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.

I'm not a doctor...

Stock photo: syringe shown is for mineral oil. Organic cotton mask by Graf Lantz. Not surgically approved.

 

Before I had to work with hydraulic brakes a lot, I didn't really know how to get the air out of a syringe correctly. When I would get an injection from a doctor, I didn't watch the procedure closely. Never stop learning! I'm not a doctor, but I play one in the workshop.

Yesterday's hydraulic fluid surgery had me rebuilding the lever and caliper of a SRAM Guide RS brake. Not only was the lever piston stuck in the characteristic way, but the caliper pistons were stuck. Water gets into the brake system in various ways. Oxidation and corrosion can follow. The glycol-based fluid SRAM uses absorbs water, so it is distributed evenly throughout the system. That reduces the effects of undiluted water pooling in a low spot, but does decrease braking power steadily, as the percentage of water increases and the boiling point of the fluid gets lower.

At least it was a front brake.

On the Lefty fork, you have to remove the brake caliper to unbolt the wheel from the axle. You should remove the wheel when working with brake fluid, to avoid contaminating the rotor. I was removing the whole brake anyway, because it had to be taken apart.

You can't start a job until the parts arrive, so that put me a bit behind schedule. The customer had hoped for the bike that day. It had been hanging in the shop for about a week, but we needed to get parts. They're lucky that the parts were available. Then nothing went according to the basic printed instructions or cheerful YouTube video tutorials, because every piston that needed to come out was jammed tightly in. I had to reassemble the caliper and put a spacer in, wrap the whole thing in a thick cushion of rags, and blast it with compressed air. That brought out three of the four pistons with varying degrees of willingness, but left one of them stubbornly buried. I had to reconfigure the spacer to hold the other pistons back a bit and leave space for the one holdout to expand into when it was finally willing. This took several tries.

The lever piston was also not responding. Compressed air doesn't help there, because the pressure vents into the upper reservoir of the lever rather than going full force against the recalcitrant piston. In that case, you can just clamp an old spoke in the vise, pointing straight up, insert it into the little hole where the brake line was connected, and tap the lever body down with a rubber mallet to dislodge the old piston. Feel free to damage that. It's not going back in. Just don't hit the lever body very hard with anything, and certainly not a metal hammer. Also be careful not to score the inside of the cylinder with the spoke end. It's pretty well guided by the size of the hole it's fed through, but if you get angry or frisky when hammering it could bend and give you worse problems than you already had. A scored cylinder will not seal, even if it just looks like a scratch. Hydraulic systems are very unforgiving.

After the tedious process of disassembly, the caliper halves and lever body need to be cleaned and inspected. Then all the new parts need to be installed cleanly and without excessive force. With the caliper pistons in particular, you're working blind once you go to shove the piston in, so you take it on faith that the seal stayed in place. There's quite a bit of resistance, because the seals have to hold sufficient pressure to stop a rider and bike going hell-bent down a rough slope. They're squared off and fit into a squared-off recess in the caliper half, but in a worst case you might fold one over partway. Once it's mangled, it's done.

The component on the bench never seems to look exactly like the examples in the manual. You have to determine whether the difference makes a difference. Are these the right instructions for this version of a component that may have been manufactured for a couple of years with the same model name and superficial appearance, but actually have critical differences inside that are not made obvious by any marking you can readily see? In that case, you may have ordered the wrong parts kit as well. The differences this time were not enough to stop the job.

Once the caliper was back together I had to assemble the lever. The current parts kit includes things that this old lever didn't use, but they were trivial. Still, getting a lively new piston in was fiddlier than getting the stuck old one out. The return spring on it fought hard against the insertion of a washer and spring clip that hold it in its proper position so that the little push rod on the cam that the lever actuates can do its thing, and all the magic juice stays in. You're working in the narrow interior of the lever body, to try to cram the spring clip at least far enough that you can coax it the rest of the way by pressing it with some object that gets it to snap into its little recess and properly engage. Except that it doesn't really snap, it just sort of stops and you have to keep peering in there with a light that you keep blocking with your own face as you try to align the light beam and your sight line to sort of confirm that you're pretty sure you've got it. That sums up almost all work on the most modern bike crap.

After successfully reassembling the whole brake, line and all, it was time to fill and bleed it. That's another fussy procedure that drips caustic brake fluid all over the place. Because it was a complete fill, there was a lot of air to chase out. The first go-round did not end with a firm lever feel. Because it always feels good on the bleed block you use to hold the caliper pistons back, you have to completely reinstall everything and test it with pads on the rotor to see if you've really got it. If not, the wheel comes out, the pads come out, the bleed block goes back in, you refill the syringes, hook everything up, perform the ritual again, and then reassemble to check, cleaning carefully as you go so that the brake fluid doesn't eat the paint on the bike or ruin the pads.

