Replacing car trips with e-bikes

 "Replacing car trips with ebikes." That headline greeted me as I skimmed through the ol' inbox a few days ago.

First of all, it's a great idea. It would reduce the volume of large, boxy vehicles in traffic, although it would probably increase the overall number of vehicles. Second, it would reduce fossil fuel consumption. By extension, that would reduce tailpipe emissions. It would drastically alter the parking situation. But it would also drastically complicate the riders' lives in ways that they haven't imagined.

Motor vehicles have been the norm in this country for so long that massive support systems exist to keep them rolling. How many parts store chains can you name? NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, AutoZone, WalMart... you can get auto parts everywhere. You can go in with pretty fragmentary information about your car and the people behind the counter can usually find what you need in their voluminous cross-reference books. No such network exists for bicycles, e- or otherwise.

Most people drive vehicles that they don't even begin to understand. Car broken! Go to mechanic! Mechanic fix! It costs a lot of money, and we often feel that the mechanic might be shady or not that competent. But at least we have options, and the mechanics -- professional or home DIY -- can get parts, tools, and manuals, as well as the ubiquitous YouTube videos.

Electric bikes have almost none of this. Not only are they a much younger technology, they come in from a scorned and neglected sector by identifying as bicycles. In addition, many companies have abysmal tech support.

Because smokeless mopeds are so popular, independent support will evolve quickly, but it's happening very unevenly. In Wolfe City and the surrounding area, smokeless mopeds have been playthings of the rich for more than a decade. For some of them it's been since the 1990s. As the category has taken off in the past few years, the opposite end of the income scale has taken to it heavily. The wealthy have had resources that the worker bees will never enjoy, including calling up the CEO of an e-bike company and getting parts sent directly as a favor, executive to executive. That ain't the real world.

A local working class e-bike user who grew up working on his own internal combustion vehicles has delved into the inner workings enough that he is considering starting an e-bike service business. We are encouraging him, because smokeless mopeds are not bicycles. They share traits in common, but the motors and electronic aspects demand knowledge that the average bike shop shouldn't be burdened to acquire.

You might say that the competitive economy presents challenges and opportunities, and that anyone unwilling to embrace this new aspect of "bicycle" evolution is a slacker and defeatist, but you would be a dick. Simple economic reality stands in the way of this idealistic vision.

Someone starting a business from scratch can decide how to expend capital to equip that business. Let's assume adequate funding to establish the business. For smokeless mopeds you will want a powered lift, or at least one with some mechanical advantage built in. Depending on your expected volume of business, you might want two or more. I have only the vaguest idea what you would need for tools to service the electrical aspects, but they aren't free.

You will need space for this operation. If you also service regular bicycles, that will probably call for a parallel service area with the usual few thousand dollars in tools and workstands, plus staffing. Smokeless mopeds being a separate genre, you can probably focus solely on them.

My car mechanic has a three-bay setup in a side-street industrial park, for just himself and an occasional assistant. Smokeless mopeds don't take up nearly as much space as cars and SUVs, but they're generally bigger than regular bikes. Just as car repair places tend to accumulate derelict hulks parked here and there around the place, so do bike shops, including smokeless mopeds. Owners abandon them over the bill, or you scavenge them for parts, or you just get tired and go home at the end of day after day and never quite get around to processing the carcasses.

Once a business is mature, and has been operating in a dying industry that went into decline right after a phase of merciless competition between retailers, it has been getting by on slim margins and a shrinking customer base for years. We have no bag of cash to finance an effective expansion into a rapidly changing market sector only vaguely related to our original core strength. It's hard enough to keep up with the ridiculous bullshit produced for pedal-only bikes.

For now, the network of commercial and private e-bike mechanics barely exists. New owners are coming in much faster than support is forming around them. The vehicles are fairly reliable, but when they fail it could leave you stranded. The rider who is considering starting a service business almost lost his storage shed and more when the battery caught fire during charging. Fortunately, someone else spotted the fire in time to knock it down before it really took off. Battery fires are the most spectacular hazard of e-bike ownership, but hardly the most common.

Electric bikes either work or they don't. An internal combustion vehicle will enjoy its youth all shiny and tight, devolving gradually through the various stages of beater car (or truck), probably passing from owner to owner in the process. But electric motors don't generally just run rough and metaphorically burn oil. They either work or they don't. If something is loose, you don't want to let it rattle for too long. If power is intermittent, you need to find out why, or risk having to pedal your 60-pound behemoth with nothing but your li'l legs. Because that's another thing that evolved to support cars and has no comparable service for bikes: towing.

E-bikes are mostly massively heavy. Batteries and motors are heavy. You can buy light e-bikes and you can buy powerful e-bikes, but you can't buy light, powerful e-bikes. This may change, but for now the lightweight materials that might help with that equation are things like titanium and carbon fiber, which have mostly appeared on high-priced bikes. Carbon fiber in particular can suffer from the abuse and neglect that most of us inflict on our daily drivers. Light, thin metal and plastic might serve to lighten cheaper bikes, but with a resulting loss of ruggedness. Things will bend and break more.

You can't blame the industry and its cheerleaders for encouraging as many consumers as possible to become test pilots for generation after generation of failed experiments. The bike industry did it with mountain bikes through the 1990s without a twinge of shame. They also destroyed their market in the process, but they raked in some good bucks for a while before the dropoff. And the evolved product really excites the few people who can afford to buy one and ride in the style that the bikes have been shaped for.

E-bikes probably won't shrink to a niche product the way mountain bikes did, but their wide variety creates a parallel universe to the categories of bicycling. The categories don't line up exactly, because the e-bike spectrum extends from very bike-like all the way to virtual motorcycles. An e-bike is a motor vehicle. Expect costs to reflect that, even if they're lower than for a car. They'll never be as low as for a nice, basic transportation bicycle.

E-bikes are the new Muffy

 Two e-bikes were parked by the entrance to the grocery store yesterday at 7:00 p.m. They were black, heavily built, with brand names that had no connection to the traditional bike industry. I usually see them on the road. Their riders wear regular -- non cycling -- clothing, and ride all year.

Lower income people who for various reasons did not use cars would traditionally buy cheap bikes. These were often in the Muffy category. Muffy was bike shop shorthand to describe bikes in the category with Huffy and Murray, two major brands in the degenerated US bike industry. The category also included Columbia, Kent, and any other department store brands. As department stores faded in prominence with the rise of Walmart, the new category of Walgoose emerged. Walgoose refers to the disgraced Mongoose brand, which left the bike shop channel and moved into the big box channel when Brunswick Outdoor Recreation bought them in the 1990s.

When smokeless mopeds first hit the scene, we only saw them in our shop as playthings of the super wealthy. The earliest proponent of them in our orbit would dispute the title of super wealthy, having modestly settled for only a few hundred million dollars. The others are also small fry, barely in the billionaire category at all. We're not talking Musk and Bezos money here, but certainly quite comfortable. The electric bikes were toys. However, e-bikes eventually reached the takeoff point. The craze has attracted more companies than the mountain bike boom ever did. Prices are tumbling, with quality to match. They still cost way more than a Walgoose, but they provide excellent value to a worker who never aspired to be a cyclist. Well, a motorcyclist, maybe.

