The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

In endless hope and constant fear

 A road rider lives in endless hope and constant fear. The hope propels us, keeps us going out there because the odds aren't really that bad. The problem is that things can go gruesomely wrong in an instant. Anyone out there who isn't thinking about that stands a greater chance of experiencing it. I can't be the only one listening to a motor vehicle coming up from behind, wondering casually if it will be the last thing I hear. Of course I'm not. The fear has made many riders give up the road.

There's more than hope and fear, of course. We also proceed in exasperation and complete bafflement at times. Those feelings are common to all road users. "Who is this idiot?! And why did they just do that?!?"

Fear keeps you sharp. It doesn't have to be debilitating terror. I'm sure that enthusiastic mountain bikers, safe from motorists on their trail networks, experience fear. You have to look for trouble in a purely recreational context like that, but even at an intermediate level a hazard can ambush you if you forget to respect the possibility.

Hope motivates the transportation cyclist. It was strong in the 1970s, diminishing through the 1980s as the Boomers chased wealth in a wide variety of motor vehicles. It returned with the popularity of mountain bikes in all environments, even those with no mountains, and hardly any woods. But the off-road aspect pulled most riders away from contact with traffic except when driving to where they wanted to ride. The industry abandoned its cheerful suggestion that riders might like to use their bikes a lot more than their cars, and switched to baiting them with more and more expensive, elaborate technology.

My paid writing from the mid 1980s onward tried to use recreation as a gateway to environmental stewardship. Motorized recreation had seemed masochistic to me since the first gas crisis in the early 1970s. At that time, I did not think about transportation cycling as a central part of my life. I liked to ride my English 3-speed, but had no desire to open the rear hub and anger the gods by probing the mysteries of its miraculous functions. But I did see the price of gasoline more than double and continue to rise. It wasn't until I got to university and overcame my derailleur phobia that I also discovered anything like mechanical aptitude in myself. I also discovered the economics of poverty.

It was a safe experiment. I had family. I wasn't going to sink without a trace, the way real poor people do. But I was working within a set budget. I sold my car before the end of senior year because I was happy and confident on my bike, determined to live within my means. A car brought with it fixed expenses in registration and insurance, the need for parking, fuel, and upkeep. I could shelter and maintain a bike in a single room or a small apartment. All I had to do was find jobs I could ride to. Lots of college students in Gainesville managed school and employment without cars. Most cities and towns seemed to have a resident population of bike riders.

Most cities and towns today have resident populations of riders. Cycling survives because bikes are basically good things. This is more true of the ones that are well made, generally older, but the concept is sound no matter what. The riders starting out may have mostly hope and little or no fear. As fear grows, maybe interest dies completely. No one rides for long without finding reasons to give it up. Whether a particular person does depends on their personal equation.

Competition and Monopoly

 Capitalism always trends toward monopoly. Competition only seeks to increase market share. Once market domination is achieved, the "winners" become very hard to dislodge. In general consumer markets, the appearance of many companies often masks the fact that most of them are owned by a larger corporation that says it operates them independently, but still uses its mass to control pricing to its own advantage. 

Competition still appears to exist in the bike industry, because bikes are parity products, and there's never been enough money in them to attract major corporate consolidators. The competition is an illusion, because bikes for each purpose use parts from the same menu of suppliers, which is itself pretty small. Some might be slightly better made or better equipped within a price range, but you still have several relatively balanced companies milking the dying market at pretty equal rates. It isn't really competition as such, because they're just divvying up the customers over cosmetic details or accidents of proximity. Trek or Specialized? Who cares? Which shop is closest and maybe offering a little promo?

Competition did exist in the 1990s, and it was brutal. The losers were the riders and the many small shops, as well as small builders who had to find the right size to survive. Some sold out to a bigger player, notably Bontrager, Gary Fisher, and Klein. None of those are sold under their own name anymore, if at all. 

It took a while for the collapse of small shops to spread. It lasted into the 2020 pandemic. It was a steady rolling wave, as technological complication made the service side more and more expensive for retailers already struggling with the tightened margins that came out of the cutthroat warfare of the 1990s. Riders suffered because all of that technology has made what passes for a quality bike much more expensive and made mid- and low-price bikes trashy knockoffs of the expensive ones.

In the mid 1990s, Specialized went through The Great Cheapening, during which they seriously downgraded the spec on the Hardrock series, and even the Rockhoppers. These two models had been great buys from the end of the 1980s, building a name for Specialized quality and durability. They started gutting the Hardrock as early as 1991 or '92, largely due to the cheesy quality of Shimano's low-end Rapidfire shifters. The frames were still decent chromoly, but gone were the replaceable chainrings and solidly built derailleurs. Those were disappearing from the whole industry as the manufacturers scrambled to make bigger profits off of the influx of inexperienced buyers that they cynically assumed would never figure it out anyway.

The real Great Cheapening hit with the adoption of aluminum as the frame material of choice. The reputations of the model categories were well established, so customers would come in with an existing good opinion of the bike they'd generally already decided that they wanted. It was around this time that I started avoiding the sales floor more and more, because I couldn't do anything to stop the general rot in the industry. We needed to sell what we had, but I couldn't stand in front of it with a big smile and say it was a great buy. You could still make a case for some of the bikes on the basis of the serviceable features they still had, like replaceable chainrings and halfway decent derailleurs at price points that still didn't scare off buyers. Specialized snapped out of it when Raleigh re-entered the market with absolutely sweetheart spec at all price points and bought a lot of friends in a short time. Specialized went back to providing solid spec (within the choices available), leaving Cannondale as the perennial high-priced bike with embarrassing components.

Cannondale's excuse was that you should be happy to pay for their excellent US-made aluminum frame, the costs of which prevented them from dressing their bikes with the same level of parts you'd get from those "offshore" bikes. Cannondale subsequently changed hands a couple of times, nearly went under, and are now just another "offshore" brand.

As for consolidation, Trek and Specialized are now trying to control huge swaths, but they're hampered by the ubiquity and disrespect of bikes in the developed world. There are a lot of bikes out there, and only a tiny minority of riders who will pay for the good stuff. Among those, there are good little technolemmings who will queue up for the industry's latest marvel, but also grouches like me, who will own a simple bike for decades and do our best to duplicate it pretty exactly if we ever want to supplement or replace it. The industry could make money off of us if they were willing to keep selling the stuff that appeals to us, but the industry chose to emulate drugs and electronics instead. They foster addiction to passing highs and offer replacements frequently to anyone who can still afford to play.

Then there are e-bikes. While the major bike companies are trying to claim market share, the electric bike has too many variations that serve their users well, but are almost nothing like a conventional bicycle except for the coincidental use of pedals. They are much more like the true mopeds of old: a motor vehicle using bike parts to sidestep regulation. The category includes some very bulky vehicles that do useful jobs. Meanwhile, the traditional bike industry can offer the sexy e-road, e-mountain, and e-gravel bikes that just add a little zing to existing bike categories without inviting competition from a newer e-bike specialist with no heritage in that area or interest in farming that minuscule market.

