Teaching the craft

 Trainee David asked a lot of questions yesterday. As we worked through each brain teaser and skill builder I thought about teaching the craft, and how many people I've taught it to over the years. In this small shop in this backwater community, it hasn't been a huge number. Partly this is because we were fortunate that a few of them stuck around for several years before escaping to greater prosperity.

The phenomenal Ralph broke out around 2005, after ten really good years. Even then, he went to Harris Cyclery, to play a season or two in the majors before immersing himself in web design as a full-time professional. He learned so quickly that it was hard to tell what he already knew. He would assimilate techniques instantly, as well as doing his own research and bringing new knowledge to us during the critical time from the mid 1990s through the turn of the century. He'd already been wrenching on his own stuff and doing work for friends as a teenage mountain biker from the late 1980s. He respected the past and understood its role as the foundation of the latest and greatest in a way that too many modernists lacked in the rise of technofascism as the mountain bike boom billowed into its climactic fireball.

Short-timers hardly count as students of the craft. We had a number of summer fill-ins of varying usefulness during the 1990s. A couple of them became reliable flat-fixers who were also not afraid to pick up a broom and empty trash cans. Others were there just for the employee discount and the prestige of working in a shop that sold mountain bikes during the brief period in which that had any cachet. They were more notable for their ability to overlook the mundane tasks for which they had actually been hired.

After Ralph we enjoyed the services of Jim A, who was hampered by a longish commute -- much farther than mine -- and less of a fascination with bikes in general. He still performed excellent work for several years, long enough to make the effort worthwhile. He cared enough to learn, which always gratifies a teacher. However, with training in physical therapy and other real career-type skills, he left to pursue those avenues rather than remain chained to a workstand as bicycling entered its decline.

From our Jackson, NH, winter staff we got the services of Big G. He'd had some interest in bikes back in the 1970s boom, as a young engineer in the Boston area. Now not such a young engineer, he had joined us for the ski seasons in 2006, and transitioned to full-year employment after we shut down in J-town in 2009. He was another student who respected and understood the value of the past in shaping the future, so he absorbed a range of skills as rapidly as he could, without trying to dismiss as unimportant the parts that might not have interested him as much.

There have been others who worked earnestly and well, but really had better things to do, and hurried to them at the earliest opportunity. Who can blame them? A complete bike mechanic needs to be able to deal with technology that spans almost a century, and may face any of it within five minutes of each other, on any given day.

Most of the people to whom I have taught the craft no longer practice it. Most of the people alongside whom I learned it no longer practice it, either. Lifers are the minority in this business. The business side does tend to crush the fun out of it.

Trainee David is off to the Marine Corps in July. That will be the last we see of him unless he comes back to visit the shut-ins, the way a youngster named Ray, who was a shop fixture for a few years until shortly before I came on board, drops back in from time to time now after a career in the Navy and in commercial aviation.

The pandemic-induced bike boom continues, along with the shortages in complete bikes and in service parts. This distorts our sense of what we really need in the long term, because the present level of intensity seems impossible to sustain. I also wonder whether the intensity seems greater because of the almost nonexistent supply. If we were sitting on fat inventory, along with every other shop with similar bounty, would we get cleaned out, or would a satiated population come through to pick and poke and chisel for discounts? I noted already how the seekers are no longer just looking for anything they can pedal. They've refined their search to specific categories, and even to specific models.

The return to freer movement in society, as we find new norms reminiscent of the old norms, will be slower than people hope. Its final form will be shaped by a multitude of factors in public taste and medical necessity, as well as economic and environmental considerations, as ongoing neglected problems all come to a crisis point along with the pandemic and its aftermath. This makes it nearly impossible to chart a course into trackless ocean beset with mist and mirage. When will supplies come back? Where will they come from? Who will still want what?

All of this, coupled with chronically abysmal levels of pay, make it nearly impossible to entice anyone to sign on for a career -- or even a few solid years -- as a really good bike mechanic. My first mentor, Diane, got out of the shop scene in the early 1980s and has operated as an independent with her own little machine shop ever since. She has supplemented her income by working on aircraft restorations and other endeavors, including the now shuttered Victory Bicycles, which made accurate replica ordinary bikes (penny farthings) that were sold internationally. Her curiosity about bicycles and their history led her back past the ordinary to the draisine. Talk about owning one of every category!

