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.

Cog blocked

 Blue is almost but not quite perfect. The gearing covers a little wider range than on my original Cross Check. As I’ve put more miles on, I noticed that the steps in the cassette could be a little more even. What’s on there is 13-15-17-19-21-24-28-32. 

On the green bike, I had added a 30 to a seven-speed block with the same gears that the blue bike has, only culminating in a 30 instead of a 32. So the intervals from the 13 to the 30 were 2-2-2-2-3-4-2. By subbing in a 27 for the 28, I made the intervals 2-2-2-2-3-3-3.

Large intervals and strange intervals mess with your cadence and power. On the 13-32, I wanted to Frankencog a 22 for the 21 and a 25 for the 24. That would make the intervals above the 19 go 3-3-3-4. At least three of my bikes have cogsets I assembled for them to suit my needs. I have a cog farm at home, and we have a deeper one at the shop.

A 12-25 used to be common on road bikes in the late 1990s. Some riders still ask for gearing that high. Surely a 25 lay in the big treasure chest at work. The 22 might be more challenging, but I remembered some combinations that had not interested me before that might contain one.

Nope. No 25, no 22. A search for new cassettes turned up one, described as a downhill mountain biking cassette, that had a 25. I’m not going to shell out for a whole cassette just to scrounge two cogs. The industry has cog-blocked me. Maybe a 25 will turn up eventually, but without the 22 it only creates a weird 4-3-4 sequence in the lowest three gears.

I should have bought up as many Miché cogs as I could get, back when they were available. I used some of those to make my “8 of 9 on 7” cassette for the Isaac/Trek.

If a particular part becomes too rare it negates a lot of the value as a reliable tool. True victory over the technofascist bike industry is won by using durable but also replaceable parts to rejuvenate a simple bike indefinitely.

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.

Surly goes electric. What EV.

Someone I know asked someone else I know what I thought about Surly’s new electrified version of the Big Dummy, called the Big Easy. I don't know why he didn't ask me directly. Anyway, it was the first I'd heard of it, because I don't pay much attention to industry news.

While I’m no fan of smokeless mopeds, I have previously acknowledged that electric assistance makes sense for a cargo vehicle. It brings all of the undesirable complexities of motors and batteries. It does alter the power to weight calculation by adding irreducible weight even when a dead battery or other malfunction negates the power assist. But it does increase load carrying capacity when it is working as intended.

I still assert that a smokeless moped is a motor vehicle with pedals, not a bike with an auxiliary motor. If a bike seemed heavy enough to tempt you to add a motor in the first place, the extra poundage of a battery and motor will definitely discourage you from pedaling without the assist. Once you accept that motor, you’ve stepped onto the same kind of production line that led from the earliest sailing ships with steam engines to the ones with vestigial masts and then no spars at all.

The quest for power warps everything it touches. The Telemark revival of the 1980s was an attempt to increase the versatility of touring skis by using a 19th Century technique to control traditional length skis in downhill maneuvers. Touring skis are long and skinny so that they move efficiently on flat to rolling terrain. Alpine skiing -- the dominant form today -- developed only in the 20th Century when skiing finally reached the Alps. The quest for downhill power and control took over the evolution of ski gear to create skis very poorly suited to anything else. Even the Telemark revival killed itself by turning Telemark skis and boots into just another downhill-only tool. Say what you will about alpine touring gear, trudging up and up with climbing skins for the sake of the downhill run, you would not want to use that stuff, or modern Telemark stuff, to go for a rambling bushwhack where you will encounter mixed climbing and descent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Telemark skiers were tackling the whole range of terrain on skis around 70mm wide, controlled with leather boots and very basic bindings. By the late 1990s, all of that gear was mutating rapidly into the alpinesque monsters of today. It's all a risk/benefit calculation. You can get seriously mangled with long, narrow skis and non-releasable bindings. But by eliminating one aspect of risk and increasing the power of the tool for one phase of operation, the other functions were seriously diminished or lost.

In bikes, every category illustrates how the quest for one kind of power diminishes the overall versatility of the type.

A cargo bike is already shaped by specific needs. You're not likely to hop on it to go for a ride on the local pump track, or a group ride with sporty friends. But it's an investment. And the more complicated the mechanism, the more support it will need over its lifespan.