Before long, e-bike competition will settle on a few strong players, like the car business. Cars are another parity product in which the major differences end up mostly being who has produced the most glaring manufacturing defects in a given model year. The stage from genuine evolutionary improvement to flashy gimmicks takes place sooner and sooner in this electronic age. On the other hand, small companies may hang in there just because everything comes out of enormous factories in Asia, even the frames that are painted and labeled to match whatever brand ordered the batch. This will always come at a cost to the consumer. That unbelievably affordable e-bike might have no-name brakes you can't get pads for, or proprietary parts that you can't replace because the company either dissolved after it sold through the first load of crap or changed the spec and don't stock the old version. It's annoying enough when it happens with a bolt or something that a good mechanic can devise a substitute for, but I've also encountered it with control units and wiring harnesses that are more difficult, if not impossible, to fake.

I guess when it comes to consumer goods you have to choose your poison: a small company that will jerk you around because it doesn't have the finances to establish a rock-solid customer service department, or a large corporation that feels it's big enough to ignore the faint whining sounds of aggrieved customers. Look at how long it took Shimano to acknowledge their latest iteration of exploding cranks. Classic example of arrogant, monopolistic corporate behavior.

Ignorance is Economical

 When I returned to the bike business in 1989, the mountain bike boom was still billowing upward into the mushroom cloud that peaked in the 1990s before collapsing on itself to leave the toxic landscape of mutants in which we live today. My scavenging style of low-budget problem solving was a perfect fit for the mechanical challenges of the day. I thought about this during a repair this summer as I pieced together a couple of ferrules and some cable housing to fix a cheap pod shifter on a bike, rather than throw away a mechanism that still had some life in it.

Years ago I developed the method of salvaging shifters that had broken housings, but functioning inner workings. It started with one goofy kid who would beat the absolute crap out of his bike about once a week. We tried to keep a full selection of replacement parts on hand, but the industry was shifting rapidly to the dispos-a-bike concept, starting with the continuous mutation of things like shifting systems. Also, I could slap together one of these improvised cable nozzles in a few minutes, saving the customer a welcome couple of bucks on a bill that regularly exceeded $100.

Replacement shifters are now more available, but my reflex to fix what can be fixed kicks in first. Changing the shifter pod completely might take a little less time, but it wastes the life left in the old shifter, sending it to the landfill. Some other customer might really need that complete replacement shifter later.

In a shop more devoted to serving obsolescence than resisting it, the well trained technician will spec the new shifter. A shop like that might also turn away a lot of the ancient and weird things that we take in. 

Because time is money, and some old shifters never quite come back, even after a deep cleaning, we keep pods on hand. The industry is pulling up the lifeline, however. They're steadily reducing the options for index shifters for six and seven speeds. The key to future proofing lies in the past: switch to friction shifting and you can keep a bike going indefinitely.

We're rapidly running out of mechanics who remember any portion of the bike world in the 1970s and '80s. Most people who work in the business only do so for a few years at most before they have the sense to move on to something that actually pays a living wage. I hear that some technicians can command princely sums to work on the latest technological marvels, but each of those marvels only exists for a couple of years at most before it is tossed aside for the more and more marvelous offerings desperately pimped by an industry still wondering how to bring back the feeding frenzy of the 1990s at the price points of the maturing 21st Century.

The elders of the younger generation came in with index-only shifting and ubiquitous suspension as the baseline norm. Fortunately, an archive is being created for mechanics who witnessed little or nothing of simple bikes firsthand, in places like Sheldon Brown's website and elsewhere, and in early editions of bike repair manuals floating around. Still, it's not the same as living with it all as the state of the art and standard model. I will assess an innovation compared to its simple ancestor, and decide whether it really meets the need better, or just more expensively. I also disagreed with Sheldon on some points, which a student might not know how to do without their own life experience.

Speaking of need, the bike industry begs the consumer to accept that something is a need, like disc brakes, inset headsets, and press fit bottom brackets. And don't even get me started on tubeless tires. I need to scrape up the coin to stockpile non-tubeless rims while I can still get them, so that when the industry finally discontinues them I can at least keep building and rebuilding my wheels until I am too old to use them.

Everything that the bike industry has done during the last 20 years has only made bikes more expensive to buy and maintain. The price hides within the general inflation that has afflicted the capitalist consumer economy throughout my lifetime. Inflation is built into the business model in the form of profit. There's overhead, and there's a little something extra to cover unexpected challenges or to fund genuine innovation that leads to better products. But there's always an extra gouge, and that gouge drives inflation. Also, a steadily increasing population makes a dollar smaller so that a specific number of them can be given to new players joining the game, masking the fact that the finite pie really is being cut into smaller and smaller pieces. We have no handy messiah making five loaves and two fishes feed the assembled multitude. We have only economic sleight of hand, and theft of resources from future generations. It's way bigger than the bike industry, although the bike industry embraced it in a big way when easy money poured in during the 1990s.

Bikes made since the early 2000s defy attempts to improvise repairs and modifications as freely as we did as the 20th Century drew to a close. You can do it, but it either takes tools and facilities well beyond the average home mechanic or it exposes the rider to considerable risk of catastrophic failures.

When things get better, they only get relatively less worse and it feels like a relief. Bikes really could be part of the solution, but only if they're durable and fixable, simple to work on. Future prosperity can't be based on anything close to the current level of consumer spending, let alone ramping it up. And the industry had better get busy promoting that while there are still a few fools left with hands-on knowledge to share with a rising generation finally interested in learning it.

Corporate greed further impacts the freedom of bicycling

 As the big two companies, Specialized and Trek, continue to pull in large independents and chain shops in major market areas, the black hole of corporate accounting continues to pull away chunks of what had been a workable system of distribution at all levels of population density. The latest casualty is Quality Bicycle Products, which recently announced layoffs even as it expanded its warehouse locations, and has now begun to offer some of its house brand products direct to consumer.

Currently, the QBP plan will share profits with dealers enrolled in their Dealer's Choice program, but it indicates that QBP's status as the top distributor of parts and accessories has suffered inroads from the vertical integration pursued by Spec and Trek, pushing their own lines of parts and accessories through their controlled network to consumers with less and less choice.

You don't have to build a better mousetrap. You just have to market yours more effectively, or otherwise gain control of the market so that no other mousetrap gets enough visibility to compete. Consumers can only vote with their wallets a limited number of times. Usually, once we own a product, we have to put up with it because that portion of our budget has been expended.

The bike industry faces a peculiar challenge because of the strange niche bikes occupy. From their first emergence they have been controversial. Their haters hate them and their lovers love them passionately. The great neutral middle blobs toward use and neglect in response to forces as hard to calculate as the actual parameters that make bikes work at all. So when money started pouring in during the mountain bike boom of the 1990s, no one in the business knew how to keep it going. The power players only knew that they were finally earning like real capitalists, so they'd better start acting like it. Partly due to their own technological and financial decisions, and partly due to the inevitable public swing away from any boom activity, the wave broke by the turn of the century, leaving the industry leaders trying to figure out how to hold onto what they'd gained.

Small brands have vanished, folded outright, or folded into a larger consolidation, and perhaps sold online, "ready to ride out of the box." Small shops have gone under. And now, the major supplier to the independents dips a toe into direct consumer sales. They're strong enough to become a dominant force in direct consumer sales. One hopes that they will continue to supply the kind of durable, simple stuff that allows a truly independent rider-mechanic to build and maintain the kind of bikes we used to have in the second half of the last century. In any case, it's always a good idea to stockpile parts if you can. I'd rather be on foot than ride some gimcrack marvel of flashy technofashion.