SRAM's instructions say to be sure to clean the brake fluid off of the lever and caliper, in part because the fluid's tendency to eat paint will remove the snazzy logos. Seriously? You guys have been working with this fluid -- by choice -- for how many years and you haven't come up with a way to apply the logos that's immune to it? Way to innovate.

It was well after official closing time when I left. It's bad luck to put any of the tools away when you're doing a brake bleed or a tubeless tire job until you're absolutely sure that it's a winner. I left the bike on the stand and the bleed kit strewn across the bench until I return today and make sure that no little air ninjas sneaked out of a crevice in the caliper.

Your safety is assured because I hate your bike

 Some customers have expressed gratitude over the years for my vigilance in finding things like frame and component cracks that could have led to catastrophic failures. These include cracks in suspension forks and other linkages, failing handlebars, and cracking rims.

The dark truth is, I take delight in finding fault in ultramodern tech weenie bikes and parts. The customer's safety just comes along for the ride. I would scrutinize their bikes in any case, looking for the satisfaction of a structural or functional failure that I know will be there. It's a wonderful affirmation. I don't mind benefiting humanity, but my real aim is to compile such a huge dossier of evidence against the overwhelming mass of stupid design and cynical gouging that has overtaken the bike industry since the 1990s that it finally creates a customer backlash that returns us to an ethic of durability. That would be the real service to humanity. Because that is doomed to failure, I'll take the small victories of one or two riders at a time preserved from disaster, or perhaps even converted to the path of durability and simplicity. It has happened, a rare few times, that riders have abandoned the NEW! and IMPROVED! offerings of the industry and returned to a saner form of the machine.

Older stuff fails, too. It always did. Some changes are actually improvements. We have to be patient with some evolution as an idea gets refined. For example, the threadless headset started as a way to get around the problem that the influx of new mechanics in the explosive rise of the mountain bike boom couldn't understand how a locknut works. They couldn't adjust hubs and they couldn't get headsets to stay tight. You could overlook the hubs until they got really bad, but the clunky loose headsets were right there in front of you. So someone came up with a fancy-sounding reason to clamp the stem around the steerer tube and set the bearing adjustment with a cap screw. Then they just had to teach the ham-fisted apprentices not to graunch down so hard on that top screw that they broke the bottom out of the plastic top cap. On the first models, the top cap was designed to fail like that so that the enthusiastic wrench grunt wouldn't crush the actual bearings when they overtightened the headset. Within a couple of years, this had changed and metal top caps became the norm. They were slimmer and stood up better to abuse. They looked sleeker, and could be printed or engraved with logos. 

One nice thing about the threadless headset for the self-propelled traveler was that you didn't need a big headset spanner to adjust or disassemble the headset. That meant one less large tool for the fully equipped tourist to carry in the bottom of a pannier, hoping not to need it. But threadless headsets created real difficulties changing the height of the bars. The devices developed to deal with that can be very clunky and inelegant.

Cassette hubs went through a period where they were a real improvement, too. During the brief time when you could get replacement cogs in any size, and the cogs were separate across the entire gear range, you could customize or repair a cassette at home or in a tent with only hand tools. And the freehub design does put the support bearings for the axle in a better position to support the drive side. Beyond that, though, the design of cassettes now has turned into another facet of technological enslavement. One article I read while researching bike gearbox transmissions in mountain bikes said, "External drivetrain owners who ride often might replace their chain, cables, and housing three or four times per year, and the chainring and cassette once annually. As those components wear and their precise angles begin to dull, performance suffers. The chain is pulled laterally across the cog teeth under heavy loads, and as dirt and debris are introduced the metal is essentially sanded away."

Great, more stuff sent to the landfill by a once ecologically supportive industry. And a 12-speed cassette sells for an average retail price of close to $100.

Customers I deal with are not expecting to replace their chain, cables, and housing three or four times a year, although they might choke down replacing the cassette and chainring annually. With internal cable routing and full-length housing, replacing those parts can add up to a hefty service bill just to have the fussy shifting mechanism returned to its original state of acceptable mediocrity passing for precision. They certainly won't believe me if I share this information with them, even though I would rather do something else with a couple of irreplaceable hours of my life than ferret out cables and housing from the mysterious interior of their overpriced toy.

