Shocking TV images, frightful news stories, skis to tune

 As American democracy teeters on the brink of self destruction, we're still renting ice skates and sharpening and waxing downhill skis and snowboards, and working on the odd and occasional fat bike. Potential customers still come in hoping to find snowshoes, cross-country skis, and even bicycles in their size. It's hardly a mob scene since the hot rain on Christmas obliterated three feet of snow in 24 hours, but people are finding things to do. The snowshoes were gone before the end of December, but we've actually managed to put together some cross-country ski sets for lucky Cinderellas who come in and find that our selection of glass slippers happens to fit them.

The contrast is strange. Very little of the violent political unrest seeps through to us, despite the persistence of flag-waving disciples of authoritarianism who still keep their banners aloft. It's been interesting to see some of the really long-stranding ones disappear, though. My middle finger is getting a lot less of a workout on the commute now. Instead I beam a little message of thanks that they finally found a line they wouldn't cross. Either that or the dang thing just rotted from a few years of UV exposure, and they didn't bother to replace it. But that can't be true of one of them, which was brandy new right before the election in November. It actually came down a while ago. I forget which atrocity had just preceded it. The comings and goings of the flag and signs at that house were an enigma anyway.

I don't want to find out how long we would be able to continue our business more or less as usual after the country became a fascist dictatorship. I'm afraid that we would barely notice. The heroes of resistance in World War II faced a different kind of conflict. Weapons were more primitive and the battle space was still somewhat defined. The fight appeared long and dangerous and difficult, but Allied forces were on the move. It was just a matter of holding out and helping out as much as possible in occupied territory. But there have been tremendous advances in killing hardware and sadism since then. Not that sadists have invented anything new, but there seem to be more of them, and they can communicate readily to coalesce in locations that currently do not depend on declared control of territory. No place is behind enemy lines. People who want to start something can just get in their trucks or hire some buses and go. Since their political ideology is founded on ignorance, paranoia, and greed, they offer no plan that can be critiqued, other than short-term plans to do harm to elements of society or specific individuals that they believe threaten them.

Racial justice matters little to communities that are basically all white. It's easy for a business owner in a situation like that to say that he doesn't care who is in office as long as he can take care of himself and his family. I could never understand the virulent racism in lily-white northern New England. What the hell do you people know about having to get along with other races? They rag on French Canadians, too. Frenchman jokes abound. The south hasn't gotten over the Civil War. New England still hasn't gotten over the Seven Years' War.

I wonder how many northerners went to fight for the Confederacy during the first Civil War. Based on the attitudes I see today, I would expect a lot of them would do it now.

Are you prepared for the civil war?

 A teaser for a site called The Washington Examiner said that 61% of Americans believe that we are headed for a civil war, and 52% are preparing.

I wonder how many of the people "preparing" understand that average residential home construction will not stop a high-powered rifle bullet. Are more than half of the people in the country up-armoring their homes, boarding up their windows to rifle slits, stockpiling food and water for a siege, installing fire suppression systems so that they can't be burned out of their refuges, or even installing deep bunkers that can withstand Billy Bob's improvised explosive devices? Or are they just buying a semiautomatic rifle in stylish black or camo, a few hundred rounds of ammo, maybe visiting the range once or twice, and feeling manlier as a result? I know that a depressingly sizable contingent looks forward to gunning down anyone they deem undesirable, but I don't know if that will foam up into the kind of endless bloodbath that most modern civil wars become.

Meanwhile, at my job, I see only people preparing to occupy their little refuges in New England, far from the infectious crowds, and work remotely at their jobs, as they have been doing since March. The backwoods revolutionary crowd does live exactly there around here -- in the back woods -- but around Wolfe City the vibe is distinctly more upscale and insulated by walls of money. They are preparing for safe outdoor activities, seasonally adjusted. Incoming browsers ask about snowshoes and cross-country skis now, more than bikes. At the same time, riders keep riding and breaking things.

One energetic mountain bike rider dropped off his Trek full suspension bike because the freehub had suddenly stopped engaging, so he could not propel the bike forward. When I opened the Bontrager hub, I saw that the pawls had all come out of their little recesses, and two of the three springs had disappeared. That was strange, because the freehub body had not been loose. The tiny springs either managed to escape as I separated the pieces of the hub, or were pulverized in whatever catastrophe had dislodged the pawls in the first place. I did not know whether the failure had been gradual, with the engagement getting progressively less positive, or instantaneous. The rider, spending virtually all of his riding time on rough surfaces that cause plenty of jolts and irregularities in power transfer, might not have noticed among all of those distractions, until the whole thing broke loose.