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.

Train your customers to reject simplicity

 Another breathless article about the "advanced" features that some bike brand or other might be slopping over onto more and more models illustrates the evolution of bicycles from vehicles of personal independence into vehicles of technological dependence.

A certain percentage of bike users will learn to work on them, regardless of how complicated and temperamental the mechanisms get. These riders will feel independent for as long as they can maintain their investment in tools and time. But it reminds me of people I know who work on their own cars, but who don't own a real auto garage with lifts and compressed air, and some level of machining capability. Those drivers have to make arrangements of various kinds to use a shared facility that they have to go to at the available time. The less of a workshop a given rider has, the more that rider will need to pay for a facility in which to work or someone to do the work.

The latest article on "improvements" in bike spec reported on the steady retreat of rim brakes in favor of disc brakes. This goes along with the overall weight gain among certain categories, as electric motors are added. Motor vehicles need more powerful brakes that impart the braking force more centrally, but that comes with several costs. A brake light enough to be carried on a chronically under-powered vehicle (even with electric assistance) will have relatively small brake pads that have to be replaced frequently, if you can find them in stock. Brake rotors are more prone to deteriorate when the bike sits idle, compared to your aluminum rim. Disc brake calipers are full of little crevices in which water and dirt can brew up mischief. Hydraulics complicate disassembly.

I could go on, and I have been known to. Suffice to say that bike maintenance is ever more the province of a professional mechanic with a lifestyle to maintain, as well as his or her shop full of expensive tools that have to be constantly updated, because manufacturers like to squeeze money out of them, too. To the consumer, that means steadily rising prices and a hunt for really good mechanics, akin to what we have gone through for years trying to keep cars on the road.

Key to this progression has been the ongoing campaign by the bike industry to get customers to scorn simplicity and embrace complexity in the name of performance. Niche riders are most susceptible to this. Triathletes want the most sinuous steeds that slice the wind. Mountain bikers want bikes that serve their specific interest, which seldom means pedaling up a hill. Just as alpine skiers don't ski up the Alps, mountain bikers aren't interested in climbing for its own sake. To be fair, how many of us who pedal are truly interested in climbing for its own sake? But still, it used to be a respected skill for a complete rider. But beyond the allergy to strenuous aerobic efforts, the mountain biking community also has come to depend on the suspension technologies that allow them to bomb down their trails without picking their way among obstacles that can't simply be launched over.

The varieties of unpaved trail surfaces and degrees of slope have led to very specific subsets of mountain bikes, each more than $1,000 (at least) to purchase, and costing hundreds of dollars a year to maintain properly. Or you do what most riders do, and ignore problems until the machine simply won't go anymore, and then either dig into it yourself or dump it on your chosen expert.

A thousand bucks ain't what it used to be. I've had a theory since the 1970s that the real driver of all economic fluctuations is the price of gas. By gas I include diesel. Motor vehicle fuel, anyway. The basis of all currency is the petrodollar. Right now, for instance, Americans are all freaked out that gasoline is over $4 a gallon. Back when I started driving, and gasoline was 28 cents a gallon, I had to endure the horrifying spectacle of it doubling in price within a couple of years. By the end of the 1970s it had topped one dollar! Eek! So either gas prices drift down again or everyone gets used to it as all other pricing adjusts to make it normal. Workers' wages will still lag. The rich will get richer. The international situation will be desperate as usual.

The fact that a widespread adoption of simple bikes for transportation would have headed all this off in the 1970s isn't even worthy of academic consideration. The "ten-speed boom" started a little social movement, and the mountain bike boom drove it off the road. It turned cycling back into a consumerist hobby.

As factors combine to give transportation cycling and other riding on the public streets some leverage, it also depends on the expense and complexity of electric assistance to exert that leverage. All of these technologies have their place, but it's in addition to older, simpler machines, not instead of them. Soon, very soon, I will pump up the tires on the old fixed-gear and start riding again. It's that simple. Each bike in turn as I need it comes down off its hook, gets dusted off, tires checked, and off I go. There's not much to go wrong with a simple machine. It won't suck money out of you relentlessly.

Bikes are like cars now

 Our energetic trail builder has been forging alliances all around the region for the ambitious vision of turning Wolfeboro into a unique destination for mountain biking. He recently met the owner of a prominent shop in neighboring Maine, who told him that the pandemic had provided a great opportunity to start nudging service prices up to "where they should be."

This shop owner starts from the laudable goal of paying his staff a good, livable wage. To earn this, the technicians are certified to do suspension work, provide full service to electric bicycles, and any other credentials that will look good in a simple black frame on the waiting room wall. He described it as similar to taking your car to an auto service center, where the people all wear neat jump suits and have documented training. "And you pay for that," my friend said.

And you pay for that. Thing is, the best car service I have ever gotten has been from a hard-drinking, independent genius whose shop uniform may start the day clean, but ends up fully grimed by the time he knocks off somewhere between 8 p.m. and 1:00 the next morning. You'll never find him there before noon. He's semi-nocturnal, because it suits his biorhythms and he finally gets some uninterrupted hours when the phone doesn't ring and people don't drop in on him. He has some certificates hanging crooked on the grubby walls of his waiting area, which is mostly a place for his dog to lounge. The fancy service place isn't just charging for competence and your best interests. They're charging for the jump suits and the spiffy building and the cheerful person who checks your vehicle in, and the ones who answer the phone.

I can see both sides. I hate having to interrupt a tricky bit of mechanical work to answer an insistently ringing phone or launch a party of bike renters or just answer casual questions from someone who hopes to impersonate a customer long enough to be able to ask to use our restroom. I would love to make more money and achieve respect for my knowledge and ability. But I also remember when bikes were a vehicle of true independence. If you want to invest in more and more expensive tools, and learn how to service the more and more temperamental and complicated mechanisms of the modern super bike, you may still achieve a measure of independence. But because of the complexity, and the perfect precision with which all the pieces have to work together, your freedom only lasts as long as someone can make you the parts that fit your particular marvel of modern engineering. It misses the point of the bicycle entirely.

We've gotten used to the idea that a car is old when it's been on the road for three years. People do hold onto them for longer than that, or buy them used from the first owner who loses patience, interest, or trust after three years. The used car owner then holds onto it for another three years before handing it on to the next level of owner, who can't afford to buy anything fresher, and puts up with the increasing eccentricities of an aging vehicle. Eventually the car is too degenerated to function anymore, and gets scrapped. But the system has evolved around motor vehicles to provide the parts it needs at all of these stages. My used car is a 2003. When I got it I felt warm and happy because it wasn't too old and hadn't been driven hard. But the years sneak by, and suddenly it's 17 or 18 years old, and it's been driven by me. But I can still get it fixed. Something will finally break that dooms it. Maybe by then I'll be working for The Dream Shop in Wolfeboro, earning a livable wage, so I can buy a newer old piece of junk to pilot through my declining years.

This is the vision of the crowd that wants riders to pay like drivers. There's already a bit of a used bike progression, but because parts support isn't there for obsolete high-tech bikes, the used buyer of a formerly cutting-edge bike depends a lot more on luck to get any use out of the investment before something breaks that dooms it.