Because bikes are toys, they're designed for people who can afford to play games. It's not about finding enjoyment and fulfillment in the necessary labors of transporting yourself. It's merely discretionary recreation. The players might wish that their toys held up better, but they always have the option to quit. In the meantime, companies that make stuff want to find ways to get people to buy it. Once someone is recruited from the sidelines, how do you get them to part with more and more coin to keep the company in business?

The more complicated things get, the more details can get overlooked. Even my own urge to scrutinize is overwhelmed by the volume of work and the external complications required to hunt down solutions to the problems we can readily identify. I also have to fight through an initial thick fog of disinterest, because I find nothing desirable about the bikes brought before me.

My scrutiny is more appreciative on designs I like. I want to preserve and protect a bike I respect. Since those are almost invariably older, they may have seen more miles. But because the designs are simpler they could be built a little stronger, because the weight budget didn't get spent on bulky index shifter mechanisms, disc brake calipers, suspension forks, and rear suspension assemblies. Road bikes of today don't delve too deeply into suspension, but they do have the weight of disc brakes and bulky shifters. The weight budget for those comes from the lighter frame and rim weight, but those definitely come at a cost. Not every piece of racing technology should trickle -- or deluge -- down upon the citizen rider just looking for a bit of sporty transportational fun.

When the oppression of proprietary shifting systems first descended on the biking world disguised as a great new convenience and a boon to all humanity, I treated their ills as any physician would when faced with a new disease. I wondered, as any plague doctor would, how long the scourge would last, and how many casualties it would take. It would have required a widespread customer revolt to stop the spread of it. We've all seen how unbelievably hard it is to get the vast majority of people to band together to take simple actions to stop a plague. Lots of people either don't think it's serious or see some advantage in it for themselves.

Unlike the current actual plague afflicting our species these days, the plague of proprietary bike systems really was manufactured by known entities intending to profit heavily from their scheme.

 

One company in particular seemed to lead the way, but the other big players, including at least one new entity whose product was originally derisively called "gripshit," followed along behind the marketing juggernaut that was convincing a large pool of new customers that they needed innovation.

Some changes were improvements, even some changes that I derided at the time, before I studied them more closely and the changes themselves evolved into something more standardized and less "Shimano-y." Like linear pull brakes.

Original V-brakes were complicated and notoriously noisy, with Shimano's "parallel push" linkage. The idea was well meant, but in typical fashion it was overkill for the actual problem of brake pad alignment at the rim on cantilever brakes. 

Parallel Push disappeared after a couple of years, and now linear pull brakes themselves have been scrapped in favor of the even more complicated and annoying disc brakes. 

Disc brakes are a good idea on mountain bikes, because they take vulnerable, bendable rims out of the braking system, but they generate their own complications because you have to keep the fluid where you want it and rigorously guard against getting it where you don't. Rotors bend easily. There are two types of fluid. Know yours and keep it faithfully, for I thy brake fluid am a jealous brake fluid. Or you can have cables for slightly less hassle, and much easier servicing, at the cost of some braking power and modulation.

When I rode the Vermont 50 in about 1998, on my fully rigid Gary Fisher with friction shifting (my choice), old-style cantilever brakes, triple crank, and a low gear of 24-28, I did not finish DFL. My lower mid field finishing position had nothing to do with my lack of a suspension fork and up-to-the-minute shifting, and everything to do with my sense of self preservation on the descents. I also lost precious time helping some idiot with a flat tire, because my buddy Ralph had busted my balls for being unsympathetic to someone who broke a Shimano chain in the Hillsboro Classic earlier in the year. And I blew time at the feed stops, admiring the views. Vermont is wicked scenic. But that was the olden days. Courses now are not designed around primitive bikes like my mutant Aquila. The mountain bikers of today are the ones we dropped on all the climbs back in the 1990s, or their philosophical descendants.  And descend they do.

In summary, my critical attitude -- to put it mildly -- toward most modern innovations serves the customer just as well as a deep affection for the same abusive partner we all have in the bike industry. You may be deep in the clutches of that abusive relationship, Stockholm-syndromed to the max, fully convinced that you're hooked into something you can't live without, and I will still do my best to protect you from the worst consequences of your addiction. Because this is capitalism, that comes at a price. You need to know the true cost of chasing down all the flaws behind the facade presented by the marketing department, because you pay in some way, sooner or later. Taking care of this crap is neither simple nor easy, despite what disparagement you may read about bike shops in online forums. It's a daily struggle to keep abreast of all the changes we never needed in the first place, while trying to maintain what was genuinely good in the face of industry neglect.