A smokeless moped is a fantastic transportation tool for someone whose job is already tiring enough, who gets paid as little as society can get away with to do things society definitely wants done. The ones with a throttle option eliminate pedaling entirely. They're low-powered electric motorcycles, neatly protected from the need for licensing, registration, and insurance by the mere presence of a bicycle crankset and a pair of pedals.

Smokeless mopeds aren't cheap compared to a Walgoose, a Muffy, a Toadmaster, or the current incarnation of Schwein. But they offer a much better ride.

Product support for e-bikes can be bad. Because lots of little companies are slapping these things together from the same limited array of parts suppliers, you will find a lot of cheap, no-name parts. I haven't done more than skimming research into the e-bike community online, but I have picked up snippets from forum threads where enthusiasts talk about substitutions, repairs, and upgrades that a knowledgeable person can do. For anyone who doesn't know how all that stuff works, or have a friend who does, electrical problems in particular can be discouraging. But even if you get just three years out of an $800 moped, you made out better than you would with an $800 car, and took it a lot easier than you would with a cheap non-motorized bike.

The e-bikes I see regularly used for practical journeys around here all have onboard lighting systems. They are configured for transportation. Hunting and fishing stores sell versions configured for those activities. You pay more than $1,000 for a solid transportation vehicle, but it has a lot of what you need to have your best chance of survival in the mosh pit that is the American highway system.

Established bike companies offer electrified versions of sport bikes in road and mountain categories. These adaptive aids for the enfeebled are not transportation bikes, although someone might try to graft attachments to them to make them do some actual work. The same companies have their leisure bike versions with varying degrees of adaptability to daily practicality. The more an e-bike tries to look and act like an analog bike, the less useful it is in the broader moped category.

Gas engine mopeds didn't pretend to be bicycles. They knew their place in the hierarchy of motorcycles. In the 1970s, rising gas prices and periodic fuel shortages led to their surge in popularity. They were equipped like motorcycles. Their engine noise and the blue cloud of oil smoke that often surrounded them identified them readily as something that didn't belong on what passed for bike paths at the time. But it was a free-for-all on the streets. Pedalers, drivers, mopedists, all jostled along on the same network.

Classic gas-powered mopeds mostly died out. But the electric version could be around a while. Aside from battery fires, they make better house pets than gas-engine mopeds do. No drippy fuel or engine oil. Quiet running. The only leakage you might have to worry about is brake fluid. They have limitations in cold and wet weather that an internal combustion machine does not, but they still have many advantages for someone who needs cheap transportation.

The benefits of neglect and obscurity

 Being forgotten by the technological world for decades was one of the best things to happen to bicycling. The machinery evolved very slowly, which made bicycles a reliable device and a reassuring piece of stability in a changing world.

 When I started paying attention, in the mid 1970s, no one seemed to be clamoring for space-age advancements. Kids born in the 1950s received their bikes as something their parents had received in almost the same form. Some kids born even later received the same actual bikes. My older brother wanted an "English racer" three-speed because our family had been introduced to the works of Arthur Ransome as soon as we were old enough to read. The characters in those books, when they weren't on the water, were likely to be getting around the English countryside on classic black bikes that you could still buy at a shop near you in the 1960s. Much might change in the world, but bikes were your living connection to history. Not only that, they worked perfectly well as personal transportation.

When the "ten speed" came on the scene, it didn't strike me as a wild new concept, only a more advanced existing concept of which I had been previously unaware. It also seemed like risky magic to encourage your chain to jump off the sprockets, after all my years when chains popping off was a greasy nuisance. I was very slow to adopt. However, as with other vices from which I initially shied, I embraced this one emphatically when I was finally corrupted by the right exposure. Indeed, the derailleur had existed in the form we would recognize for almost as long as Arthur Ransome's children's books. Whatever prompted the 1970s bike boom merely thrust it into the American public's eye, somewhat the same way cross-country skiing became the cool new thing around the same time.

Bikes through the 1980s -- meaning mostly road bikes -- had an aesthetic that seemed to span the 20th Century. Steel frames held together with lugged joints might have elaborate curlicues and cutouts or showcase the precision of smooth spear points, but at a distance the general configuration would convey instantly the bike's purpose and connect it to its heritage. By the 1990s, essayists like Maynard Hershon might gripe about its "19th Century" technology, but the stuff still works.

Check out some of the details on this Richard Sachs. The bike's owner is the real deal. She's been touring on it since she bought it new in the early 1980s (or earlier).

These cutouts are on the inside of the fork. 

Downtube friction shifters pull the derailleur across  a five-speed freewheel.

The rear wheel sits in long horizontal dropouts. This allows for all sorts of modifications and improvisations that you can't do with VD (vertical dropouts).

 Check out the original Blackburn rack from when the original Blackburn guy still had anything to do with the original small company by the same name.

Even the saddle is original.

I wore out several Avocet saddles until you couldn't get them anymore. I know she's logged some serious miles, but she probably hasn't crashed as much as I did, and perhaps has a smoother style. Her gearing is realistically low for a load-carrying bike.

The cam on these Gran Compe brakes actually opens up wide enough to get the tire through the brake pads, unlike the token range of much newer -- and not cheap -- offerings here in the dying days of the Age of Rim Brakes.

Old plastic Silca frame pumps tend to crack at the threads. You can repair a minor crack by wrapping the barrel with filament tape. This pump has that repair. I don't know how much she's had to use it in that condition. I finally gave up on mine and got a Lezyne mini pump.

Before the Sachs I had a bike called a Sketchy on the stand. In a color strikingly similar to Surly's "Beef Gravy Brown," which was one of the Cross Check colors around 2011, this bike was apparently a hip item around that time. Made of lighter weight, more upscale tubing, it completely lacks the touches that make the Cross Check such a great basic platform on which to build a wide variety of bikes, such as the above-mentioned long horizontal dropouts. The Sketchy had VD, and shapely but highly inefficient curvaceous chainstays that would completely prevent the use of fenders with plump tires.

What's a nine-letter (two-word) phrase meaning "overrated?"

Until FSA got rid of the needle bearing version of the Orbit UF headset, that was the answer, at a tiny fraction of the cost, to the issues that the CK headset purports to fix. The CKs are serviceable, but what a pain in the ass to get in there, just to have ball bearings  -- albeit in a sealed cartridge -- anyway. Tapered roller bearings were the best for headsets, which is probably why they disappear almost as quickly as they appear when a company offers them. The Orbit UF stayed on the market for several years before they went on the angular contact bandwagon. So they're still a good deal for the price, but not as good a deal.

Despite its unfortunate modernist touches, the Sketchy at least used a steel frame with basically round tubes. The aesthetic is not at all classical. It doesn't look like art, the way lugged frames did. The Cross Check has a welded fame, but the dropouts have a classic shape, and the forks have an external crown that gives them a classic look as well. The Sketchy fork looks like an old suspension bridge tower. It's kind of cool in its way, but it looks heavy.

The bike business seems to be able to support a number of limited-edition boutique builders who do their thing for a while and then move on. As long as they build to fit off-the-shelf componentry, you can keep the frame going almost indefinitely. Whatever it is, if it works for you, it's a good bike. 