Your odds are better buying a 30-year-old bike than a 10-year-old bike, or even a five-year-old bike. They're even better buying a 40-year-old bike. For instance, I just changed the gearing on this 40-year-old Motobecane road bike, to give the rider the lower gearing of a compact crank and a wider range freewheel.

I'd done the rear derailleur and freewheel earlier in the year. The other parts weren't available yet. The crank is a 74-110 arm set offered by Quality Bike Products under their Dimension house label. The rings -- bought separately -- happen to be ramped and pinned for easier shifting, but the rider is used to flat rings, and shifts in friction, so there are no clicks to coordinate. The inner ring says "for ten speed only," meaning the current version, with a skinny chain and ten cogs in the back. I had to use spacers on the chainwheel bolts to set the ring over properly for the 6-speed chain. If or when he replaces the ring later, maybe we can get a thicker one and ditch the spacers. The whole job took a fraction of the time needed to rebuild the brake lever and caliper on a mountain bike, or replace suspension pivots, or chase down electrical gremlins.

The down side to simple bikes is that the work still takes skill and art, but the machines are so starkly simple that customers don't respect the people who work on them for a living. They don't want to do the work themselves, but they assume any idiot can do it. Therefore, you must be an idiot. Many days, I agree with them. I didn't get into bikes because I wanted to work on bikes. I got into bikes because anyone could learn, and bikes offered a great alternative for a world already getting smothered in asphalt and choking on fumes 50 years ago. Emission standards improved the fume situation somewhat, but the proliferation of pavement and the culture of haste have only gotten worse. And the emissions ignored by the standards are destroying the climate itself. Widespread adoption of the bicycle by those who could, aided by a societal resolve to support that alternative, would have bought us more time to work on the traffic systems and polluting output of the motor vehicles we still legitimately needed. I would much rather sell tools and parts, and share knowledge, than clean up someone's crappy, abused piece of junk or touch my cap and bob my head respectfully to the squire when he brings his immaculate machine for me to fine tune and polish.

People can break their bikes in more profound ways than the local auto service center will see in the cars that people bring to them. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, it's all vulnerable. I don't see how a flat rate book can account for stuff like the twisted wad of this derailleur:

This rider didn't just shove it in or pedal hard enough to yank it up in the back. He rode it all the way around the dropout, making a full wrap with the chain and cable.

With the trail system and the Dream Shop fantasy, its supporters believe that if you build it, riders will come, and bring business with them. But that also assumes that the consumerist, privileged lifestyle of expensive toys ridden by highly paid people with both the leisure time and the temperament to play that way will survive much longer in the economic and social adjustments being forced on us by our decades of unwillingness to enact incremental changes to head off the problems that are now boiling over. In my research on some other service topic I found a guy's blog post from the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, about trying to make an "apocalypse-proof bike." If it has suspension and a complicated shifting system, it ain't apocalypse-proof. You want a real apocalypse-resistant bike, build yourself a fixed-gear. Find a frame with long horizontal dropouts so you can stack cogs that will allow you to get off and shift manually among a small selection of maybe four gears, tops. You'll need a two-sided hub.

The trail builder wants to build a little Bentonville North, with trails for all abilities, including completely non-technical path riders. It still ignores the real-world transportation cyclist. We have to dream our own dreams and live in the real world, negotiating our way among the indifferent majority. I guess their nod to the transportation cyclist on the open streets is the e-bike section of the service department, because the only way bikes are going to become popular is if they are actually motor vehicles. And you'll pay for that.

Old reliable no more

Shifting problems barely existed before the invention of indexed shifting. Now they're a regular annoyance for riders in all categories.

In my private war to eliminate 4-millimeter shift housing, inline cable adjusters have been a reliable ally. But the bike industry has finally figured out how to mess that up.

For years, 4mm housing used thick-walled ferrules that made the ends fit into the 5mm cable stops commonly in use. Because of this, it was easy to substitute 5mm housing to reduce friction in a system that was getting erratic.

Because mechanical indexed shifting relies on perfect cable tension, shifting systems included fine tuners in the form of barrel adjusters somewhere in the cable run for all rear -- and most front -- derailleurs. Lately, barrel adjusters have become a necessity for front shifting because the indexing requires higher tension than you can get just by pulling on the cable as hard as you can when you hook it up.

At the same time as shifting systems have evolved a need for super high tension, the trend to run all the cables inside the frame has led to systems that can only use 4mm housing, because the cable stops are holes built into the frame and do not accommodate -- or need -- a ferrule. However, with inline adjusters I could reduce the 4mm section to the bare minimum needed to enter the frame, and put 5mm from the shifter to the adjuster. With ferrules on the housing, 4mm could go in one end, and 5mm in the other. So the bike industry introduced 4mm adjusters that take naked housing with no ferrule. But they still made the 5mm adjusters as they did before. I could sub in a whole new adjuster.

Not anymore. The last 5mm adjusters I ordered in blissful confidence were sized for 5mm housing without ferrules.

Linear-wire shift housing has always needed a strong ferrule on each end to keep the stiff wires from poking through under the pressure of the shift cable tightening. We used to see ferrule failure a lot in the cheesy plastic ferrules on 4mm housing. The extruding wires would burrow into the shifter, making shifting maddeningly inconsistent, and sometimes even damaging the mechanism. That has gradually faded away as we see more metal 4mm ferrules and perhaps some reformulated plastic that is less prone to punch through. But that does not do away with the problem of drag from the skinny housing. The skinny housing is often applied over thicker cables with coatings that are supposed to make them slide better, but usually end up turning into lint in there.

The answer has always been 5mm housing and a 1.1mm stainless slick shift wire with no coatings of any kind. That's it. No secret formulas, no chemical agents, just the largest available housing with the skinniest available cable. And now you can't have it. As cassettes get more crowded and spacing between cogs gets smaller, smaller deviations make a noticeable difference. The bike industry once again makes riding less convenient and more expensive.

I haven't sold a bike since 1992

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

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

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

Four millimeter shift housing is like deliberately constricting your tendons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More service activity

By the end of the week, it's all a blur.

A road bike customer asked whether we could get him short cranks because he's got some sort of calcified tendon problem, and can't bend his knee far enough to get around a pedal stroke on 170mm crank arms.

A quick dip into internet research brought me immediately to Bikesmith Design, a machinist who specializes in exactly what our customer needs. In fact, our customer's brother or brother-in-law or friend or something went to an event in Minneapolis years ago for HPVs and met the machinist, who was already working on shorter cranks because HPVs need them to fit into the confined spaces within fairings on recumbent human-powered speed vehicles.

I got the machinist and the customer talking directly to each other so I could get on with other items in the deluge. Eventually, a couple of sets of little cranks arrived, with detailed instructions for our customer to follow as he explored the limits of his bad leg. One set was 85mm long. Mark, the machinist, suggested that the customer use the 85s on a trainer, because they weren't strong enough for real rides on hilly roads. There was a detailed process to determine what the final crank length should be, as well as a set of 100mm cranks that were fully cleared for road riding. The customer opted instead to have us mount the 100s right away, so he could go try them on the road.

Short cranks don't just lower the top of the stroke, they bring the bottom right up close, too. I raised the seat as much as I could, but the post wasn't long enough to cover 70mm. I sent the customer away with a longer post so he could make the swap after feeling out the new riding position. His fork is cut really short, so the best I could do to bring the bars up was flip the stem. If he reconfigures the bike permanently he will need to replace the fork to get a longer steerer. I don't recommend steep rise stems, and I definitely wouldn't put a big clunky stem raiser on the carbon steerer of the existing fork.