Between earwax and shrapnel...

 When Shimano dedicated itself to index-only, ratcheted shifting in 1990, it ushered in a whole new era of problems in bike maintenance and repair. Not even they knew what all could go wrong. It was also the beginning of a more predatory relationship with customers. As technology proliferated through the 1990s, customers became test pilots for complicated mechanisms being rushed to market to secure a competitive sales advantage while consumers were spending indiscriminately. The industry focused its efforts on redirecting the surge of enthusiasm for riding into a surge of enthusiasm for buying things.

Some changes really are improvements, but did we really need "model years" like cars? Hell no. Lots of people would have been happy to buy bikes that looked the same from year to year and were equipped with simple componentry that performed reliably. But as soon as "Rapidfire" was introduced, the concept had to be refined to replace its initial flaws with newer, flashier ones.

Shimano warned us from the beginning to stay out of the mysterious interior of their magical devices. "You can't fix anything in there, so don't even try." At the time, one of the bike mags had a snippet about a couple of intrepid mechanics who disassembled brand new Rapidfire shifters and reassembled them exactly as they came apart, and the shifters failed to work. This implied that we wrench-monkeys couldn't handle the precision mechanism of tiny parts in perfect synchronization inside those sophisticated shifter pods. Having peeked under the hood, we could believe it. "If it quits working, replace it," said Shimano. Now I wonder if the article was disinformation to discourage exploration. 

Years later, out of necessity, we discovered that the most common reason for a Rapidfire shifter to fail is congealed factory grease. Ralph dubbed it earwax because that's what it looked and acted like. Clean out the earwax and most non-functioning Rapidfire shifters of any generation start to work again. You have to be careful to follow up with a light but persistent oil to keep the mechanism from freezing up later either from residual grease drying out or from micro-corrosion because all of those tiny levers and springs are no longer protected by the original petroleum product. Fun fact: before Shimano factory grease turns to earwax it looks a lot like pus.

When the road version hit the scene, it integrated the shifting into the brake levers. Other manufacturers had to follow suit. Asian componentry had always had an edge because it usually cost less -- sometimes a lot less -- than the top European stuff, notably the coveted Campagnolo. Campy's Ergopower shifters had better ergonomics than Shimano, by keeping the brake lever as a brake lever, and using a thumb lever for the upshift. Campy was also completely serviceable. Many parts transferred from one model year to the next. But it's pricey, and other aspects of the gruppo might guide a rider to choose Shimano. Because corporate warfare was in full swing, you had to commit to the whole package. There was little that you could mix and match. Riders suffer so that corporate coffers can benefit. The world becomes a worse place because the parties in power focus on their power rather than promoting the general welfare and ensuring domestic tranquility.

Shimano road brifters get earwax, the same as their country cousins on mountain bikes. They also suffered from another, more frequently fatal flaw: Strands of Death.

Inside a road brifter, the cable has to turn around a tight radius to travel enough to haul the rear derailleur across eight, then nine, then ten, and now 11 and 12 cogs spanning an ever wider range of diameters. The mountain shifter sits parallel to the handlebar. The pod can grow a bit to accommodate a larger wheel around which the cable is pulled. I have never seen a shift cable blow up inside a mountain shifter. But I see it all the time in Shimano road brifters. Because the shifting mechanism sticks out perpendicular to the bar, the diameter has to stay within a reasonable size to fit into a brake hood. You may have noticed how road lever bodies have gotten progressively fatter over the years. This is only partly to provide a more comfortable grip over the long road miles. That's a good cover story for the need to make more room in there for all the little ratchety bits. Even with that, the drum that the cable rides around torques the cable down pretty hard over a small area, fatiguing it in a matter of months to the point of failure.

Actual time to cable failure depends on use hours, of course. Other variables include cable quality, housing drag, gear range, and riding environment. You might go a couple of years. Conversely, if you're training a lot and racing frequently you will stress the cable more quickly.

Because Shimano's STI road units could not be opened, cable failure frequently jammed the mechanism completely. Cables don't break when you're in top gear where the head of the cable lines up conveniently with the hole through which you install and remove it. They break when you're jamming desperately on a shift to low gear under load. Maximum tension, maximum windup: blam. The cable usually blossoms instantly into a bouquet of fishhooks.

Failure usually takes a while. Riders will report that the indexing has gotten unreliable, and maybe the shifter feels crunchy. But the problem can progress rapidly, from early mild symptoms to shifter-jamming catastrophe in a single ride.