This old Manitou fork showed really bold marketing in naming a new model (at the time) for what planned obsolescence would soon turn it into:

As we charge forward into the battery-powered future, a category called "hunting bikes" is on the rise. Camouflaged smokeless mopeds are becoming a popular vehicle for some hunters to use to get into the woods and fields in pursuit of their quarry. Back in the 1990s we had a customer or two who embraced the mountain bike as a silent approach vehicle for hunting, because they were quieter than ATVs and didn't produce stinky exhaust. But you had to be willing and able to pedal. Now a wider range of hunter can take advantage of not only pedal assistance but also pure motor power on some models. They're being sold through hunting and fishing stores, assembled by people who may not have a lot of familiarity with the basics of bike mechanics. Or the customer might have bought it online and had to assemble it themselves. Such was the case with this behemoth:

What have we gained by junking reliable simplicity? I still prepare for hostility and negligence before every time I venture out on the roads. This is true even in a car. Are the few riders retained or recruited by electric motors or enticed by technological ephemera enough to offset the general loss of people who don't grow up with bicycles as a normal part of their life, with the option to continue into adulthood?

Bike categories have forever altered the concept of what is possible under pedal power. Mountain bikes started out as just bikes. Modification piled onto modification in rapid evolution, but it was only the same process by which bicycles had developed from the beginning: largely trial and error. Only when the type was firmly established did the engineers really focus on seriously designing the machines of today.

As for the road, the demand for technology is more driven by fashion than function. Shifting systems since the onset of indexing have increased precision when they work, but also increased the demand for precision in their construction and adjustment. Road riding could still thrive if all of that went away, just as road riding could thrive if disc brakes went away, along with carbon fiber frames and 52 different bottom bracket standards. Mountain biking, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on its suspension technology and gearing systems to make the preferred style of riding possible. Some mavericks might sing the praises of a hardtail versus full suspension, but almost no one -- and perhaps no one at all -- is extolling the virtues of a fully rigid frame and fork. Fully rigid bikes have been relegated to another category, like bikepacking, in which they are still the weirder option, or fat bikes, which have always been a weird option.

Millions of riders logged millions of miles before there were through-axles, disc brakes, electronic shifters, and 1X drivetrains dragging tinfoil chains across 12 cogs (or more) spanning a range from 10 or 11 to 52 teeth. Some things could safely be rolled back and advanced along different lines with only gains for the riding public.

The Woman with Exploding Nipples

 It could happen to anyone with a low-spoke-count, highly tensioned wheel with trendy alloy nipples. They start popping without warning. This customer had come in a couple of times already for single incidents of nipple failure.

This rear wheel had 27 spokes: nine on the left side, 18 on the right. The rims were a little deep, but not hard to work with. Weird-looking wheels are part of what makes a bike look modern.

To begin, I had to remove the tire. Because it wasn't a punctured tire, I went to remove it without tools. When I pushed down on the wheel to work the bead around, another nipple exploded. I called the customer to let her know we were going to do a complete nipple transplant, not just an individual replacement.

On the stand, two more nipples popped when I put a wrench on them to start loosening them. This wheel had been a real time bomb. Imagine ripping down a bumpy descent when one spoke after another detaches from the rim.

Fortunately, the diameter and thread on the bladed spokes matched the DT brass nipples I was planning to use. And the low spoke count made the swap less time consuming. I would never ride a low-count wheel myself, but I appreciate the time I save on jobs like this.

This has also been the Summer of Forgotten Through Axles. We've had several in a row. A rider calls up and asks if we have through axles in stock. We explain that there are different kinds (of course). They're not sure of the brand and type. We figure it out. We had one kicking around from a previous customer's special order that they then declined to pick up. We've accumulated one or two more, to try to cover some of the possibilities.

Next up on the list of modern problems, a mother and daughter had to forgo their bike ride because they had forgotten the keys to their ebikes, turning them into nothing more than immensely heavy regular pedal bikes. You can just ride them that way. It's a common claim in the advertising. But who would? No one, actually, unless they get caught out with a dead battery and have no one to call to pick them up.

Problems like this are right up there with forgetting the charger for your shifters. If you have electronic derailleurs and a dead battery, you got nothin'. 

There's still plenty of good old abuse and neglect to keep us busy. I figured out that the handlebar tape on these bars was about 15 years old when I removed it the other day.

The bars themselves were old enough and had been through enough rough use that I recommended replacement. The last bars I saw that had that much salt and oxidation encrusting them had been on a bike that had lived in Singapore for a year or two. Those bars were so deteriorated that I could poke a screwdriver right through them. These bars were nowhere near that level of deterioration, but still a risk according to most manufacturer recommendations. Better to be safe. It also gave us a good opportunity to put on a much shorter stem for the new rider of the bike.

Accidents will happen. One of the local ebike aficionados took a digger on their chunky steed. The owner called to see if we would work on it. To make it easier, he had contacted the president of the company that made the bike to hook us up with a direct pipeline to parts and advice. With clout like that, ebike ownership is smooth sailing indeed. When a bike weighs upwards of 60 pounds, it hits the ground with more force than a bike weighing less than 30. It also hits a rider with more force, should you happen to get on the wrong side of things as they're going every which way. The rider was apparently not hurt badly enough to be worth mentioning, so that's good. I was just musing about it as I looked at what was scuffed and tweaked.

The trickiest part will be replacing the battery case, which is cleverly inserted into the welded rear rack on this Pedego bike. It has thick cabling inserted into it, and has an irregular shape that does not appear to slide easily out of either end of the framework of the rack. The screws that hold it in place broke loose when the bike crashed, because they were never designed to restrain such a heavy piece of equipment in an impact at an angle. The good news is that the owner of the bike doesn't need it fixed instantaneously. We can put it off for at least a week or two before getting mired in its complexities.

The temptations of Marpril

Today's high temperature was about 62 degrees at my house. In a forecast discussion one day last week on the  National Weather Service site, a meteorologist had written that the pattern looked more like April than March. It's true. The high temperatures have been consistently well above freezing, tagging the 50s on occasion. But 62 -- that's the territory of May.

Freakishly warm days can hit at any time. I've seen it hit 60 in January, and turn warm and wet enough to melt off the snow cover all the way to the highest summits. That was 1995. But the odd warm day or two can pop in and out in any month of winter, with less dramatic consequences. Still, the closer you get to the real end of winter, the more these benedictions make you yearn for more like them.

I yielded to it today. I overdressed, of course, but not so much that I was gasping for breath and pouring with sweat. My route passes through one well-known micro-climate where I was glad of every layer I had on, for the seven seconds that I was in that shaded hollow full of snow and spruce trees.

The temperature drops back to more Aprilish conditions starting tomorrow. Tomorrow's 50s with clouds and developing showers mimics the latter half of next month, while the progressively lower temperature waves take us closer to the beginning of it as the week goes on.

The early meltdown has drawn a few riders out. On Sunday, a woman brought in her thoroughly modern gravel bike to investigate a flat tubeless tire. David diagnosed it as just a dislodged bead due to low air pressure. The rider had been told to run 'em soft because it's faster, and it absorbs shock. Because she works out of town, she goes to an excellent shop in Concord. She described her mechanic there as "hard core." Based on his equipment recommendations, I would add "trendoid." But looking back over my life I realize that I have lost every war I was ever in. The industry sold its soul to planned obsolescence in the 1990s, and the addicts who depend on it live in a world viewed through their perceived need.

You don't have to be hard core to be dedicated.