The owner of the Specialized Turbo Como 3.0 ebike we recently assembled came by a few days later and said that she'd had a problem with it not running right. "I just turned it off and back on again," she said. "Then it was fine." Hilarious. The bikes are so computerized that now you can use the classic advice: "Hello, IT department, have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

We assembled another $10,000 mountain bike. This one was shipped here by its owner so he could ride with his buddy, for whom we had built up the new one a couple of weeks ago. Here was a bike that he had owned and ridden for a while, and it shifted like crap. These wide-range drive trains with the 42- or 50-tooth large cogs make all kinds of noises and move really stiffly anyway, but this one looked like it had never been adjusted properly. Nothing was bent, but it threw the chain right over into the spokes without hesitation.

When the owner picked that bike up, he spent the entire time with his phone up to his ear as he monitored an important call.

The heavy hitters are here. One guy called asking for "several road bikes." I was stunned into silence. The pandemic bike frenzy has been big enough to get a few minutes of national news acknowledgement, as well as lots of coverage in the cycling media. But the caller might have been spending a few weeks or months on a private tropical island, having a cleanse and a digital fast. I gathered my wits. They may be few, but they scatter far when I drop them.

"You said 'several road bikes.' Is that to rent or to buy?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. To buy. All of my kids are big enough now that I wanted to get them nice road bikes that they won't grow out of."

I explained about the current shortage. Because I believe in providing as complete a picture as possible, I always start by explaining that the bike industry has been in decline for close to 20 years. Next I point out that the coronavirus broke out first where everything gets manufactured these days, torpedoing production before interfering with shipping and distribution as it swept around the globe. Thus, already small planned inventories were reduced even further because factories couldn't meet production targets, just as the public suddenly decided to rediscover bike riding after a long period of neglect. And they all got here a couple of months before you did, my unfortunate friend.

That may seem like a lot of unnecessary detail, but anything less makes the bike industry look sloppy and negligent, and retailers look like slackers. The bike industry is tech-obsessed and self-sabotaging, but they're not sloppy or negligent about it. It isn't even entirely their fault that the public lost interest at the end of the 20th Century. The mountain bike boom had already lasted almost twice as long as the 1970s ten speed boom did. The true believers in the surviving form of mountain biking were always a minority, but they were firmly enough addicted to form the nucleus of the addict pool that the industry farms today. The general population changed hobbies the way they always do.

Now they're back. We'll see where it goes. I doubt if it will last a year, let alone ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, our particular shop operates in an area where most of the categories have attracted a handful of adherents who come in on a regular basis to keep our brain cells challenged.

The owner of a Yamaha smokeless moped that he bought last year from somewhere else had had it shipped to us to assemble. This year, he brought it in because "it's making a grinding noise when I pedal hard." This is the same guy who didn't notice that he had Biopace chainrings for the first ten years that he owned his mountain bike, and then brought it in one day concerned because the chainrings had somehow turned oval. It was conceivable that he had only just now noticed that a mid-motor ebike makes noises when the motor engages. However, grinding might be a sign of something actually amiss. He mentioned that he'd read things on line from owners of the same brand who complained of grinding noises.

The Yamaha is light enough that I can actually lift it into the work stand without my little block and tackle rig, as long as it's early in my work week, and I got almost a good night's sleep the night before.

There was play in the bottom bracket. Or was it the bottom bracket? The crank axle disappears into the motor housing, engaging who knows what in there. I could see the face of a sealed bearing on each side. The play wasn't in those bearings. The motor itself was shifting. Under hard pedaling, this could cause gears to engage improperly. The owner said that he had tightened the mounting bolts and the noise had become worse.

I put a wrench on the bolts. They did not want to turn. They seemed bottomed right out. So I undid them, greased the dry threads, and reinstalled them. They torqued down properly instead of binding up. The motor no longer wiggled. There was a faint trace of play in the bottom bracket bearings themselves, but I couldn't do much about that. It was almost imaginary.

The bike made no alarming noises on a test ride. I called the customer to report that we had finished with it, and suggested that he should start a warranty claim with the original dealer if it made any further noises. I had also changed the chain, which was worn almost to the end of the gauge, and absolutely black with grimy lube.

The rate of repair check-ins seems to have slowed. In any normal season we would get these pauses, sometimes long enough to be alarming, but this is not a normal season. There's a blend of exuberant wealth, sober caution, and reckless, pent-up sociability. The people with money seem very happy. The reckless are ready to run out and embrace life, which sounds great until you consider how they are also exporting death and expecting everyone to be okay with that. Color me cautious, but I'm not going to bother to confront anyone outside of my job, because I don't need to get coughed on by some psychopath.

What Price Respect?

Google fed me a link to this opinion piece in Cycling Industry News, titled, "It's time for the bike industry to have some self respect." In it, James Stanfill president of the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association, lays out an excruciatingly detailed case in favor of continuing training and qualification standards.

Stanfill makes some great points about what makes bike shop work a temporary phase for workers who pass through the industry on their way to something that actually pays decently. However, in his call for retailers to reallocate their budgets to cover the frequent training and retraining needed to keep up with modern technology's rapid pace of obsolescence he assumes that a shop has the money to reallocate. He also assumes that consumers will be willing to pay the higher prices that go along with a general rise in overhead. Bike shops don't have CEOs making billions who can give up their bloated compensation to redistribute the wealth to the workers. The industry as a whole will have to figure out how to get customers to respect them, before we can afford to adorn ourselves with our own new self respect.

Key to that "self respect" is Stanfill's assertion that shops need to be able to measure and present their qualifications to assure entities like insurance companies that they are meeting standards of safety and competence when providing highly complex equipment to the public. He also calls on mechanics to seek professional training and certification where available to make themselves more desirable to this new breed of self-respecting shop. Be ready to fork out on your own for a recognized training course because you take that much pride in being a bike mechanic. What was once a pretty good gig for someone with a modicum of mechanical aptitude is attempting to become a career path akin to auto or aircraft mechanics.

In capitalism, if you don't have plenty of money you are a failure and deserve to die. But in the real world, many areas with a small population have been served by small shops that were able to subsist for decades on a pretty slim margin with incremental investments in tools, and an experiential approach to learning about new things.

For a century, bike shops came in all sizes. Frequently they were small places, sometimes ill-lit, and merchandized by people more attuned to wrenches and grease than to point of sale marketing. Experienced mechanics could train new mechanics at the work stand. What mattered was the quality of the merchandise and the mechanical work, not whether they had a stunning atrium, or row on row of fashionable clothing. If you rode a bike a lot, you appreciated the rough practicality of basic black wool shorts.

All things evolve. Changes can bring improvements as well as unhelpful complexities. They are driven by the desires of existing enthusiasts, but also by public interest. When bikes were simple and people were content with it, a rise or fall in demand only meant changing the rate of production. Things would go obsolete as better things replaced them, but within a narrow range of functions. Weird derailleur systems gave way to the parallelogram, and then to the slant parallelogram. Caliper, cantilever, and drum brakes coexisted using the same basic leverage ratio. Every system of a bike was closely enough related to its forebears that you could figure out a lot based on what you already knew.  You could get deeper into it and become an inventive machinist if you wanted to, but you didn't have to.