Because we had to work blind in many models, digging out the fragments could take a lot of time and fail to get every piece. Then the rider would have a ghost in there, like that floating piece of cartilage in your trick knee, that floats into a bad position and then out again.

When the shift cables came off the outer end of the brifter, the housing was fully exposed and could in most cases be released from its stops without undoing the cable from the anchor bolt on the rear derailleur. Then you could check the cable for failing strands by poking the liberated bit of slack out the other side of the brifter. Once Shimano routed the shift cables under the bar tape that became impossible. But they did start putting little access hatches into the lever bodies so that broken cables would be easier to dig out. As with many of their remedial actions, they did not call attention to the improvement, probably because they did not want to acknowledge any responsibility for the prior problem.

On Saturday, a rider came in with her Trek gravel bike, complaining that she could "only get about two gears." The bike has hydraulic disc brakes, so it has brifters that have a master cylinder taking up a lot of space in the lever body. The shifting mechanism is pushed way out front, from which the cable has to travel a couple of inches just to get to the cable housing under the bar tape.

The problem clearly went all the way through the shifter.

The head of the cable was all the way down at the bottom of the slot, far from the exit hole.

We were now at the mercy of the designer of this technological marvel. I saw some fasteners: the usual tiny Phillips head screws, and a couple of aluminum Torx nuts that turned out to be T9.39857, smaller than T10, but a sloppy fit for T9. And the heads were annoyingly shallow, making it hard to keep the tool in there securely. But at least I could take the covers off to get at the mess.

 See all the broken wires in there? Even with the mechanism fully exposed it took minutes of careful searching to make sure I got all of them.

 The bike had also been equipped with those crappy coated cables that fill the cable housing with lint and dust as the coating flakes off.

Although the cables run inside the bike frame, the rear had continuous housing. I opted not to yank out the 4mm and put in 5mm because the rider was hoping to get the bike back that day, and I didn't want to risk running into a snag if any part of the system was designed to obstruct 5mm housing. Green coated cables are not as bad as the brown ones that generate a lot more lint. I bet that just going down to 1.1mm uncoated cable would free it up inside the smaller housing enough to get by for a few months. Housing change would have required redoing the bar tape, too. This way we got her out for a bit more of the somewhat nice weather we've been having since the real warm spell ended.

Not the fire ax

As predicted, the road tubeless tire that I had such fun with last month came back last weekend because the tire had lost pressure. The rider told me that he had been having problems with the tires since he bought the bike. I'm pretty sure he's going back to tubes. I put a tube in the troublesome front tire, no charge.

A rim with a solid floor would eliminate the problem of rim tape, but requires a non-conventional approach to spoke nipples, such as putting them at the hub, which makes a wheel much harder to true, or threading them into the rim from the inner circumference, in the style of Mavic. In that case, you have to have their proprietary nipples to replace any that get damaged, and use a special spoke wrench adapted to them. Mavic has spawned two or three sizes already. Other companies have had to develop their own spline patterns. This is in addition to more traditional shapes with non-traditional sizes.

Because I started out as a self-sufficient home mechanic, I judge things from the perspective of a self-sufficient home mechanic. One of the greatest strengths of the bike as personal transportation that a rider could also use for fun was the relative cheapness and simplicity of the workshop one would need to support the machine or machines. I got drawn into it further than most, but even with the shop-quality workstand and truing stand my investment was far less than the price of a used car, let alone a new one.

There have always been some specialized tools. You can't fake cone wrenches or a headset wrench. You can put a big honkin' adjustable wrench on the top nut of a threaded headset, but you need the flatter wrench to secure the cone beneath it. And some form of fixed cup tool for cup-and-cone bottom brackets really assures that the cup stays fixed. There were few things more annoying than having the drive side bottom bracket cup working its way out of the frame on a long ride.

                                           Cone wrenches   Double-enders were handy for a home mechanic and to take on trips, but single-size shop wrenches with longer handles are more pleasant to work with when you have the luxury of better facilities. I've been spoiled a bit by the professional life. In either single- or double-ended form, the 16mm is the size to remove bottle caps.

                                            Headset wrenches     The upper one has a 15mm jaw on the small end, for pedals. The lower one has pins that would fit Sugino adjustable BB cups, as well as many other brands. You could also get adjustable pin spanners (not shown) just for BB cups, which I eventually did. 

Cranks used to come with a crank puller. They mostly looked similar to this Campagnolo puller that I got as part of a barter deal for some work on a guy's Schwinn Paramount. He had no use for tools he didn't know how to use, so I did the work in exchange for a nice collection.