My second mentor appears still to be a prime mover in the craft, operating the East Coast Bicycle Academy in Harrisonburg, VA. At the time I had no idea that the craft was my future. Indeed, for nine years after leaving the shop where I worked for him, in Alexandria, VA, for a scant nine months, I worked in the yacht industry, in an outdoor outfitter store, and clung to the fringes of the world of journalism before I dropped back into the bike business for temporary supplemental income. Still, despite my youthful arrogance and general density, I absorbed a few fundamental principles that have served me well. That means they have served my customers well, as I applied them to every service issue. Thanks, Les. He found a good refuge for his base of operations. If the whole tinsel and plastic castle of obscenely expensive and ridiculously complicated machines collapses tomorrow, people like Diane and Les will assure that the completely satisfactory and much more locally serviceable machines of the prior era will be ready to emerge and claim their place again as the most efficient way to translate human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too for you insanely skilled fixed-gear riders.

What Price Respect?

Google fed me a link to this opinion piece in Cycling Industry News, titled, "It's time for the bike industry to have some self respect." In it, James Stanfill president of the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association, lays out an excruciatingly detailed case in favor of continuing training and qualification standards.

Stanfill makes some great points about what makes bike shop work a temporary phase for workers who pass through the industry on their way to something that actually pays decently. However, in his call for retailers to reallocate their budgets to cover the frequent training and retraining needed to keep up with modern technology's rapid pace of obsolescence he assumes that a shop has the money to reallocate. He also assumes that consumers will be willing to pay the higher prices that go along with a general rise in overhead. Bike shops don't have CEOs making billions who can give up their bloated compensation to redistribute the wealth to the workers. The industry as a whole will have to figure out how to get customers to respect them, before we can afford to adorn ourselves with our own new self respect.

Key to that "self respect" is Stanfill's assertion that shops need to be able to measure and present their qualifications to assure entities like insurance companies that they are meeting standards of safety and competence when providing highly complex equipment to the public. He also calls on mechanics to seek professional training and certification where available to make themselves more desirable to this new breed of self-respecting shop. Be ready to fork out on your own for a recognized training course because you take that much pride in being a bike mechanic. What was once a pretty good gig for someone with a modicum of mechanical aptitude is attempting to become a career path akin to auto or aircraft mechanics.

In capitalism, if you don't have plenty of money you are a failure and deserve to die. But in the real world, many areas with a small population have been served by small shops that were able to subsist for decades on a pretty slim margin with incremental investments in tools, and an experiential approach to learning about new things.

For a century, bike shops came in all sizes. Frequently they were small places, sometimes ill-lit, and merchandized by people more attuned to wrenches and grease than to point of sale marketing. Experienced mechanics could train new mechanics at the work stand. What mattered was the quality of the merchandise and the mechanical work, not whether they had a stunning atrium, or row on row of fashionable clothing. If you rode a bike a lot, you appreciated the rough practicality of basic black wool shorts.

All things evolve. Changes can bring improvements as well as unhelpful complexities. They are driven by the desires of existing enthusiasts, but also by public interest. When bikes were simple and people were content with it, a rise or fall in demand only meant changing the rate of production. Things would go obsolete as better things replaced them, but within a narrow range of functions. Weird derailleur systems gave way to the parallelogram, and then to the slant parallelogram. Caliper, cantilever, and drum brakes coexisted using the same basic leverage ratio. Every system of a bike was closely enough related to its forebears that you could figure out a lot based on what you already knew.  You could get deeper into it and become an inventive machinist if you wanted to, but you didn't have to.

Mountain biking pushed a lot of improvements in durability and function as bikes were subjected to consistently rough use. Prior to that bikes had received plenty of mistreatment and neglect, but they weren't advertised for the purpose, the way mountain bikes were. The bike industry had to back its claims with machinery that could withstand the kind of boisterousness that the pioneers of clunking had established as the standard. On the road or trail, user groups appeared to have a contentious relationship. In research and development, designers were borrowing from both categories to improve each of them. Versatile riders were doing both on- and off-road riding to improve their abilities.