Clearly almost no one respects my opinion about the technology. I do enjoy riding my archaic shit. I love how it works. I do not yearn for anything more sophisticated. All the gimmicky bullshit has not bought us any more respect on the roads, or recruited sedentary legions from the sidelines. The only technological innovation that has stirred much interest is the addition of an electric motor.

How many times over the years did some smartass look at the price of a high-end bike and say, "For that kind of money, I want a motor!" Well, here you go: put up or shut up, asshole.

You can get hassled or run down just as easily on an e-bike as on one powered by meat alone. Think that a motor enhances safety? Ask a motorcyclist about that.

For today, I made it around a nice little 15-mile route on a fixed gear with no parts on it newer than the late 20th Century, except for the tires. They're more recent, but they may not even be from this decade. Oh, and the chain was new within the last couple of years. I could tell I had no strength, but I had enough. A utility rider doesn't need to maintain 20+ miles per hour for hours. You don't need to be first up the hill. You just need to get up the hill.

One ride leads to another, or so you hope. And so begins a season.

Celebrities, Networking and Trickle-Down Economics

Summer brings to Wolfeboro cars that cost more than your house, and people who can afford several of them. It also brings the brief visit of a television personality who has developed a strong affection for the place.

I used to check out the Forbes 400 every year, to see how our "locals" were doing, but I haven't checked the scores yet this year. The billionaires list is updated to 2019, but the latest 400 I can find is from 2018. No matter. It's just like bird watching. "Oh look, there's a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. And there's a Market Manipulating Cash Amasser." You don't really need to know. It's just a hobby.

Earlier this week, a woman from one of the lakefront houses called to ask if we sell electric bicycles. I explained why we don't, and mentioned a couple of people in the Millionaire Motorbike Club that I thought she could call for more information. I assumed that they already knew each other, because, over the years, I have found out that most of the super rich in the summer population go to the same church. Indeed, the founder of the MMC has been an evangelist for e-bikes, and has gradually converted nearly everyone in the congregation who used to get around by muscle power alone. I figured this latest inquiry was inspired by his efforts.

As it happened, the founder of the MMC showed up to have flat tires on a jogging stroller repaired. I asked casually if he had heard from Mrs. E-curious. Turned out he didn't know her. She hadn't told me this when I had suggested that she call him. I always imagined that the Sewall Road crowd and the wider circle of financial heavyweights along the lake must get together for regular summer socials, to talk about how to keep the help docile, and what each of them is paying for congressmen these days. I guess not.

Jimmy Fallon sightings were reported before the Fourth of July. We haven't had a visit from him in more than ten years. His wife has bought socks from us. The bike shop holds no attraction to the celebrity set. So we listen to the rumors and see the selfies posted by businesses that sell coffee, food, and beer. Again, more bird watching. I joke that the closest we come to a celebrity encounter is when Mitt Romney has another flat tire.

Late yesterday afternoon, in comes Mitt Romney with a flat tire. So that box is checked for the summer. He did look at bikes with El Queso Grande while I was knocking out the flat tire repair. So there may be more trickling. Meanwhile, I have to get to work for just another summer day.

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.

E-bikes and the illusion of something for nothing

A recent convert to the smokeless moped posted this graphic showing their growth in Europe.

It's from this article on a site called Explain That Stuff.

Electric bicycles entice the consumer with the lure of smokeless, relatively silent assistance when the going gets tough. When the flesh is weak, your personal assistant will kick in to carry you through.

A tandem weighs less and provides the chance for pleasant conversation. But a second person does weigh more than a battery pack, and doubles the chances of farts. And maybe the conversation grows wearisome.

An under-performing stoker and a dead battery both still weigh the same as their energized counterparts, but you can ditch the stoker at a coffee stop and try to recruit fresh talent. I suppose you could also scrounge up a fresh battery somewhere. As the smokeless moped expands to become a common appliance, facilities might offer battery swaps along popular routes. Maybe they do already. But with the rate of obsolescence in new technology, what are the odds that such a service could remain current -- so to speak -- with all the proliferating options? You may be stuck with the dead hulk of your 60-pound slug of a bike, even when you're left alone to do all the work.

I wonder if anyone has collected statistics on how many dead ebikes have already ended up chucked in canals.

The ebike relies on the illusion of something for nothing. But aside from the up front cost of purchase and the ongoing cost of charging, you face maintenance and repair of its electrical parts, and eventual decommissioning of the dead battery. You also have to horse the thing around when you're not riding it: transporting it to riding venues if you drive to ride, lugging it in and out of wherever you store it...

As you use your magic moped, you rapidly deplete its reserves of pixie dust. Energy has to go into the equation in the form of your pedaling and the all-important battery charging. Pedal-assist devotees point out that they can choose how much assistance to request, and extend their cruising range. It is still more finite than the muscle power of an acclimated rider. I don't say trained, because that carries connotations of athleticism and competition that many riders pride themselves on avoiding. But anyone who rides frequently is trained. Strength, power, and efficiency all improve with use.

The smokeless moped requires an extra type of training to learn how to interact with the power assistance. To get that go when you want it, you have to use a setting that produces a very noticeable result when you push hard on the pedals. The rider learns quickly how to feather the power to avoid wobbling -- or even getting thrown -- but it does take at least a minimal period of adaptation. My own experience comes from test riding a variety of specimens brought in for repair, and from observing new owners, or novice riders on borrowed equipment.

The bike shapes the rider. You learn how to get along with your equipment. Happy moped riders fall into the comfort zone of the machinery. I suppose someone, somewhere, has tried electric bikes and rejected them. And others push the limits of the medium and lead the charge for expanded capability. (see what I did there? I'm on fire today! Oh wait, that's just the battery overheating...).

Joking aside, compare the cost and benefit of a heavy bike dependent on outside power to make it functional versus your primitive old push bike powered by meat alone. My rationale for transportation cycling, from back in the late 1970s, still applies. I will be eating anyway. I do need physical activity to maintain my body's fitness and health. I will have a basic metabolism even at idle. The energy in my body already can be applied through the supremely efficient bicycle to move my individual self to a lot of places I need or want to go. The up front cost is the bicycle itself, and an evolved set of accessories. Most of those cost nothing to own after the initial purchase. Some are consumable at varying rates. Clothing wears out. Bike parts wear out. But by learning to use tools, and sticking to open source componentry I can maintain a bike almost indefinitely. Frames and parts can be combined in different ways to produce desired riding effects. Pump up the tires. Lube the chain. Go.

Your body is the battery. Your body is the engine. Your body is the beneficiary.

The smokeless moped does have a place in the transportation mix. As an urban commuter it offers partial exercise benefits to riders who can't get sweaty on their way to a job that might require them to look spiffy as soon as they hit the deck there. The energy required to charge them is certainly less than the amount consumed by a full-size car or truck transporting a single occupant. Electric assistance is also good for anyone weakened by age, injury, or illness. But stop calling it a bicycle with a motor when it is really more of a motor vehicle with pedals. The motorized aspect is so embedded in its nature that it can't be separated.

The motor of this specimen drives the chain from the pulling end. This avoids the problem of 20-pound wheels with a motor in the hub, and heavy electric lines that have to be detached every time you need to fix a flat, but it also gives the bike a complicated gear box and does little to reduce the chronic weight problem that afflicts all battery-powered vehicles.