I soon acquired a Park shop-type crank puller because it was convenient and I had little else to spend money on. Unpublished writers and bike nerds are unencumbered by social life.

You have to keep your crank bolts tight if you want the crank arms to remain obediently attached. First I got the Park multi-size, because common bolt sizes were 14, 15, and 16mm

Then, as part of the trade deal, I got a genuine Campagnolo peanut butter wrench. It was so named because the handle was perfect for spreading that affordable nutrient on your crust of stale bread.

While we're down around your bottom bracket, the official wrench for the most common flattened-oval fixed cups looks like this:

The hooked end fits the notches of the common BB lock ring. The wrench itself could be secured with washers and a crank bolt so that additional force or leverage could be applied to either seat the fixed cup or bust it loose as needed. There are cooler tools specifically for the task, but they've always been a little pricey for the slight advantage. I invested later, when I had a brief period of accidental prosperity. Rather than piss it away on frivolities, I invested in tools. Of course they were tools for tasks that nearly no one needs done anymore... but in the perfect post-apocalyptic, post-consumerist fantasy future, bike design would return to the accessible basics that were hallmarks of the late 1970s and the 1980s, minus the annoying nationalistic variations. Sort of a neo-classical period. Barring that I have a great supply of eccentric paper weights.

The well prepared home mechanic would have a chain tool. These became part of the take-along kit when mountain biking got big, because people were breaking chains right and left. This became especially common after Shimano introduced their "special pin." I developed a whole slew of phrases based on the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" PSAs on TV, starting with "friends don't let friends ride Shimano chains." 

Continuing the process of upgrading tools, I did get the fancy Park one that would handle up to a 10-speed chain.

Now, of course, you need one that will do 11, 12, and 13. I haven't bothered to equip for tinfoil chains, just as I never got sucked into buying new tools every year to keep up with changes in suspension design. I'm still holding out for that return to an ethic of simplicity and durability. Be the change you want to see, even if you know full well that it will never happen and that the world will cheerfully obliterate you and everything that you hold dear.

In the age of thread-on freewheels, you needed the proper tool for any brand that you had. The tools were small and inexpensive.

My brands were Regina and Suntour. Suntour later went to a four-notch freewheel that was not an improvement. The extra dogs on the tool created instability rather than greater engagement. Splined engagement was better, but only if you could get a tool in there without having to remove things from the axle. Phil Wood came up with the thin-walled tool that would remove Regina and Atom freewheels without having to disassemble the axle.

If you got into changing cogs on your freewheel, or messed around with fixed gears, this cog vise was great to have:

You will not find these anywhere now.

A chain whip or two is not only handy for self defense or really hard core S&M, you also need it to disassemble a freewheel or to immobilize a cassette on a freehub so you can remove the lock ring.

  Cable tension is important. Pulling them with pliers or just your fingers can fail to get things as snug as you'd like. Because of that, the Fourth Hand tool seemed like a worthy investment.

It's especially useful in today's world of high-tension shifting systems. It takes some delicacy not to crimp the cable, especially a skinny shift wire, but it's worth mastering. The Park version doesn't have as fine a nose as this specimen, so it's a bit harder to fit into tight spaces, but it has a locking mechanism that can come in handy when it isn't being a pain in the ass by locking when it feels like it.

Another score from the barter deal was this "Campy 5-mil with a growth on it."

The little knurled burl made it easy to twiddle quickly to thread down a 5mm cap screw.

The 8-9-10 Y wrench was another convenient item for the home tool kit or the carry-along set.

You'd still want regular box-open wrenches in those sizes, but the Y wrench was still worth its weight. 

I bought all of my tools from bike shops. Bike shops carried tools. I suppose there were mail order catalogs when I started paying attention to cycling in 1975, but I lived in places that had well-stocked shops. It never occurred to me to go anywhere else. Even my machinist friend moved into a series of shop jobs for quite a few years before she and her husband got away from retail and formed part of the shadowy support world of referral mechanics: people with the skills and tools to do jobs that the retail shops can't or won't. The referral network supports the shops by taking some of the load off, and fixing the problems that would cost too much money and time for a retail store's overhead.

 

Now I would probably buy on the internet, since shops don't tend to stock the more esoteric and serious tools. If I had to operate without a retail front, I would have to get parts somewhere as well. Depending on how far civilization degenerates once we've finished shooting ourselves and each other in every available foot, we may be scrounging in junk yards and landfills to piece together our mad creations.

Fifty years of bike technology in a typical day

 This scrappy old street dog is actually only 48 years old, according to its owner, but fifty is a nice round number. And on any day we might see stuff at least that old, or older.