By joining the electric parade, Surly has obligated itself to support a complex product that uses expensive components over which they have very little control. The motor assembly is made by Bosch. The frame is built around that specific unit. The weight of the vehicle demands powerful hydraulic brakes. You still wouldn't use it to take the family on a summer vacation to visit the major national parks. That leads to another interesting question: National parks arose at a time when personal mobility was about to increase rapidly. Land was set aside because of various natural attractions as people were developing more and more ability to go and see those attractions. If personal mobility dwindles because people realize that it is more environmentally responsible and affordable just to live where they live and keep most of their trips short, will the justification for the grand and wonderful places crumble, opening them to the destructive extraction of finite resources? This may seem like quite a leap, but the Big Easy lists for $5,000.00 USD. It's either a car replacement or a car supplement. Extrapolating a widespread shift to relatively short-range transportation devices leads to a scenario in which a highly developed public transportation system would have to pick up where the cars and SUVs had left off. Either that or the adamant non-pedalers are simply running us down with electric behemoths instead of fossil-fuel guzzlers.

Because the Big Easy is a Surly product, it is solidly built and as simply designed as possible. I still don't want one, because its vulnerabilities outweigh its benefits, same as all the smokeless mopeds. Any complex piece of equipment is only as good as its support. Can you get parts? Are they the parts that actually need replacing? Can you get in and out of the mechanism without destroying it? Can you get good instructions and diagrams? What sort of facilities will you need to perform maintenance and repairs? I got into bikes for transportation because I could do absolutely anything I needed to do in a one-room apartment. It's a lot easier to maintain a vehicle that you can lift with one hand than it is to work on one that requires a hoist or a hydraulic lift.

No one has stopped driving cars because they don't make parts for a Duesenberg anymore. The evolution of machinery has left many fossils behind. But the extinction events seem to come along more frequently these days, driven as much by the accounting department as anything else. Just buying a product forces you to bet on the health of the company and its future prospects. When a product includes critical assemblies from multiple companies, you're at risk from every one of them.

The latest and greatest!

Bike componentry development reminds me of the joke about the two guys running away from a bear. One guy stops to put on his running shoes. The other guy says, "Why bother? You can't outrun a bear." The other guy says, "I only have to outrun you."

No matter how much money you spend on ultra-fancy bikes and parts, you'll never really be fast. You'll only -- maybe -- be faster than the other pathetic dorks working outrageously hard to go about as fast as a prudent driver in a residential neighborhood.

The things we make and do for each other

In a recent laudatory puff piece on Pinkbike, about his visit to Shimano's factory in Japan, Richard Cunningham used the expression "bowels of the factory." This common metaphor made me laugh out loud. What comes out of bowels, after all?

After decades of cleaning up the wreckage that lies on the shore after a tidal wave of innovation devastates peaceful villages over and over, I have no love for obsessive gear weenies and the corporate behemoths that feed off of them.

Cunningham described and praised the ingenious automated machinery that Shimano designed for themselves, eliminating the human touch from nearly all aspects of their production line. Machines feed material to machines that stamp out parts combined and transported by machines, to be assembled into machines eventually to be ridden by people.

In the article, Cunningham writes, "Keizo said that Shimano realized early on that automation was going to be key to their survival, so they began the learning process by building their own assembly robots – first, developing some of the automation in the machining and forging factory, and culminating with their precision assembly process. Shimano’s experiment grew into a new enterprise and at some point, they were building robots for other industries as well. Connecting the dots, it could not have been a stretch for Shimano to automate a derailleur shifting system after inventing the robots that assembled those components in the first place."

Industrial manufacturing began as a way to speed up individual craft processes and increase their output. It also assured more uniform products that were easier to maintain and repair, that could provide measurably similar performance wherever they were applied. Factory output required fewer people to produce it, compared to individual artisans working start to finish on the same kind of product. Factories could also produce much larger items, through the intermediary of large machinery beyond the means of an individual artisan. Early factories still needed quite a bit of labor, however, to operate and maintain the machinery. Human hands moved a lot of things throughout the increasingly standardized processes. Management and the accounting department have been working steadily to carve down the human element from the beginning.

