Shimano temporarily made a good touring shoe (maybe)

Someone sent me a link to what seemed to him like a good touring shoe by Giro. It looked okay, but on the same page I saw something that was as close to a real old-style touring shoe as you're going to find these days.

Meet the Shimano SH-UT70. Closeouts are all over the world of e-commerce. 

You're not going to find a walkable shoe without a place for SPD cleats. The cover for this one at least looks firmly secured.

I'm always afraid to point out when Shimano makes a good product because then they'll notice and kill it. It's like in King Lear (Act III Scene VII) where Gloucester's loyal servant points out that he still has one eye left. Cornwall takes care of that in a hurry. "Out, vile jelly!"

Yeah, I was a friggin' English major. Certainly explains a lot about my financial struggles.

Go to Shimano's consumer site and they've never heard of it, because it's not in the lineup for 2015, but apparently it was out there for a couple of years. The Duke of Cornwall has already squished it.

A really good toeclip-friendly touring shoe needs a tapered toe without bulky bumpers. It needs a sole without a thick rand coming up around the sides of the shoe. It needs a stiff sole, but not a thick sole. It should have laces rather than a rail yard of Velcro or ratchet straps. The UT70 has all of that. It looks a lot like really old-school leather cycling shoes that died out in the early 1980s with the rise of step-in road pedals.

My brother, who has one weird leg, found he could not use this pair of old Dettos I gave him back when they weren't that old. He returned them to me. I might glue some rubber strips to the sole to improve walking traction and use them for summer day tours on the classic steel road steed.

Some day I will have to do a weight comparison between a light leather shoe like this, or one of its mesh-upper heirs with an alloy-cage pedal and a toe strap, and a reinforced shoe for step-in pedals along with a mid-grade step-in pedal. By now, of course, exotic materials have brought the weight down on the step-in systems. But I bet there was a time in the middle of the evolution of shoes and pedals when there was no weight advantage at all with the step-in system.

In racing the two times toes straps were inconvenient were at the start of a race when a whole peloton was trying to clip in at once, and just before an attack, when racers would check to make sure their straps were tight. Nowadays they check to make sure their shoes are tight. And nothing warns them if their cleats are a bit run down and are going to pop out under the explosive load of a sprint. Woo Hoo! We goin' DOWN! SMACK! SCRAAAAAPE! Human crayon. Massive pileup. And a whole peloton fishing around for the cleat interface isn't a whole lot smoother than a whole bunch trying to flip up their toeclips and snug the straps. The step-in is slightly more convenient because it's hands-free, but no one talks about the other costs. It's another thing that isolates The Cyclist from regular people who ride bikes and want to blend efficiency with off-bike functionality.

If you choose to use a toothy pedal cage and no strap system you will want a thicker shoe sole made of material soft enough to allow the pedal cage to bite in, but not so soft that the cage chews the sole away too quickly. All this has been covered extensively by far more revered experts well before my humble observations. I mention it because I like to cover a topic thoroughly.

Take away the strap and you no longer have to shun bulky rands and toe bumpers. That does not mean such details are really useful, only that they are no longer an inconvenience. Personally, I don't believe that every casual shoe has to look like some kind of hiking boot.

Spring is just around the corner...of a SNOWBANK

When Punxsutawney Phil projected an early spring on February 2, it looked no more than obvious to anyone around here. We'd had no snow to speak of. The temperatures had been above average. It felt like late March out there. But this is New England. We get treated to meteorological jokes like a heavy snowstorm on April Fool's Day. More than once, in fact.

Some people love to rag on the weatherman. "Who else can be wrong 80 percent of the time and still get a paycheck?" When the forecaster is an animal, suggestions of groundhog stew join the list of scornful dismissals.

I don't comment on the job performance of an entire category of people because I know how many people think any idiot can fix a bike.

Phil finds himself in the balance like a politician, between the warm glow of approbation you get from telling people what they want to hear and their angry feeling of betrayal when things don't turn out that way. Sure, it's only the weather, but people who have been enduring winter's restrictions for a couple of months even in a mild one can get pretty irritable.