Looking at the Nishiki head tube badge, I didn't notice for a while that the bike was actually "Produced for American Eagle." 

 

Interestingly, little color accents on the fork blades are German colors, not American. There's nothing red, white, and blue anywhere on this bike, at least not all together in one spot.

Für deutschen adler?

The bike is designed for touring. Lots of people were happy to ride something like this across the continent in the 1970s. The owner said that it came with fenders and a set of lights. He did not keep those, but the bike still has its randonneur handlebars.

Randonneur bars are kind of brilliant. The tops rise from the center and are sometimes swept slightly back. This provides higher hand positions and back angles for the rider, but still mounts to a stem with a negative rise, for better handling overall.

Because the steering axis of a bicycle is not vertical, stem angle changes how the steering feels. The shape of the connection changes how your weight controls the system. A stem that drops forward of the steering axis tends to center itself better than one in which the stem rises above 90 degrees to the steering axis. The steeper the rise, the more noticeable the effect. You can get used to anything, but once you know you can't overlook it. It's very annoying. That's why on so many of my bike builds after the advent of threadless headsets I left the steerer tubes long, piled up the spacers, and mounted stems with an angle of 90 degrees or less.

The bike industry reinvented the randonneur bar, as seen on some Specialized Roubaix models and elsewhere. The newer version has a wing top for more comfortable hand support, and rises more abruptly. They can do this because stems almost all have open clamps to allow for more weirdly-shaped handlebars that no longer have to thread the needle of an old-style single-bolt clamp.

You could really go on a Safari with this bike, or so the name implies.

Double eyelets on the fork would take fender stays and either a front rack or the more common handlebar bag with bungee cord stabilizers that hooked in down at the dropout.

The crank says American Flyer

The rear derailleur was bent. This was repairable in the Dark Ages of friction shifting:

Less repairable was the Suntour freewheel.

 I liked Suntour freewheels, but they had a tendency on occasion to disassemble themselves while you were riding, allowing the innumerable tiny ball bearings to fall out along many yards of highway. You could theoretically purchase replacement ball bearings and spend a meticulous hour putting the freewheel back together, provided that the pawls hadn't also escaped, but more often you would just buy a new freewheel and graunch down on the outer plate that held the whole apparatus together before trusting it. But the failure could be catastrophic. The worst case I saw was on a climb in Northern California, near Rockport. The rider's freewheel on his loaded touring bike came apart and cracked the flange of his nice Campagnolo Record hub. He and his riding companion had to camp on the side of the road for the night and hitchhike back to the nearest bike shop the next day, to get a wheel and freewheel so that they could resume their northward journey.

Time traveling forward to the present, the 21st Century is represented by this tubeless road wheel:

Tubeless tires for bikes barely make the slightest bit of sense for mountain bikers who could be riding on serrated ledges and over a certain size of angular stones while running fashionably low pressures, but even there I hear them lament that they burped a tire on one of those hazards and ended up with a flat tire anyway, often harder to reinflate in the field than a stupid old inner tube would have been. Your magic juice can leak out, making a seal to the rim difficult or impossible to attain. This is why tubeless riders carry a tube with them.

Setting up a rim and tire for high road pressures really highlights the absurdity of applying the latest fad to every category of bicycling. Road pressures severely challenge the sealing technology that evolved at very low off-road pressures. The process makes gluing tubulars look almost casual.

Gluing tubulars is potentially very messy, but at least you can see what you're doing. Move deliberately and methodically and you will succeed. 

Mounting road tubeless puts you at the mercy of microscopic discrepancies that somehow manage to be immune to the properties of the drippy sealant you have to pour into the casing. The setup shown in the picture, on the first attempt, was okay up to about 60 psi. It would not hold anything above that, no matter how I waved the wheel around to distribute the sealant. It was leaking into the rim somewhere. 

The original stem looked cool, but the rubber seal area at the base of it was rectangular, meaning that it covered less rim along one dimension than the other. Also, the rim tape had not bonded well enough, even though that was hard to judge by looking. I replaced the stem and peeled the tape, deep-cleaned the rim with alcohol, and then baked the wheel in the convection oven we use to heat-treat skis for glide waxing, to dry it absolutely thoroughly. That seemed to do the trick. The tire settled in at 90-100 psi and held it to the end of that day. I declared victory and called the customer. He said someone would be in to pick it up for him. My work week ended, and I left for three days.