Electric bikes have spawned a whole segment of componentry to meet their specific needs for tires and other parts that can stand up to their weight and the increased wear as a result of power assistance. This is better for the breed than early models that used standard bike components, but it increases yet again the number of products a shop needs to carry to be ready to serve all potential customer needs. Even if shops practice "on-time ordering" someone has to have the crap in stock.

Open source componentry means that a rider can live off the land more easily. The recent Ars Technica article cited in an earlier post sneered at rim brakes and praised disc brakes, but I can find a functional set of rim brake pads almost anywhere.  Even in a local setting, can your local service source get the parts you need for your specific vehicle? How long will it take? I'll be in and out of the shop with a set of brake pads or a chain, or a chainring, or a crank arm, or tires and tubes, or pretty much anything in about five minutes. Installation takes longer, but acquisition is a snap.

My commuting costs when I lived in a town were under $100 a year. They were probably well under $100 a year. And I didn't have to remember to plug my bike in. Even in a rural area, riding a minimum of about 30 miles commuting per day, I only have to keep up with tires, chains, and some chain lube. Because I might choose to ride more than the basic distance, I use up consumable items more quickly. But the rate of consumption is still really low unless you're racing, with its risk of crash damage, or mountain biking, for the same reasons. The harder you ride, the faster you wear everything out, including yourself. Find a balance that suits your personality.

The smokeless moped rider will not notice paying much more on a day to day basis, but the up front cost tends to be higher, and the replacement cost will mount. Given the way electronic things go, replacement will also be more frequent. Batteries die of neglect just as much as from frequent recharging. The more complex the vehicle, the more delicate are its storage needs.

Something for nothing turns out to be more costly than you think.

Coming Soon: Moped Monthly Magazine!

Someone dropped off a pile of back issues of Bicycling. One of them included a special section devoted to ebikes.

Check out the Buyer's Guide to Sidewalk Motorcycles, and articles like "Hate to Pedal? Who Doesn't?" Read reviews of selected accessories, like helmets, gloves, and weightlifting belts. Find out why your smokeless moped must have electronic shifting and computer controlled suspension.

I don't mind if people want to invent labor saving devices. But I don't recall the Bicycling Magazine of the 1970s reviewing mopeds. The fact that the power is provided by an electric motor seems to blind people to the fact that this is not a bicycle, except in the sense that the original term for motorcycle was motor-bicycle. Yes, it has pedals and uses a lot of the same componentry. That in itself is a problem, when a 50- to 75-pound vehicle is using a suspension fork and brake system designed for something that weighs 25- to 35 pounds. Wheels and tires are gradually mutating to reflect the actual loads involved. This leads to other problems when the motorcyclesque tire for a given smokeless moped gets dropped from production. I ran into this working on a couple of massively heavy models from A2B. The only tire available to fit the rims is definitely not for a 75-pound behemoth. The rubber will melt away.

The bike industry, desperate for cash after they destroyed the mountain bike boom, is grasping at every straw, including electric wires. I suggest attaching those to the genitals.

You can't stop progress. You also can't stop diarrhea.

Electric vehicles are great. They are a separate thing and need to be considered as such. Quit dumping every whacked piece of crap with pedals onto hardworking little bike shops. Improvement is one thing. Over-sophistication is something else. The minority thrilled by space age, temperamental componentry is vastly outweighed by the people who want a relief from that crap, who were perfectly satisfied with simpler mechanisms, well made, and ask only for safe riding conditions.

It's still winter here, but a pretty crappy winter, so I have too much time to think about the next season and the technological marvels that are imposed on us in a deeper and deeper pile every year. Tool up! Study up! One or two people might need something annoying and expensive worked on! Meanwhile, all the older stuff still needs its routine attention.

The industry's ideal is to make bikes that are addictively attractive, that can't be serviced. Customers will buy them, ride them into the ground, and replace them eagerly, because we all have that kind of money. What happens to the carcasses of the dead? Who cares? Maybe someone will develop a feel-good, token recycling program to salvage the 10 percent of the content that can be. And environmental groups will start reporting on how the remaining detritus has been pulled from the gullets of the last few whales, or something.

Hang 'em high

I brought more serious tackle to work to handle the dead weight of the last pair of electric bikes I had to work on. It had been a boom vang at one time, on a boat I no longer have, which had already been reconfigured, leaving this handy unit as surplus.

After I placed some hooks in the beams above my stand I hung the purchase and secured it to the moped.

Playing with the rope was way more fun than any work I did on the bike itself. I left it hanging there for a while just for the fun of it.

Do you carry electric bicycles?

"Do you carry electric bicycles?"

"Are you nuts? I can barely lift one."

A customer called to see if we had, or could get, 20X3-inch tires for a couple of electric bikes someone had given him. Scraped off on him would be a better term, but we didn't know the full extent of the annoyance for many weeks.

Just finding 20X3-inch tires that matched the ones on his bikes was a treasure hunt.

These things look like motorcycle tires. No one had them in stock on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe they didn't have them in the UK either. We didn't bother to follow up with those vendors. NYCewheels in NYC listed them, but told us they were unavailable indefinitely. They offered a substitution. Hey, whatever gets this guy's rims off the ground and his three-ton pieces of crap out of our basement.

These Ultramotor A2B bikes are the heaviest smokeless mopeds it has ever been my misfortune to try to lug around. Getting them into the shop from our basement storage area was easy enough: just wheel them around to the main door and through the shop with only a few stairs to negotiate. The main drawback to that approach is being seen in public with the thing as I walk around the building. I avoid eye contact and move as quickly as my shreds of dignity allow.

Getting the cursed hunks of scrap metal onto the work stand is another matter. Previous electric bikes, while grossly heavy and poorly balanced, have still been light enough for me to grunt them into position with a solid stance and a little luck. Bikes of a convenient height allow me to put one end on a footstool so I can pivot the other end up and clamp the seat post.

The A2B monstrosities defied such simple steps. I scanned the overhead for some place to rig some sort of cord system to lift them. In our old and heavily mutilated building, I did not see anything overhead that I would trust with the dangling weight of this ridiculous contraption.

Eventually I settled on using the stand itself, tying the lower end of the rig to a low point on the bike to try to get the seatpost up to the height of the clamp. But how to increase my mechanical advantage, which was the whole point of rigging a hoist?

Thanks to my father's taste in nautical widgetry, I had a fully functional Harken dinghy block on my key ring. I could have used a couple more, but it gave me something along with the high-friction upper end going over the work stand arm. I could at least lift the behemoth.

It was still an awkward wrestling match until Beth came through in the middle of it and brought the stability of a woman's touch.

"This must weigh a hundred pounds!" she said. "Why is it so heavy?"

In typical electric bike fashion, even a simple thing like a tire change turns into a twiddly fiddle with bullcrap. I had to trace the motor wiring back to detachable connectors, one of which had been heavily mummified with electrical tape, and then drop out the rear wheel, which weighs 19 pounds. The front wheel is pretty simple, with a normal hub and disc brakes. It still managed to hang up in the forks for no obvious reason. Maybe it just didn't want the rear wheel to get all the attention.

I disassembled the lifting tackle before I went home. The bike is still in the stand. I have more Harken blocks and other handy bits at home to make a smoother-running purchase for lowering this bike and lifting the other one.