Mountain biking pushed a lot of improvements in durability and function as bikes were subjected to consistently rough use. Prior to that bikes had received plenty of mistreatment and neglect, but they weren't advertised for the purpose, the way mountain bikes were. The bike industry had to back its claims with machinery that could withstand the kind of boisterousness that the pioneers of clunking had established as the standard. On the road or trail, user groups appeared to have a contentious relationship. In research and development, designers were borrowing from both categories to improve each of them. Versatile riders were doing both on- and off-road riding to improve their abilities.

All analyses lead back to the stresses placed on retailers and repair facilities by relentlessly mutating technology and category specialization. So I won't flog that again. I merely note that your chances of finding a place that can take care of your particular bike needs get slimmer and slimmer in the face of economic reality. Bike shops will become dependent on climate and population density to maintain a large enough size to remain viable in all categories, including smokeless mopeds. In addition, consumer costs will rise to reflect the greater expense the retailer faces. Training and higher wages cost money. That money comes entirely from consumer spending. When consumers can no longer afford to spend in sufficient volume, they will receive less of something in return, whether it's product selection, service quality, service speed, or the convenience of having any kind of shop within 20 miles.

For the moment, such vast numbers of archaic bikes remain in use that a small shop can eke out a living from the customers who need work on those. As they inevitably dwindle away, the next wave of well-used crap that replaces them will have increasingly esoteric needs, more difficult to meet.

To see ourselves as others see us

Hard to believe that anyone in the technical mountain biking community bothers to read any of my rants, but apparently some do. Hey there.

Things written or said for rhetorical effect will focus on specific aspects that support the central thesis. It’s the basis for editorials, legal arguments, and marketing. The benefits of a drug are repeated loudly and clearly in the commercial, while the side effects are recited in a hasty blurb in a low tone.

When I say things that are true, bluntly summing up actual events, it might compose a picture that looked different from someone else’s angle. This is the unsettling effect of seeing ourselves as others see us. That doesn’t mean that everyone sees you that way, only that the dots can connect to create that image. But I went too far, and I apologize.

As an unsociable person, I lack the instinctive understanding of the needs and desires of sociable people. In every activity to which I was exposed growing up, advancement in the activity itself was primary. The social aspects were secondary. It was an unrealistic point of view. For a few hard chargers, achievement is a primary goal and benefit. But among normal people, the social side is much more crucial. It explains a lot about where I’ve landed, and the rough and desolate landscape in which my life will end.

In the case of off-road biking in any season, I’m not alone in my laments but I’m certainly in the minority. Around here I’m definitely alone in criticizing the avalanche of expensive and complicated equipment burying small shops and cutting the tech support cord for riders trying to get a long service life out of their stuff. I don’t see that it generates much public support or sympathetic interest for cycling in general. But I suppose that nothing can do that. We might as well each ride in our chosen style and let the world burn if it's going to.

As stated in the post before this one, cycling is being gentrified. Its greater value as a tool of social evolution is falling victim to its short-term attractiveness to an industry bent on exploiting it as a consumerist bait station. The technofascist element has its hooks into every category. It has the most to work with off-road, followed by high end road and its offspring, “gravel biking.” But the collateral damage shows up in the reprehensible quality of middle and low end componentry as seen on a lot of path bikes, hybrids, and entry level mountain bikes from companies that should be ashamed to have their logo on something like that. Like an asteroid on a converging trajectory, nothing can stop it. Actually, more like the deferred consequences of environmental destruction, it would take too many people to understand and agree all at once. We would prefer an asteroid, that we could maybe blow up with one quick nuke and go back to enjoying ourselves.

Specialized strong arm

Big Bicycle is always putting the squeeze on independent shops. I don't know how it was in the 1970s boom, but in the 1990s, large brands like Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale put increasing pressure on shops to make large preseason commitments and meet hefty financial thresholds.

Even though technofascism and lack of industry advocacy has fragmented the market, corporate titans are still more interested in their cut from shop income than they are in the realities of daily operations on the frontiers of bike shop territory.

The latest intrusion from Specialized is their insistence that every dealer sign up for automatic bill payment, so that the Big S can suck money directly from the shop account for the full balance due. You get a few days' warning in case you have to ask for some indulgence, but the default is that they get to drain your coffers on their schedule. They feed upstream from every other expense you have, unless some other vendor has sunk a suction line that draws earlier in the month.

The rationale for such things is always the same: If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. Of course you will sell through by the deadline. Doesn't Specialized do everything they can to support their dealers and enhance sales?

Everyone knows that the restaurant business is tough. What are people going to feel like eating? Are they going to want to consume all of those perishable items you had to buy, or have you created a walk-in full of expensive compost? Fortunes can change at the speed of a blackening banana in hot weather. You can see the good times melt like ice cream in a power failure. Spoilage in specialty retail takes longer and does not generate as much obvious odor and muck. But we get stranded just the same. What will the fickle public feel like doing this summer? What unrequested innovation will turn expensive leftover floor stock into a clearance item and require that we buy more tools and watch more instructional videos as we record the loss?

Shops that change their focus in the winter face the added challenge of all the winter vendors playing the same financial games.

I know from previous experience that some shops play games with their vendors. Who knows how many of us have been technically bankrupt for years, dodging from debt to debt to keep from facing the fact that we will never break even? I started wondering way back around 1980 how many people called themselves millionaires because a million people owed them a dollar. The job that lured me to New Hampshire was the brain child of a guy who would purchase equipment, get the delivery guys to do a quickie, half-assed setup, and then use the equipment while withholding payment because he never got a proper setup. To this day I don't know if he was a fully calculating con man or just an idiot. Guys like that make suppliers try to secure their receivables. We all pay the price. But there is also legitimately hard luck. The con man/idiot publisher claimed it was all hard luck. That still left everyone queueing up in bankruptcy court to salvage whatever they could.

It's a hard world. Did you know that if your employer writes you a rubber paycheck, your bank will charge you for taking bad paper? Here is your lifeline, your just reward for services rendered, your ticket to be a productive citizen, but you get screwed if the "job creator" who paid you isn't really good for it. That's a sickening thrill. Then the checks you wrote against it start to bounce, and the fees really pile up.

In a diversified small business, we're always trying to balance the costs and rewards of each facet. While cross-country skiing and bicycling are pretty stupid sectors to remain in, they're not entirely dead. Cross-country is on life support worldwide, but bicycles are the transportation of the future, once the greedheads manage to collapse both the economy and the environment. We may have to learn to make our own stuff in a charcoal-heated forge, but pedal power will endure after motors can no longer be maintained. As humans breed and breed, new bike motors are manufactured every second. But, for the moment, bikes are still a luxury item and a toy. The corporations that market them look for customers with disposable income, and shops that know how to harvest a lot of it.

Trash talk

The 1990s were ugly. The sudden influx of cash from the mountain bike boom led to a surge in incompetence and dishonesty. People would drive many miles to check out different bike shops, in search of a little lower price or a particular brand that the magazines or their friends told them was the only one to buy. Shops a hundred miles apart -- or more -- would badmouth each other’s work.