When I returned to the shop, the bike was still hanging there. I pinched the front tire. It had gone down to squeezably soft. I reinflated it and heard hissing into the rim. Resisting an urge to take a fire ax to the goddam thing, I tried tightening the lock nut at the base of the stem. The hissing worsened. I removed the groovy plastic shim included with the wheel and went straight for lock nut against rim. Before tightening that, I removed the lock nut and pushed the stem into the rim so I could inject sealant around it to coat the base of it. Then I tightened the stem, re-seated the beads, and inflated the tire. It eventually seemed to hold quietly. I had barely walked away from this when the customer's father came in to get the bike. I said nothing to him or to El Queso Grande, who was handling the transaction. The tire was rock hard and seemed ready to ride, but I guarantee it will be back within a day or two. I can decide then whether to go for the tire levers or the fire ax.

The tubeless department had been getting a little chaotic, so I found a bigger receptacle for our tubeless paraphernalia.

The three-speed that this rim tape came out of may have been much older than fifty years.

I could barely make out some inscriptions in Aramaic on these scroll fragments.

A smokeless moped with a flat tire provided official acknowledgment that ebikes are mopeds:

An old Cannondale showcases the destructive interaction of human sweat and aluminum:

When I attempted to coax a stuck ferrule out of the cable stop on the frame, the stop popped off instead, because the aluminum was so oxidized. The deterioration is eating into the frame itself.

The frame also has some nasty dents from chain suck. It is now destined to be recycled into beer cans. Cheers!

The parts shortage this season led us to farm old inner tubes when common sizes went out of stock and would vanish instantly from suppliers' shelves when they became available again.

On to the next thing: This visiting rider said that he was having a heck of a time getting his gears to stay adjusted. At first he focused our attention on the front derailleur, because it's one of those Shimano models where you have to follow a six-page PDF of instructions to hook up the cable and set the tension. Eventually, though, he also mentioned that the rear shifting was incorrigible, too. Shimano's higher end mechanical shifting systems seem designed primarily to make people want electronic shifters.

The bike wins the award for Worst Internal Cable Routing, but that's a highly competitive category. I don't expect this entry to hold the crown for long.

The bike had those crappy brown-coated cables that get abraded almost immediately. Cable fuzz causes drag, especially inside the standard undersized 4mm shift housing.

This bike did have a full cover over the bottom bracket cable guides, protecting against a major entry point for dirt and water in internally-routed cable systems. The hatch cover was full of carbon dust from the cables abrading the cable guides, and a thick dusting of cable fuzz that had worn off of the wires themselves. 

Step one is always to yank out the brown cables and get some 1.1mm stainless wires in there. Step two is often to replace the housing with 5mm if the frame will allow. But when I was trying to thread the new cables I discovered that he had a bigger problem than cable fuzz and skinny housing.

The problem turned out to be the cable stop on the top tube, where the shift wires enter the frame for their dark journey through the mysterious interior.

 

 

That little doohickey inside the tube is supposed to be on top of the tube. It managed to fall inside, but would not come back out the same way. I had to remove the fork, which fortunately gave me access to the inside of the top tube. 

If you own a bike like this, expect to fork out a lot for repairs.

 

Someone had wrapped Teflon tape around the cable stop to try to wedge it into the hole in the top tube, but that merely reduced the width of the flange that is supposed to keep the stop from dropping in. I peeled the tape away, and reduced the size of the opening from the back edge, where the stop has a longer flange, to enhance the overlap of the narrower flange across the front. It was a bit of a hack job, but much of what we do is meatball surgery for riders who not only need a bike repair, but have limited time. This is bike service in a resort town.

We do have our year-round residents. I believe the doting Dad who wanted us to change the grip-style shifter on his daughter's 24-inch mountain bike to a trigger-style shifter endures the winters with us and doesn't just cherry-pick the summers.

The close-reach kid levers on the brakes don't leave a lot of room for the index-finger lever of the shifter pod.

Finger trap made in China.

Fortunately, kid fingers are small enough to work in the space available, and the pivot of the brake lever keeps it from pinching down on the upshifting finger. A larger lever, shut down to accommodate the daughter's diminutive digits, would end up just as close.

Two department store bikes came in at separate times for separate things and I noticed these helpful stickers on the fork:

We have frequently seen cheaper bikes with the forks mounted backwards, either by the owner or by a disinterested grunt at a big box store who was numbing his way through the assemblies for a management and clientele that don't know the difference. This sticker may help to reduce the frequency of that error.

After a brief hiatus immediately after Labor Day, repairs have picked up again, though not to the flooding volume of spring and summer. And many of the problems continue to be weird and time consuming on top of the lottery odds of finding parts that you need.