I'm debating whether to leave a tackle system at the shop all the time, carry the pieces with me when I commute, or bring the parts each time the need arises. The shop should probably have a lift on hand in case some e-bike victim comes in for emergency repairs during the more active cycling season. As Baby Boomers age and younger generations who think electric things are cool come along, we will probably see more hefty two-wheelers on which the pedals are more decorative than useful.

The industry already offers lifts for heavy loads like this. They're not cheap, of course. If I can set a good anchor overhead, it will be cheaper and almost as easy to keep lifting tackle on hand, rather than lay out the coin for a fancy new work stand. There's added satisfaction in hoisting someone's electric monster like a dead animal carcass rather than investing in a fancy, high-tech lift that exalts it.

Stroming around Wolfe City

In the process of diagnosing the latest Stromer electric bike fiasco, I had to go on extensive test rides.

Poor, deluded souls are invariably impressed with the distinctive-looking machines. When they express this admiration I have no choice in my OCD but to take the time to try to explain all the reasons they should question the substance beneath the eye-catching looks. Or I just grunt, pretend I didn't hear anything or smile wanly and try to get away as quickly as possible. But even if no one says anything I know what many of them are thinking: "Hey, there's another one of those neat bikes. Maybe I should look into getting one."

Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! I'll wake up one morning and everyone but me will be a pod-person! Actually, POD stands for Power on Demand on the Stromer console. PAS stands for Pedal Assist.

The price tag for a Stromer stops most casual inquiries. But if the unaffordable version sparks sufficient interest, the interested party can find plenty of other offerings at lower price points, and lots of happy people on forums to say how great the machines are and how simple every little process is. You can find answers to just about every question that will come up when you try to reduce your workload by increasing the weight and complexity of your bike with electric motors, batteries and control circuits.

I feel like an idiot riding around on the thing. I know that's my own problem, but since I would not own one and I would not advise anyone to get one, I feel very keenly that I function as an unwitting ambassador for the concept when I'm tooling around out there. Adding to my unease, I know a lot of pedalists who think anyone on an e-bike is a wanker. Please! I'm not one of them! I'm only doing my job!

So there I am, tooling around the steepest nearby hills in Wolfeboro, trying to get the bike to malfunction in the way described by its owner. The bike has an absurdly wide saddle that makes a squeaky, metallic fart noise with every pedal stroke. I can't stop pedaling, because the bike only screws up in pedal assist mode. So I'm grunting up Friend Street, Pleasant Street, Forest Road, and connecting them with bits of Main Street, Sewall Road and short side streets, going squeak-fart, squeak-fart, squeak-fart, over and over around the course, waiting for the pedal assist to quit on me as the owner says it does. I pass walkers and real bicyclists with a pained smile and eyes averted. Squeak-fart, squeak-fart, squeak-fart.

The assist in pedal assist is not a magic effort eliminator. You have to give to get. I topped out on the hills breathing hard and sweating. I simply got there faster than I would under my own power on my own bike. Having a motor allows you to go faster and perhaps work less, but because the assistance comes on and goes off in response to your effort, the drag of the motor cuts in whenever you let up, slowing the bike more than an unassisted bike would slow down from gravity alone when you let up momentarily on the pedals. The bike yaws as the power fluctuates. It's pretty annoying, especially if you're predisposed to be annoyed.

Nothing about the ride made me suddenly feel, "Hey, I want this." I just wanted it to be over.

Because the bike never misbehaved, I could only go on what my research discerned. The lithium-ion battery probably cut out because it had not been charged lately and the long grade the owner was climbing threatened to over-discharge it. Either that or the system was overheating from the long effort and cut out because of that. The battery was pretty low when she brought it in and went flat overnight. But my first test ride on a shorter course with the low battery did not trigger a malfunction. My longer test ride, after fully charging the battery, did not cause any trouble either.

Bikes functioned happily for a century without electrics or hydraulics. Think about that.

Every time I have to wrestle with the problems of someone's ultra-modern marvel, whether it's a high performance carbon road rocket, a kinkily articulated full suspension mountain machine or a three-ton behemoth of battery power I go over and kiss my own bike hanging on its hook. You and me, baby. Simple pleasures.

Most of these tuneups should be overhauls

The Bike Tune Up generally includes the basic adjustments to bearings -- those that might still be adjustable on your modern marvel -- gears and brakes. Customers dutifully bring their bikes in every year or so for the traditional laying on of hands.

A bike that has been well tuned and not abused will still be in adjustment a year later. Brakes might get sloppy from pad wear. Index shifting might slip a bit from housing compression or cable stretch. But a properly adjusted bearing will stay adjusted as long as whatever was provided to lock the adjustment works in the first place and is correctly secured by the mechanic.

Inside that properly clearanced bearing, lubricants break down or get flushed out by various environmental stressors. I can perfectly adjust a bearing that has no grease left in it. It will run a bit roughly, but better than it would with no attention.

Most of the bikes that customers bring in for tuneups should have overhauls instead. The bearings need to be opened up, cleaned out and re-greased, if they're serviceable bearings at all.

Bike shop workloads run on a boom and bust cycle. Bike owners all get the idea around the same time, the Bike Season, and storm the shops for service. If even half of them said to go for the overhaul instead of the less effective tuneup, the wait time would surge into weeks instead of days. Taking someone's bike for that long in the season risks killing their enthusiasm either for riding or for getting their bike serviced. So we do the best we can with the time we have. We're like a battlefield hospital, patching up the wounded as best we can.

Many of our seasonal customers save their bikes for us to fix because they do not feel well served by their local shops. It's flattering and a helpful source of revenue, but all these people arrive with time constraints.

A couple of days ago a father and son came in asking questions about how to perform various procedures and what tools to buy. Refreshingly, they seemed to absorb information readily and had the vital ability to visualize a mechanism and a procedure from a verbal description. I did a little show and tell, but we managed to cover a lot just from discussion. They came back the next day for more little parts and further guidance, but it was building on the previous information, not filling it in again because it had all leaked out of their brains.

That poor kid is at risk of ending up in the bike business. My own slide down the slippery slope began because I wanted to be able to maintain my own bike. Then, hard up for cash in a career slump as a sort of a journalist, I wandered into my local bike shop in search of supplemental income. Turns out bike repair is steadier and more reliable employment than quasi-journalism. I'd been a copy editor, which is basically a word mechanic and someone who repairs press releases, so it's all kind of related. When the newspaper fell on hard times and eliminated my position, the mountain bike boom brought enough money and work into the shop to turn my part time into full time. Not lucrative full time, mind you, but enough to find a survivable balance of income and expenses. I've found that to be more valuable than a feast or famine roller coaster of big money followed by no money. I've seen people ride that one. It's all good fun until the screaming plunge.

The repair load has been inconsistent this season. Right now we're in a big weekend, with two triathlons and the Mount Washington Hill Climb. In addition, certain seasonal visitors we had not seen yet seem to have arrived for their stab at summer. The lulls even on a busy day are still frighteningly quiet and deep, but the surges are almost like the real thing.

Yesterday I had to make a 7-speed cassette out of an 8-speed because a customer needed it and we didn't have a proper 7-speed in stock. It wasn't as simple as just dropping one unwanted cog, either. I had to find a 12-tooth high gear cog to keep the steps reasonable and match the one we were replacing. That meant a treasure hunt in the cog farm. You can find all the 11-tooth cogs you want. Good luck finding just the right 12. I had to change the lock ring to one with a wider flange to secure the best 12 in my bin of spare parts.