The bike business attracts competitive people. I showered plenty of napalm on other shops’ bad workmanship. The apparent easy money in the mountain bike market led to a surge in "bike shops" and increased bike sales through more generalized outdoor sports stores. Between the unprepared merchants and mechanics, and the bike industry's own rush to dump poorly designed and barely tested products into a market loaded with consumers unable to judge the merits of the so-called new improvements, there was plenty to criticize.

With the fragmentation of the bike market, all that seemed to have subsided. Overall participation dropped, and the riders who continued to ride fell into multiple categories, none of them dominant. Addicted bike collectors with sufficient funds and time might ride in several categories, but those riders are a minority. Special interest riders seek the shops that specialize in their interest, or patronize large shops that can afford to have stock in each category, and staff to cover the range of complexities. You hope so, anyway. A lot of it is just absorbing and regurgitating industry propaganda, as it was in the darkest years of the mountain bike boom. There was no time to study it all in depth, as it blasted out of the firehose. The term "retro-geezer" was coined at that time, to describe cranks like me, who critiqued the avalanche of temperamental junk that creates six problems to solve one.

The parallel lines of complicated machinery ridden hard by novice enthusiasts is ushering in a little resurgence of trash talk. Our shop is in a town with a year-round population under 7,000. Of those, only a small handful will use anything non-motorized for recreation or transportation. This is America, and normal people drive. We draw from surrounding towns, but they have even smaller populations. This makes it impossible for us to stock in depth in any category except the most basic recreational path bikes, and even that market seems to have gone a little soft this year. When one of our customers does business voluntarily or involuntarily with another shop, they sometimes share that other shop's scathing assessments of our work and knowledge. And I silently critique every bike that comes through my work station from some other mechanic's hands. I just don't bother to share my observations with the customers. I share them profanely and profusely with my fellow mechanics, on days when there are any, but that's as far as it goes.

Trash talk was a symptom of the hyper-competitive bike market of the 1990s. Now it is a symptom of the competitiveness born of famine. But competitiveness itself is a symptom of the belief that there's something to win. Part of what has driven fragmentation is habitat loss. Bikes are looking for places to thrive, or at least survive. It's Darwinian speciation, as the basic pedal-powered ancestor adapts to specific niches: varying levels of technical trail; gravel roads; sedate paths; roads; BMX tracks; freestyle parks. Shops don't shape customer interest. Customer interest shapes shops. We fight a constant battle to remain competent and relevant.

Revenge of the nerds

I've had a to do a lot of counseling in the past week or so, helping customers who had state-of-the-art ten speed drive trains and now find themselves relegated to the mediocre masses when they need parts. As I explained how the bike industry is not their friend it struck me how the tone changed during the 1990s from its earlier cheerful bike nerd persona at the end of the '80s.

As I have posted previously, promotional literature for the early mass-produced mountain bikes actually suggested that the owner of one of these affordable fun machines might start "riding more and driving less." But as the market exploded, bringing in unprecedented amounts of cash and public interest, the tone shifted quickly to technological hype. The 1990s brought the No Fear craze, and the rise of the badass image. Mountain biking events still presented themselves as welcoming to all abilities, but the range of abilities was rapidly widening, with those on the crumbling ridge crest of the leading edge getting the most publicity.

Early mountain bike evolution refined the parameters of a rigid frame, retreating steadily from the relatively slack geometry of early models to something with snappier handling. Roomy rear triangles shrank to only sufficient clearance for the tires of the time, to make the bikes stronger climbers. Head angles north of 70 degrees were the norm. Some might sneer at this as "roadie influence." I never tire of pointing out that the originators of mountain biking were roadies, and all-around bike nerds. The exclusive category specialists came in once things were rolling, to beef up the BMX influence and feed off of the anti-roadie sentiment that is always too ready to spring up. In any case, race courses shaped the bikes and the bikes shaped the race courses. The tighter, steeper frames also worked better for mixed-media riding. That made sense because so many people were using the bike for all their riding needs. People were dumping nice road bikes for cheap, cheap money as a down payment on a mountain bike. Other people, who had not owned a bike in years, were buying in and finding that they liked riding more than just trails. The bike nerds almost got their wish. But category fracturing had already taken hold.

Even as suspension was in its infancy, the sponsored riders and ambitious racers were pushing for bikes to meet their specific desires. The downhill crowd had the most stringent need for ballistic missiles that they could control at the greatest possible speed. But effective suspension had a strong appeal for everyone on rough surfaces. And before that, Shimano had been pushing the Shifter Wars, and dominating OEM spec until the SRAM lawsuit in 1990 threw a speed bump in front of them. The industry borrowed from the computer industry and drug dealers for its business model. Both of these models consume the consumer. They are hostile to longevity of both products and users. Was this in part motivated by bitterness that the peace and freedom of the original simple bike had been cast aside for gizmos and bravado? Or was it purely motivated by simple greed?

Looking back over the history of human inventiveness in general, humans invented items that made their lives easier. A stick, a rock, a vine, these mutated into levers, spears, arrows, hammers, axes, string, rope, and so on. A tool would be made to perform a function. A better tool would displace the earlier version. Before industrialization, mass production called for numerous artisans performing similar tasks or coordinating their efforts, but the goal was to make life easier. If a job could be done in less time, that meant you could do more jobs or have more of your irreplaceable time to spend on other things. Even well into the age of industrialization, things were built to last, even if that was just accidental. I was born in time to experience the end of the Era of Durability. It really did happen, although little sign of it remains today.

On the consumer side, you didn't want to waste your time and resources on an item that didn't hold up. There was no Amazon to deliver new crap by drone to whatever GPS coordinates you provide. There wasn't a Dollar Store or a big box retailer every 15 miles. A time will come when that is true again. We may be back to sticks and rocks and vines by then, or we may simply rediscover the concepts of durability and longevity.

The current waves of obsolescence may be the revenge of the nerds. Even if they didn't intend it that way, it's working out that way. Before 12-speed has fully penetrated the market, here comes 13-speed. Shimano had patent drawings for 14 back in the 1990s. Tinfoil chains indeed. Prepare to be penetrated, market, over and over. The fact that it's asinine and destructive and wasteful has never mattered. What matters is giving the tech-obsessed market segments one fix after another until they die or go into rehab.

Time sneaks by

From 1989 to 1999, bikes evolved rapidly, but stuff from the 1970s and '80s wasn't impossibly obsolete. Some frame dimensions had changed, but a steel frame from the early '80s could be cold set to the new rear hub width fairly easily. A rider could make a few upgrades without having to invest completely in a new bike. Mountain bikes -- being a newer category -- were evolving more dramatically, but a rider could still keep a bike going for quite a few years with decent care and a few spot improvements.

Shifting systems and full suspension brought an end to this. Shifter compatibility was already making life difficult from the first introduction of Shimano's Rapidfire and road STI products. Competing companies each had different standards, all vying for market control. The retro-grouch mechanic can only do so much to throw a wrench into the bike industry's plans. And the emergence of full suspension really put the pressure on everyone's wallets trying to keep up with the state of the art.

As the 21st Century dawned, riders who had dropped out for various reasons would return, from school, or military service, or family commitments, or busy work schedules, looking to get back into some of the fun they remembered.  I call these people Van Winkles, after the Washington Irving character who slept for 20 years. They are always astounded by how much technology has changed and prices have gone up since the last time they looked at a bike. A few of them embrace the new and shell out for the new stuff. A good percentage of them just junk the bike and find something else to do for fun. Or they buy lower-quality stuff because it's "new," so it must be better than fixing something old.