All analyses lead back to the stresses placed on retailers and repair facilities by relentlessly mutating technology and category specialization. So I won't flog that again. I merely note that your chances of finding a place that can take care of your particular bike needs get slimmer and slimmer in the face of economic reality. Bike shops will become dependent on climate and population density to maintain a large enough size to remain viable in all categories, including smokeless mopeds. In addition, consumer costs will rise to reflect the greater expense the retailer faces. Training and higher wages cost money. That money comes entirely from consumer spending. When consumers can no longer afford to spend in sufficient volume, they will receive less of something in return, whether it's product selection, service quality, service speed, or the convenience of having any kind of shop within 20 miles.

For the moment, such vast numbers of archaic bikes remain in use that a small shop can eke out a living from the customers who need work on those. As they inevitably dwindle away, the next wave of well-used crap that replaces them will have increasingly esoteric needs, more difficult to meet.

Up One Level

The shop has a new trainee. A highly skilled mountain biker, we used to know him as Jumper Dude when all we saw of him was a flash as he shot through our parking lot and launched off the bank on his nearly daily lunchtime rides around Wolfe City.

His resume is impressive, but he's never worked in a bike shop. He can -- and does -- build professional-quality trails. In addition to work experience completely unrelated to biking, he was a mountain biking instructor at a riding park that took over an old ski area. You can see by his riding skills that he's not a poseur. He has a great personality, which will be a real asset offsetting my crappy one. But can he survive the reality of shop life?

"After a couple of months in the apron, your outlook will change," I told him. I don't mean that he will be shattered and disillusioned, only that the wide horizon of enticing possibilities has to narrow, as probability weeds out the more vulnerable fantasies. He knows a certain clientele very well, but that clientele quit coming to our town long before we quit bothering to try to attract it. As our local group of hard core riders decided on their own to leave the trails and move onto the road, there to be dropped one by one as other aspects of life overcame them, they have not been replaced by an equal or greater number of newcomers in any specific riding genre.

When our weekly mountain bike riding group first started to dwindle at the end of the 1990s, one of them told us, "I just got tired of cleaning and repairing my bike all the time. I realized I could spend a lot more time riding and less time on maintenance if I was on a road bike." And this was before a mountain bike could routinely cost $4000 and have a dozen bearings in the suspension pivots. Someone spending just upwards of a thousand bucks on a mountain bike in the late 1990s had something pretty sweet to ride, although you could easily spend twice that. But in the background still lingers the ghost of mountain bikes past, costing far less and providing hours of laughs.

A younger generation will see the world differently. A teenager looking at mountain biking now will see that the minimum buy-in may look like it's still around $400-$500, but the upper end sits above $6,000, with peaks above $10,000.

A $1,500 bike today was a $500 bike in the 1980s. Because so many things can be mixed and matched, the value and usefulness of a bike can't be compared directly to many other things. For instance, I just did some nice updates on a 1970s Holdsworth road bike, to improve rider comfort without significantly changing the original intent of the bike as a drop-bar tourer. Because the bike was fundamentally sound, it can go on for many more years with minimal investment, if it is well maintained and properly stored. The frame itself could be fitted with completely modern componentry. Its geometry matches that of frames you can buy today.

Bits of history walk in all the time. A mechanic who has co-evolved with the technology has a huge advantage over someone who has only studied it academically, or perhaps never gave it a thought before it appears unannounced. This is true of dusty old gems and crusty old junk. Some of that old junk started its life as new junk. But even then it might have sentimental value to its owner.

Working in a bike shop, you have to deal with forms of the machine that might not interest you. I do disparage technology that I feel makes riding needlessly complicated and expensive. There are things I wish would go away. But until they do, I have to try to fix the broken ones. That doesn't mean I won't laugh derisively at anyone who would fall for that crap. But if I can get it to work for them, I will do so before it leaves my hands.

In the mid 1990s, a previous trainee came back in from test riding a full-suspension Cannondale he had just assembled. "Before I worked here, I would just have thought this thing was totally cool," he said. "Now I look at it and try to figure out where it's going to break." I've never been so proud. He had reached the next level. That's my goal for any trainee. You can like what you like, but love with your eyes open, and don't be afraid to scorn and deride what is badly designed, over-marketed bullshit. You are a mechanic now, the first line of defense between riders and the bike industry.