In the middle of the onslaught, one of the X Family's Stromers showed up with yet another weird problem. On long, steep climbs, when you would want the pedal assist the most, the motor cuts out completely. This is probably because the no-longer-new lithium-ion battery is protecting itself, but it could be several other things in the system. The worst part for me is having to test ride the thing extensively, because I have to be seen in public on it.

I don't care if people want to own and ride these things. I just don't want to do anything that might convey the impression I endorse them in any way. I may have to sneak back to town at night and work on it then, where the kindly darkness will hide my shame when I have to go road test the latest attempt to iron the kinks out of the infernal machine. Or wear a ski mask.

Today's contrast

This was on the stand:

when a guy walked in with this:

Mr X called to see if we could slap on the new rear caliper Stromer sent for his bike in 30 minutes or less. The person who said we could does not do wrench work and did not ask those of us who do. I got to disappoint him in person when he showed up.

Stromer has admitted that they have issues with those brakes. I was right.

Lunch is over.  Back to work.

More mechanic-friendly design from the e-bike industry

On a day when other people's schedule conflicts have left me running the mechanical side of the shop alone on a summer Saturday, in comes a guy who has blown the front tube on his E Z Pedaler T300.

On EZ Pedaler bikes the front one is the heavy one. It's not as heavy as a Stromer heavy wheel, but it's chunky.

There is no obvious way to disconnect the power cable. You have to undo the axle nuts and lower the wheel carefully to get the brake rotor clear of the caliper. You can then work the tire off the rim from that side. Be sure to provide a solid support for the wheel so it doesn't drop and hang from that cable.

I saw a couple of places where I might undo the connection, but they looked like they could just as easily be gateways to Hell.

When I got the tire off I discovered there was no rim strip.

The tube had blown in multiple places into the rim. Duh.

What passes for lunch is over. Days when I know I don't have the slightest chance of getting everything done are less stressful than when I believe I could and convince myself I should. I went into this day with a cheerfully doomed feeling.

Stromer Tar Pit

Sunday, Mr. X pulled up in the back parking lot with his brand-new Stromer ST 1 Platinum on the bike rack of his SUV. The rear brake had gone mushy on this one exactly as it had on the other black diamond-frame bike in the batch I just assembled.

I was glad I had ordered a new bleed kit to replace the improvised one from the 1990s that our shop had used on Magura rim brakes. Along with all the other sucking chest wounds in the repair shop I told Mr. X I would have the bike ready for Monday morning when his gang was going for a ride. I'd already done it on one bike with a less than optimal tool kit. It should be a snap, right?

I put the bike in the stand, removed the neoprene sleeve over the wiring on the chain stay, unhooked all the wiring connections, cut the various zip ties, broke loose the 19mm axle nuts and maneuvered the 25-pound rear wheel out of the dropouts past the derailleur. I removed the brake pads and inserted the block to hold back the pistons in the brake caliper. Next I undid the forward mounting bolt to help orient the caliper vertically once the bike was positioned with the front wheel up at the ceiling. That had to be tied to a pipe in the overhead to hold it straight so the brake lever would remain in the proper attitude.

The latter maneuvers required a stepladder, as does the bleeding process itself on these bikes.

Once the bike was positioned I could hook up the syringes of the bleed kit to the fittings on the caliper and the brake lever.

Magura's video, in addition to being dubbed in English so Bernd the technician's lips keep moving after the narration has stopped, shows the bleeding procedure on a front brake on a conventional mountain bike. It's quick! It's easy! It's fun for the whole family! Need the caliper oriented vertically? It basically is already. Piece of cake.

Even though our new bleed kit supposedly has the fittings for Magura brakes, they don't fit exactly right. Magura's own kit is a lot more money and the fittings shown in the catalog look identical to the ones on our old rim brake kit, which also does not fit the new disc brakes precisely. So there's a bit of weeping and the chance of air being introduced during the procedure to eliminate air from the system.

Between interruptions from customers I worked my way through the bleed and reassembled the bike: untie, lower, clean caliper, insert pads, reinstall 25-pound rear wheel, reconnect wiring, and, finally, test squeeze the brake lever.

Totally dead. It was now 15 minutes to closing time and I was supposed to ride an hour home in time to shove down a bit of supper before some guests came over to share a birthday cake the cellist had made for me. But I'd told Mr. X we would have this done. I had to try at least one more time.

Tired of lugging that 25-pound rear wheel around, for this round of bleeding I removed the caliper completely from the bike, cut the remaining zip ties to allow it to hang down below the bottom bracket and screwed it to a wooden framework I scrounged up that happened to be a convenient shape and size. While this did not put the caliper and lever ends in exactly easy reach it was easier than going up and down a stepladder over and over. I was able to fill and bleed the system in half an hour.

Successful bleeding of the brakes on these two brand new $4,000 Stromer electric bicycles does not answer the question, "why did they need bleeding in the first place?" I had seen a sheen of fluid around the vicinity of the caliper on both bikes, but there was no big stain in the box when I unpacked them or a massive dripping mess to indicate where the system had emptied itself catastrophically. There was just that little schmear. It looks as if the halves of the caliper do not mate quite correctly, but nothing is obviously warped or loose. I won't be surprised to see a Stromer or Magura brake recall on MT 2 disc brakes before the year is out. But why only on the two black men's bikes and not on the white and red step-through models?

I've given up on getting a lot of two-way communication from Stromer. They're obviously too busy selling these things to worry about a few that don't work, even if the bikes belong to some of the richest people in the country. It's nice to see they're not letting their heads be turned by all that dough. You can see their point, can't you? The rich folks have already spent their money. That makes them no more use than any other customer who has already purchased the product. Time to move on to new conquests.

I'm not sure when loyalty to old customers became a liability and the quest for new new new ones became the mark of success. I guess it's all part of the growth philosophy that drives corporate planning and cancer. An old customer is only as good as the money they're willing to spend on your new product. And since the products are poorly thought out and badly supported, new customers are your only hope. Go for the people who haven't heard about you yet!

Aggravated battery

Got a call from a wealthy summer resident last month asking if our shop would receive and assemble three or four Stromer electric bikes for him. He's been a dedicated pedaler for many years, but those years have a way of adding up. Mr. X gave up riding the Mount Washington hill climb a year or two ago.

One of his friends is executive chairman of a corporation known for battery powered tools. The chairman has been into e-bikes since Lee Iacocca had his fling with them in the 1990s. We've gotten to see the evolution of the type as he has brought in various broken ones from his fleet. Apparently he is an energetic advocate. Since he took up the Stromer brand he has hooked up several of his friends.

One of those friends brought in two older Stromers. They've lost the keys to the battery compartments. The customer service guy at Stromer told me they can't replace those.  They're apparently not cross referenced to the serial number. Both bikes also have an intermittent electrical problem causing the pedal assist to cut out randomly. Intermittent problems are always great fun to track down. The manual says to check the right brake sensor. Just for grins I checked both of them.  To do that I had to make a test lamp because I don't keep any kind of electronic diagnostic equipment here. The sensor is just a push button anyway. I needed to see how sensitive it was so I could determine whether a rider who rests a hand on the lever could cut the motor out with only a slight twitch.