The snow was timely for my livelihood. Vacation crowds from Massachusetts are a fraction of their former size, but no one would be here at all if we hadn't gotten some cover on the cross-country ski trails. Anything that remains after this week will make the locals happy, but the real income will be over.

The roads and the rail trail that had been clear enough to make me start digging around to find my bike commuting equipment now discourage the thought. Snowbanks cut into the edges of the travel way on the roads. The trail's snowy surface has been packed to concrete by whole armored divisions of snowmobiles. The dirt roads turn to deep mud when the temperature goes above freezing. I could do the park and ride with a fat bike with studded tires, but I don't have one and can't afford to get one.

The best exercise is something you can do with minimal inconvenience. Bike commuting is the perfect example. So is walking to work. The less you have to deviate from your routine,  the more likely you will fit the healthy exertion into it.

Pace yourself

Even riding the trainer or rollers requires some setup and a change of clothes. I took rollers to work a few days, but they take up a surprising amount of space when customers come in. Riding in my regular work clothes and shoes I could hop on and off in seconds, but I didn't want to get really sweaty. Especially when ski conditions return, bike-related activities have to step aside for the clientele's more pressing interest in snow sports. So I pace. By the time I get to ride I will have worn a rut in the sales floor around my course. Seriously, I can walk for a total of more than an hour in the course of a slow day. Sometimes I'll throw in a few laps on the stairs. I can even walk the tight course in the workshop, cutting a figure 8 around the rack of rental skis and the workbench.

Interestingly, when commerce gets busy I can't pace. We don't tag out to ski anymore. I keep moving, serving customers, but the exertion level drops quite a bit. Success is actually bad for me.

One night about a week ago I woke up at 2 a.m. with the kind of yammering bullshit in my brain that people get -- some more often than others. I can usually shut that crap up, but this was one of the times I couldn't. I tiptoed out to the other end of the house and paced for an hour. The floor was cold. The rugs were warm. Cold, warm, cold, warm, under my feet for an hour.

Bike jobs have started to line up. Two wheel builds, a couple of Surly consultations and a client for my home shop are on the long range calendar. There's a job left over from last September, too. Every day is one step closer.

Quality and efficiency

I thought I had upper management in a teachable moment yesterday but I was wrong.

The top banana was checking over a Specialized path bike he had assembled when we noticed a brake pad was crooked. I pointed out that they tighten more smoothly when the threads of the post are greased.

"If you want them greased you can do it in the free tuneup," he said. "We don't have time to do all that when we have so many bikes to assemble."

Nothing he puts on the floor will ever be unsafe. The handlebars are always tight, the pedals are threaded in. The wheels have been trued. The gears will work properly. He's hardly the most hurried and careless assembler out there. Beyond that, though, you're on your own. Factory-assembled hubs are always too tight. Various threads are not greased, so the tightness of fasteners isn't reliable.

He doesn't complain about more meticulous assembly on more expensive bikes. That's good, because I would have to wear ear plugs or headphones every day.

High quality assembly saves a lot of time and some potential embarrassment down the road. Meticulously assembled bikes need almost nothing at the free tuneup. In fact, many of them need almost nothing a year later when the owners come back for routine maintenance. Bikes that are ridden farther or more vigorously will need work, but they also hold up a lot better if they were put together to a high standard in the first place.

Meticulous assembly takes longer than a rush job. It doesn't take a lot longer, especially if you know your system and have refined your technique. The time you spend up front is time you will save many times over at every later stage of the sale and just about every time the bike comes in for service. I do it for myself as much as I do it for the customer. Let's ALL have an easier, more fun time. There's greater profit in doing a good job. Who knew?

Nothing up my sleeve...except the rest of my jacket

For what it's worth, I came up with this simple, obvious way to turn my wind jacket into a streamlined bundle for easier carrying on the rear rack of my wet weather bike.

As easy as 1

2

3

I usually just roll it and tie it around my waist, but the day was a little warm and I didn't want to block my jersey pockets.

Sleeve-stuffing turns the jacket into a more tubular bundle than any other method, and perfectly restrains extraneous flappy bits.