The relationship between human labor and industrial manufacturing has been dark and complex. The self-appointed emperors of the industrial age viewed the workforce as serfs. Hours were long, management was oppressive and suspicious. The owners wanted to get as much as possible, and pay as little as possible for it, from the contemptible grunts they hired, chewed up, and spat out, in a human reflection of the growing culture of assembly lines. Labor organized. Conditions improved. But labor and management remained opposing camps. Is it any wonder that "Take This Job and Shove It" became a popular anthem right before people started to notice the sudden drain of manufacturing jobs to countries overseas?

Automated manufacturing frees people to take "better" jobs that don't require as much actual laboring. But they remove the human touch, the human soul. Sure, we invented the soul, and can make it obsolete, but an awful lot of our social conventions were based on humans contributing to the common good. What's left when we don't do that anymore?

If mechanized production lines really do a much better job producing reliable parts, riders are safer by that incremental degree. Only time will tell if we have any more massive recalls like Shimano's crank debacle in the mid-1990s, or the Lambert/Viscount fork failures of the 1970s. Those hinged more on design flaws by the supposed better brains in the engineering department than on manufacturing errors by the drones down on the line.

Vestiges of the human touch remain among those of us who try to fix things. Underpaid and still considered overpriced, we alternate between following the manuals when available and improvising when authoritative guidance can't be found. Last week, I did a restomod on a 1970s Windsor that an older gentleman had found at a bargain shop. He loved the classic styling, the chrome lugs, and general elegance of the bike, but wanted the bars a little higher (of course) and the shifting more accessible. I put on a Technomic stem,  aero brake levers with interrupter levers, and stem shifters. He wants the option of the drop position, but neither of us thought he would like barcon shifters. I hoped to find a vintage set of Suntour Power Shifters on a stem clamp, but I had to settle for a recent set of SunRace friction shifters. The right one didn't offer very good leverage for an aging hand, so I substituted a longer lever from our salvage bin on that side. If a set of Power Shifters ever shows up, I'll call him in to make the switch.

At the same time I'm refurbishing something 40 years old, I might have some tweaky marvel from last week on another stand, or next in the queue, needing its internally-routed cables replaced, or some little air ninjas chased out of its hydraulic brakes. And there are always noises to evaluate in bikes with low spoke-count wheels and carbon fiber everything. Fatal or trivial? Quickly now, the guy wants it back for the next hammerhead ride.

Far away, the presses pound in an automated factory, and robot forklifts carry pallets full shiny new possessions toward what they hope is a waiting public.

Subsidized complexity

The stereotype of the Amish is that they opted out of any technology later than the 19th Century. The truth is more nuanced and intelligent. But the basis for their very measured acceptance of any new technology depends on whether the new thing will help the cohesiveness of their community or harm it.

The evolved division of bicycling in more and more distinct categories reflects the fragmentation of society in general in narrower and narrower interest groups that still try to claim larger allegiances, to a religion in general or to a national identity. There is no single Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, to name the three with which I have even passing familiarity. And the full menu of world religions is much, much longer than even the sects of those three. In bicycling terms, a "bike shop" is expected to know about "bikes" and be able to service most of them.

In biological terms, a bike shop is more like a veterinarian than a physician for humans. Under the broad heading of animals, a vet might have to treat anything from a gerbil to a horse, and more. Under the broad heading of bicycles, a bike shop -- regardless of size -- may have to minister to a downhill mountain bike, touring bike, hybrid, recumbent, e-bike, BMX bike, enduro bike, road bike, cable systems, electronic systems, hydraulic systems, suspension, steel, aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, and more. Way more.

The swirl of complexity pleases many customers who find just the gimmick they're looking for in that infinite variety. At the center of the vortex sits the bike shop. Onto the shop the cyclone drops different pieces of debris.

I refer often to the 1990s, because it was the Big Bang of the current universe of technological ostentation. At that time, our shop tried to update tools and parts to be able to service the rapidly evolving suspension systems. A couple of years into that, we realized that the expense of new tools would not pay for itself when a two-year-old fork had already been supplanted by a newer model that worked better. A three-year-old fork could be replaced with a closeout model of a new fork from a year or two ago for only a little more money, and a lot less trouble, than tearing down the thrashed old fork and trying to rejuvenate it. Threadless headsets made it easy. The 1 1/8-inch standard used a standard size crown race. A new fork could be cut to whatever length the rider desired. It was actually a bit of a golden age for customizing that part of a mountain bike.