To get the sensors out I had to remove the lever blades. Electric bikes are bulky, heavy and complicated. Some combination of those factors -- weight, size and complexity -- makes even a simple job take a lot longer.

The Stromers weigh at least 60 pounds. About 25 pounds of that is the rear wheel. The wiring for the motor connects back there. The rear axle is keyed so it goes in the right way. So any job that involves removing the rear wheel means you have to juggle this heavy wheel as you guide it into its nest of cables, past the rear derailleur, sliding the brake rotor back into the caliper, with the axle oriented the only way it will go in.

The older Stromers have Avid cable disc brakes. The levers used on electric bikes have to be set up to accommodate the brake sensors. These levers predate the introduction of cable disc brakes, so their leverage is set up for traditional cantilevers. This means when you pay upwards of two grand for a fancy electric bike with cable disc brakes they feel mushy. Admittedly I've only seen the e-bikes that have wandered into my shop, but every one of them across the price range has had the same lame brake levers hooked up to mushy cable disc brakes. You'd think the e-bike industry would have caught up with the times by retooling to make a sensor-equipped lever with the right pivot distance for the brakes they're actually operating, but that kind of organized thinking seems alien to the battery brigade.

The new Stromers I assembled have Magura MT 2 hydraulic disc brakes. There's only a sensor in the right lever, so you could ride the front brake while still powering the motor, but how many people use the front brake by itself? I do, but I'm a deviant.

The rear brake on one bike went really mushy without making a puddle of fluid to indicate a leak. There was a little fluid around the caliper, but nothing to indicate exactly where it came from or when it got there.

To bleed the brake the bike needs to be oriented so the hydraulic lines run upward to the lever. Stromer puts the rear brake down on the chainstay. Magura says to remove the pads and push the pistons back all the way before bleeding the system. So that means the 25-pound wheel needs to come out and the bike needs to be held in the work stand with the front end pointing at the ceiling.

My bleed kit was improvised late in the last century. After two rounds of bleeding -- completely reassembling the bike to check each time -- the brakes were better, but still not great. Interestingly, there were two black bikes in this shipment and the brakes felt a bit mushy on both of them. The brakes on the red men's bike and the white step-through felt much firmer.  The color is coincidental, but perhaps it indicates production runs with different personnel or even different factories.

A new bleed kit is on order. Friggin' hydraulics.

If you're thinking of getting an electric bike, don't. Just go the whole Hog, as it were, and buy the new electric Harley Davidson. The pedal assist thing is novel, but when it quits on you you're left with a bike that handles like a truck. Imagine pedaling a truck. A two-wheeled truck with sluggish steering. The heck with that.

The older Stromers I've worked on have twist throttles you can use when the control unit is set in the proper mode so you can just twist its ear and feel it leap forward. It takes more out of the battery than any other mode, but it cuts right to the best part of having a motor: putting out no effort to fly through space. Pedal assist not only requires that the pedals be moving, you also have to put at least some pressure on them. That sounds exhausting. And because the power comes on in spurts based on your own output it can make the bike surge a bit erratically. I suppose you adapt after riding electric bikes long enough. I only get to play with them for a few minutes at a time.

In the repair shop the bikes take up a lot of room, especially when you start taking them apart. Information about their innards is hard to get, even from the manufacturer. Manufacturers seem much more interested in pumping more products into the market than in helping existing customers keep existing bikes running smoothly. It seems to be part of the inherent nature of electronics that things work perfectly until they don't work at all, whereupon you junk the whole rig and start over. But some of these characteristics apply to all modern manufacturing and many modern products. Shimano shifters, for instance. And all manner of consumer electronics.

If I did not have an immensely wealthy person's name to drop, I wonder if I would get the level of service I've received so far. Even with the magic name the quality of service has diminished. I think the Stromerians may have crunched the numbers and decided they don't need to be quite so responsive to get their trickle from the trickle-down. No sense wasting deference when profit remains the same. Even a high profile customer is just another existing customer. In modern business ethics, existing customers get taken for granted while the energy goes to snaring new customers. Customer loyalty does not engender manufacturer loyalty, it breeds contempt. That attitude has afflicted the bike industry since the 1990s. No one can tell them how foolish and shortsighted it is. They'll have to learn the hard way, if consumers ever wake up and decide they're sick enough of it to support a different model. A whole lot of shit will have to hit a whole lot of fans for that to happen. So maybe the contemptuous manufacturers are right not to worry.

Mixed in with the electric shenanigans were plenty of brain teasers involving conventional bikes. Repair season is upon us, though business seems to diminish every year. It's not going to competing shops...much. People just don't seem to be around, let alone spending money.

Musing on a quiet day

The nice thing about working with a guy who has traveled to many distant countries with sketchy sanitation is that you can produce the worst fart in the eastern North America and he doesn't even bat an eye. He's hard of hearing, not hard of smelling. But experience has brought him worse olfactory experiences.

I would worry about offending customers, but there are no customers. The day turned sunny, but no one has even rented a bike. We've done about $2.50 in business. Okay, maybe more than that. But dayamn is it slow today.

I'm waiting for a tool to arrive from Stromer for an electric bike I've been working on since August 29. Two of the e-bikes arrived that day in boxes for assembly. One was good.The other was cursed. They both seemed ready to go by Friday that week, but the cursed one barely got a couple of miles (if that) before it went dead. The two sisters who had ridden out on the bikes walked back.

Thus began a long diagnostic process. I had already replaced a main power cable in a bike of the same brand for another member of the Seasonal Resident E-bike Society. He used to be number 368 on the Forbes list of richest people in America, although I did not see him on the list last I checked. Suffice to say he has the funds and corporate clout to get results. We get parts shipped overnight-Saturday delivery for e-bikes belonging to the S.R.E.S. I say this not to brag, merely to marvel at the level of attention enjoyed by the rich and powerful. It's not US they're shipping the parts to. It's the agents of the former #368, who just happen to be us. Us be them. Take that, grammar!

For some reason we don't seem to get real overbearing wealthy snobs in here. The rich we do get, while prone to occasional outbreaks of unbecoming chiseling, have largely learned that we don't respond well to that, and we do provide competent, conscientious service. The ones who just want to sling their money around never bother to come in here. What do they need from a bike shop anyway?

There are some riders in town who simply must own better bikes than we sell. We are but yokels after all. Some of those riders we only see when we chance to look out the window at the precise moment they ride by. Others of them might come to us to get a shift cable or have a flat fixed.

I've learned one thing about e-bikes from my encounters with them over the years: Every part of them is heavy. And you will have to lift the heaviest parts over and over in the process of figuring out what's wrong and fixing it. The Stromer rear wheel, with the motor in the hub, weighs 23 pounds. I know that because I just installed the new one Stromer sent after we isolated the problem that kept the bike from working at all. It had other problems we fixed en route, but that hub motor had definitely stiffened right up. I had not been looking forward to muscling that thing around, but you do what you have to do.

Now I'm waiting for the special freewheel tool required to change the gear clusters, because the replacement wheel came with a 9-speed and the shifter on the bike only goes to 8. We didn't have an appropriate 9-speed shifter hanging around, and it should really be on Stromer's dime, not the customer's, so I called the hot line one more time. The tool is on its way. At least I hope so. I'm looking forward to taking this hot rod for a derby once it's fully functional.