The teeth of the ratchet ring inside the hub shell looked undamaged. The pawls themselves did not look dulled or fractured. It looked like I could reassemble everything and get it working if I could replace the missing springs.

Searching for spring donors, I finally settled on Schrader valve cores. The springs were the right diameter. I could cut them to length.

They were a little finicky to install because very little holds them in place until the ratchet mechanism is nestled into the ratchet ring.

Feeling hopeful, I rotated and pressed the reassembled mechanism into its seat. Incidentally, the cogs are still in place because they had bitten so deeply into the aluminum freehub body that they would not come off. My attempt to pry them loose had dislodged the whole freehub body in the first place. It's a bad design for mountain bikers, especially large and rambunctious ones, but it's normal for the "quality" that the bike industry offers to its weight-conscious clientele. Ooooh. Aaaaalloy...

It all went together after an initial fumble with a hub seal that knocked things apart on the way in. I reinstalled the wheel and turned the cranks. The whole cassette rotated. I opened things up again to see the pawls out of their seats, clumped together. With the freehub removed again I was able to wedge a screwdriver between the axle and the ratchet ring and move the ring inside the hub. The ring is only a press fit, with no splines or other extra retention devices. I thought about drilling through it in several places to install pins of some kind, but this was turning into too much of a project. The customer decided to take the bike in its current inoperable condition and investigate options through the Trek dealer and internet shopping for replacement parts.

Lighter repair demand gave me a chance to dig into the crashed Pedego that came in a couple of months ago. The owner takes a light touch, which facilitates my total lack of enthusiasm for delving into smokeless mopeds except when courtesy and necessity plant one right in front of me. I finally followed up on the phone numbers he provided. Weirdly, the first one turned out to be some sort of telemarketing scam. It started with automated prompts like your typical phone queue, but every time I pressed the requisite key to get to the next level I got another advertisement asking for personal information. I bailed out of that and tried the other number. That got me right in. After no more than two layers of "press 1 for doodah or 2 for day," I got to a very nice lad named Luke, who was extremely informative. I did not drop the company president's name, but I did use the bike owner's name to help Luke find the service ticket and hook us up magically with credit terms and dealer pricing. Either that or they'll bill the bike's owner directly somehow, but either way he didn't ask me for money. And he did tell me how to get the battery case apart, and extricate it from the rack.

Which wires do I disconnect to get the main cable out of the battery case? If I master this I can apply for the bomb squad.

In the hands of a Pedego dealer with a full staff of trained technicians and a parts department full of, you know, parts, repairing this bike would not have taken more than a day or two. However, just for this one customer alone we would have to have dealer accounts with about half a dozen brands, spanning close to 20 years. He's commendably patient about how long it takes to get sophisticated equipment serviced way out here in the colonies. Then again, it's been his choice all along to embrace rapidly evolving technology and bring it here to the edge of civilization. It takes months to get parts for the African Queen delivered all the way to the Belgian Congo.

Setting aside the Pedego until the parts arrive, I moved on to some basic adjustments on a fairly recent, mid-grade, hard-tail mountain bike. It has SRAM trigger shifters and X-5 front derailleur. The derailleur needed several adjustments: height, angle, and cable tension. Each has to be perfect with this setup to reduce -- not eliminate -- the chain rubbing on the derailleur cage in the middle ring. The best you can hope for is to make it quiet on either the high gear or low gear end of the range. To achieve this, the cable cannot be tight. It has to have the perfect amount of slack. "The right amount of drape," as George used to say. To avoid using up too much of the threaded adjuster on the shifter pod, I like to get the tension -- or lack thereof -- pretty close to perfect at the anchor bolt. The problem is that on this bike you have to take the rear wheel out every time you want to put a wrench on that bolt.

World class, championship quality stupid design. The bike industry has been giving the finger to mechanics since the 1990s, and it continues to get worse. Their motto now is, "If your bike is old enough to have gotten dirt on it, it's obsolete enough to replace."

"My bike needs a tuneup."

"Don't bother! Check out these shiny new ones!"

That ethic is running hard into the shortages caused by the pandemic buying spree. But those shortages also extend to repair parts, so even though we willingly try to keep people's machinery operating, the means to do so have become even more challenging to obtain.

I caught a thing on NPR about how cargo ships are being pulled from service because ports won't let them disembark anyone to make crew changes, and shipping regulations won't let them keep flogging the ones they have. Flogging metaphorically, that is. Crews work far beyond their normal contract tours, until they legally can work no more. It's just one more factor highlighting the vulnerability of dispersed production of consumer goods to outsourced factories in distant lands. Factories may go back into production but if you can't find a ship to carry the stuff it might as well not exist.