This season has already brought several Van Winkles out of the forest. It's interesting to look at the old equipment and compare it to what it evolved into.

This 1995-ish Rockshox Quadra fork was made during the transition from forks that could be fully disassembled to forks with one-piece crown and stanchions and one-piece lower tube assemblies. The crown and stanchions on this generation of Rockshox are bonded, but the lower legs are not only removable, but interchangeable right and left, so you didn't have to keep track of that during service. The innards are identical in both sides.

Because the legs are interchangeable, the fork ends have dual "lawyer's lips" to retain the wheel if the quick release skewer falls open. Not only that, the inner set will help retain the wheel if a skewer outright fails. You could view this as an evolutionary step toward the through-axle.

Another Van Winkle brought in a Cannondale F900 with a Lefty fork, from the early 21st Century. The fork appears to be functioning okay, but it has a brake problem.

The early disc brake era was marked by the same kind of experimentation as the early suspension era. And Cannondale was notorious for trying to design their own shit from the ground up. Anyone remember their motorcycle? Don't feel bad if you don't. The unfortunate experiment was very brief. According to what I've read, it wasn't brief enough. So this fairly okay hard tail mountain bike with its weird, one-legged fork and the proprietary hub that goes with it has CODA disc brakes. I think you can actually find pads for them, but not much else. They made a huge secret of their brake fluid formulation (mineral oil). Their literature at the time said it was "designed by NASA!"

The front brake on this F900 has lost its will to live. We should be able to find a brake that will mount to the tabs on the fork, but Cannondale decided to use a 171mm rotor. What the hell kind of size is that? The rear is 151. And they mount with four bolts. So changing out the front brake will mean changing out the front wheel. You can get 6-bolt Lefty hubs. You can get carbon fiber Lefty forks that get great reviews. So this machine can be recovered...for a price.

Here's where my Van Winkleism comes into play. Once we stopped selling Cannondale, I stopped paying attention to all their weird bullshit. I worked a little with the early CODA brakes and Lefty forks. But when we dropped the line I was happy not to have to explain and apologize for a lot of their spec choices. The Headshok design was very smooth, but too limited in its travel to appeal to the emerging class of rider that would settle for nothing less than 100mm of travel, preferably 120. The Lefty was a way to move the mechanism out of the head tube, where it could stretch its legs -- er, leg -- a bit more.

Even though the Lefty is still in production, forget the 26-inch wheels. Looks like the hubs you can get and that stub axle are still compatible, though. I can build this guy a wheel on a six-bolt hub. It all comes down to money. Does he want to do the rear wheel at the same time, to get ahead of the inevitable failure down the road? That has a 151mm rotor, also mounted with four bolts, so it would require another wheel replacement. Or maybe we can get someone to machine some 160 rotors to fit that four-bolt mounting. That sounds practical, doesn't it?

The rider fits the classic profile of a person who invested in something state of the art, intending to enjoy it for a long time, and then got diverted by life and never got to use it much. The bike has storage dust on it, but no trail dirt. The rear cassette is shiny and clean. So he wants to get something out of his investment now. It will be the usual treasure hunt. I'll gather information and lay out his options.

A lot of mountain bike riders around here had not been cyclists before the mountain bike craze, and a large percentage of them did not become the kind of addicts that the industry mistakenly identifies as its best bet for high-volume sales. Did the heads of the bike companies want to shrink it back to aficionados with whom they could identify, and chase the rabble out? Or did they really believe that their expensive and excruciatingly sophisticated products were so beguiling that the briefest exposure would trigger an irresistible craving?

Civilians believe that they will find expertise in the shops, and that a high price always indicates a worthwhile investment. Through the 1980s, especially in road bikes, that was largely true. I have a couple of frames, and a lot of componentry, that dates from later than the '80s, but it's all pretty retro stuff. My current road bike frame was built in the 1980s. This is the perception that most non-cyclists have of bicycles: simple, lovable machines that they can own for years and keep in shape with minimal maintenance. Even riders who bought into the mountain bike boom in the 1990s didn't think about how all of those moving parts and sub-assemblies in the suspension, and the fidgety-widgety disc brakes brought with them perishable substances like shock oil, brake fluid, and elastomers. They didn't spend enough time with the bike industry to realize how they were being herded and fleeced.

In defense of the bike industry, they're only partly soulless bean counters. They're also smitten with their technology, and love to solve the problems that the most obsessed and hard-driving riders are encountering. I remember an article in either a consumer publication or Bicycle Retailer back in the mid '90s, complaining that the industry was focusing too hard on racers and not enough on the people who were just out for a good time on a mix of technical trails and milder paths and roads. Riders wanted to be able to mix it up. Early mountain bikes would do that a lot better than the technical marvels of today. Nowadays, if you want a go-anywhere off-road bike you have to know that you're probably looking for a "bikepacking" model rather than the catch-all "mountain bike" that no longer exists. And your bikepacker model will have more piercings than a goth teen with a big allowance. They're keeping the braze-on industry in business.

In another archaeological moment, El Queso Grande dug up this publication from 1990, laying out the perilous predicament of mountain biking in the USA (mostly the western USA) as a result of rude and reckless riding by those hooligans on fat tires.

Because I was on the East Coast and completely out of touch with the industry from 1981 to 1989, I knew very little about how mountain biking was evolving. I had a racing bike, a touring bike, and a commuter fixed gear. I knew mountain bikes existed, but I hadn't been close to many of them.

The fixed gear was my path and trail bike, to the extent that I found anything like that in Annapolis, Maryland. One of my commute options bushwhacked from a dead-end street onto the grounds of some Navy housing, but it wasn't as much fun as threading the corners on the regular streets, and not much shorter, either. I didn't look for trails as such until the cyclocross series started around 1986, and we all built ourselves some form of 'cross bike. Even then I could take it or leave it. Only moving to actual mountains made an actual mountain bike interesting.

Here in New Hampshire, there was a little bit of friction from a few landowners, but we had no shortage of places to ride. Event promoters ran into snags when they tried to direct large numbers of participants onto a course and discovered who actually owned what, and how they felt about a thundering herd rather than a trickle of riders. The same thing happened when riders would try to produce a guidebook for their area. Other than that, the problems were generally limited to riders trying to use designated wilderness areas in the National Forest, and the first few unsanctioned singletrack builders here and there. I was interested to see how early mountain bikers managed to offend existing trail users the way the invasive fat bikers have been riding over the toes of cross-country skiers in a microcosm of the first wave of mountain biking many decades ago. Everything is smaller than it used to be, except for the bikes themselves.

The answer for three-season off-road riders has been to acquire land or use rights, and build their own closed courses. Fat bikers are following suit, either by using existing connections to the three-season rider category or by developing their own landowner relations. Before you can have a trail, you need a place to put it. That's why you can't really afford to piss anyone off. A strong arm only gets you as far as your arm will reach, for as long as your strength lasts. The promoters today are stressing the economic benefits of attracting people who have already been willing to shell out at least a thousand bucks for their ride, and are eager to find places to use it. And a thousand bucks is the ante. The real players are plunking down twice that much, and more. Lots of people have that kind of coin, right?

Fewer and fewer every year. But don't believe the dying canary on the floor of the mine. It just has a negative attitude.