're either a big shop or a specialty shop.

We're an outpost, in Resort Town. We're that palisade far from civilization where a traveler hopes the blacksmith can knock together something to keep the wagon going long enough to get them home. We'll never be a big shop, because we've chosen to live beyond the edge of big civilization. The place is hardly remote. The lifestyle has evolved from north country lite to rural suburban. But the rough and rocky land refuses to support much of an economy. When people no longer come from away, the locals can only do so much to keep each other afloat.

The model for New England -- particularly northern New England -- is the subsistence farm. Now that the party is over for cycling, our shop is a subsistence farm. The woods are full of the weathered stone foundations of subsistence farms. The inhabitants of them gleaned whatever sustenance they could before they gave up and moved on, or simply dropped.

In the bustle of civilization, life is less of a struggle against indifferent nature and more of a brawl. There may be more activity in the lands of urbanization and sprawl, but it's no less strenuous. The specialty shop is only as good as its reputation. The big shop has to find the right size for its economy, and maintain a staff that will help it flourish, or at least not embarrass it too badly. If a specialty wanes, the little boutique must shift its focus or wither. The big shop or small chain can grow or shrink categories as long as the staff can keep up with the technology.

Technology is driven by desire. Perceived necessity is the mother of invention. Desire breeds an image. An image is an emotional construct. Emotion responds to first impressions. First impressions can be shaped by prejudicial beliefs. We look for what we hope to see, and often see what we have told ourselves to expect. Does this slightly limping, unkempt mumbler really know what he's doing? Why is someone that age still doing this job?

Because I can. Because the craft needs people who respect the craft. Why waste all that experience?

Like any writer, I console myself with the idea that I may yet figure out how to produce and sell something popular, or at least be discovered after my death and become influential then. Beyond that it's probably better not to pick at things too much. You can't do much more than what seems like a good idea at the time, whatever you're into. Good luck out there. If you need your bike worked on, you know where to find me.

George's rocket

When Big G finished building up his new Specialized Roubaix last week, he put it on the scale in the shop.

Drum roll...

Twenty-two pounds. Carbon fiber and bla de bla,and the friggin' tank weighs twenty-two pounds.

Mind you, 22 pounds is a perfectly respectable weight for a top quality butted steel racing bike from the 1980s. In other words, thanks to tinfoil chains, cog-packed clusters and temperamental, expensive brifters, we have achieved equality with a simpler machine powered by the same engine 30 years ago.

I know: more gears! Convenient shifting! And with the simple investment of at least a thousand more dollars in crank, handlebars, stem and wheels the bike could be an easy two pounds lighter. Still temperamental, but the fancy ones always put you through hell. You have to decide for yourself whether the ride is worth it.

Planning to commute on his new steed, Big G has been checking out all the bag options. Frame packs, enormous, projecting seat packs, anything that doesn't require a rack. He's got a messenger bag on order. That would not be my first choice for a 25-mile open road ride to work. But then this whole acquisition went entirely where I will never go. All this baggage, of course, gets added to the basic curb weight of the bike.

I understand wanting a light bike. Last summer I got a frame pack to increase the cargo capacity of my own road bike. It's a nice break when I know I'm sticking mostly to pavement. But if you only ride a light bike it will eventually feel heavy to you. And when it comes to transportation I really like the secure feeling I get from wider tires, fenders, lights and a good tool kit.

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.

They got George! Those BASTARDS!

Big G sent me an email the other night. He needed to tell me he had ordered himself a Specialized Roubaix road bike.

After all we've been through, dealing with the mysterious creaks, cracks and pops of carbon frames, and all the headaches of brifters and the Chain of the Month Club, Big G signed himself up for all of it. At what point did he cease to mean it when he said, "I'm so glad I don't own one of these?"

With so many more elegant ways to achieve a light bike that would also be simple and durable over the long haul, he chose to buy off the rack and shackle himself to this year's "state of the art." Hell, it's not even this year. It's more like six months at best.

The bike arrived today. The box looked like it had been drop-kicked all the way from Taiwan, but the bike appears unblemished. Unblemished except by the details of its own design, that is. So it's a matter of opinion. Big G won't be in until Friday. The bike will await him, in its exploded box. I got him something with which to toast his assimilation into the cult of the modern:

It's always hard when you find out your compadre has been replaced by an alien pod. The fact that he could do it with no warning shows they implanted the spores in him a long time ago. Oh, buddy, if only I'd known the struggle you didn't even know you were having...

Ah well. Too late! He's gone to the dark side. I can only help him return if he wants to be helped. Meanwhile I get to bust his balls without mercy. Got a problem there big guy? Waaaa ha ha ha ha!

I know I should be more gung-ho about the bike industry's excrescences. They're supposed to be the latest and greatest, and Enhance your Cycling Experience. Thing is, I was enjoying my cycling experiences a ton back in the 1980s, when all I wanted was enough income to buy more time to spend riding the stuff I already owned. I've made a few changes where I saw real improvements, but the rest of it is expensive horseshit. That being said, riding a bike is still great. Find someone who can help you sift through the horseshit. Even if you get stuck with some ultra-modern (temporarily) crap, the activity itself is still worthwhile. We can get you onto better stuff if you decide you want it. Or we can keep feeding you the industry's latest dump. It's all good. It still beats driving.

The thaw approacheth

Looking at the extended forecast, we get one little dip into the frigid, but after that the trend climbs a couple of degrees each day. Daytime high temperatures get above freezing. It's sap weather for the maple trees. Sugar houses will soon be steaming.

March is a winter month around here. Spring begins on the 20th, according to the calendar, but we may get snow into April, and sometimes May. Set aside years like 1816, when it snowed in every month, crops failed, famine and misery stalked the land. In any year, New England might get in the way of some orphaned bastard of winter, chasing its parent season through what you hoped would be spring. But in general, skiing is moving toward its conclusion and dry-land biking -- as opposed to what is now being called "snow biking" -- gets easier and easier.

I'm not one to throw elbows with winter traffic. Nor do I like salting up a bike with the brine that flows down the roads when the air finally gets warm enough for the road treatment to work at all. When the snow is good I prefer to use its surface, away from crowds, on skis or snowshoes. I'll use groomed trails to train, but on my own time I will head for the boonies. Thus the fat bike has little appeal, since it depends on pre-packed or naturally firmed conditions, making it a consumer of other people's efforts. Its rider may contribute by joining a pack of fellow enthusiasts packing a trail with snowshoes so they can then ride it, but that strikes me as ridiculously labor intensive when you can get on skis. Other than that, the pedalers depend on some sort of motorized grooming equipment to build them a playground on which they are essentially parasitic. They require that nature be adapted to them more than they adapt to nature.

As fat bikers evolve, will they become bow-legged as they try to fit around fatter and fatter tires? Salsa is up to five inches now. Who's got six? Come on six! Do I hear six? Six, Six, okay 6.5. Six point five, six point five do I hear seven?

Perhaps the evolution of the fat bike leads to seasonal adaptations: 3.8-inch tires in the warm months, 4.5 and up in the snowy months. One bike, essentially a 29-er based on outside tire diameter, which will even take a 29-er wheel with a slick tire if you want to use it on the road. How about some aero bars on that thang? Make the fork blades really aero and put time trial wheels on it. Test it in the wind tunnel. Maybe the aero bulldog would stack up surprisingly well against the carbon fiber greyhound.

For the moment, there is still snow to play on or contend with. It was so fine and dry this winter, that the impressive depth will shrink with an almost audible sizzle when strong sun gets on it, but for now it remains. Time for some rollers to alert my posterior to what lies close ahead.