All good things must end. If the bike industry has anything to say about it, they can't end soon enough. The arrival of dual suspension and the emergence of disc brakes threw us into another chaotic tumble down a slope of loose rock.

A small shop has to do a constant cost-benefit analysis. Because send-away suspension service centers had taken a lot of the burden of that off of us, we could solidify our policy and tell people what it would cost and approximately how long it would take. If they opted to replace a part rather than repair it, we could order and install whatever they needed -- provided its manufacturer still supported it. In the case of something like a rear shock, an exact match isn't always necessary, as long as the overall dimensions and travel will fit.

When it comes to details, some of them quite subtle, we have less to offer. I don't burden myself with overly complex bikes, and I don't recommend that anyone else do so either, but my reasoning is philosophical more than technical. Anyone who wants to ride a mountain bike in the modern style will need a modern mountain bike. Anyone who wants to race on the road will need a bike that matches the average modern road bike. Those who can afford to pay more will get more.

The shop owner has bought a 2018 full-suspension mountain bike. It's already old. The 2019s are out. A customer just bought the 2019 version of the same bike, so we could compare the differences and try to guess where it will break. El Queso Grande has gone on a group ride or two on the fluorescent green rocket. He's picked up a little lingo, but at age 62, with a heart condition, he has not developed any stature in the off-road riding community. We used to dominate not only through our power as riders, but through our unassailable knowledge. The bikes of the 1990s still owed more to pedal bikes from 100 years ago than to motorcycles from 10 years ago. That's no longer true. So our heritage and knowledge is just historical trivia to the few among modern riders who might be curious. The only way we could win their love now would be to buy it with killer deals. You know who gets killed with killer deals? The shop that gives them. If all your deals are made at margins you can't live on, you cease to live. It's that simple.

Hampered by economic setbacks and the caution born of experience, we have invested only reluctantly in new tools. Last year we bought a new truing stand to rebuild a fat bike wheel for a guy who had been going to the cool kids' shop in Alton. The cool guy at the cool shop had built his wheel with alloy nipples. Alloy spoke nipples should always come with a big warning label that your wheel will have a definite limited lifespan. On top of crumbling aluminum releasing his spokes without warning, he'd also bashed up the rim pretty well just from slam-banging around on the singletrack with the currently fashionable .75 psi in his tire. I actually put in a few shorter spokes to accommodate the low spots, so that protruding spoke ends wouldn't pierce the seal of his rim strip. The customer bubbled enthusiastically about how we were his new best friends and that he and all his buddies would flock to us.

We haven't seen him since.

As El Queso Grande curses and grapples with the complexities of this year's crop of technology, it rapidly becomes the old stuff and falls to me to be repaired. A Cannondale, roughly circa 2011, had a sticky caliper on a brake no longer enthusiastically embraced by its maker. We recommended an update rather than a rebuild, given the condition of the whole mechanism. But the new caliper mounts to the posts on the fork without room for the intermediary of the centering washers that were fashionable when the original brake was installed. This made it obvious that the brake posts had never been faced. The tool for that costs more than $250. In the case of this bike, I was able to hand file the posts to get the caliper to sit squarely enough.

All the modern tweaky bullshit eats a lot of shop time. This means that all repairs cost more, because we can do fewer of them in a day. Our daily overhead remains the same, so prices have to go up. The rank and file, with simpler bikes, end up subsidizing the owners of the complicated modern marvels. The riders of these marvels often have no idea how much more of a hassle their equipment presents, because they have such a cushier ride as users of it. They push a button, the gears shift. They push a pedal, the obedient servant provides a power assist. They squeeze a lever, the overpowered hydraulic system clamps the pads against the rotor. It's all perfect until it doesn't work at all. What a perfect metaphor for industrialized, consumer civilization. Here we are with flush toilets, motorized transportation, pretty widespread access to clean water, wondering what the heck is making so much of the rest of the world mad at us. Our biggest problems are traffic jams and finding a parking space for the land yacht. And why are these protesters blocking a road? They should be killed for that.

If every rider owned complicated modern bicycles, service would still be expensive, or it would vanish completely, as the industry got its wish and everyone just bought a new bike every two years. The old stuff just goes on the growing mountains of industrial debris forming a forbidding range between humanity and a world that they could have inhabited pretty happily for an almost indefinite period.

Your Personal Relationship with Cog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has it been a month since your last new chain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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