Do not resuscitate?

Triage has been in the news a lot lately, with the harsh measures in Idaho in response to overloaded hospitals. 

Last week I posted some pictures of one of life's little victories, a time-consuming but inescapable process to save a bike frame that was otherwise seriously limited, if not outright useless. The comments all questioned whether I had wasted my time.

Bike repair shops have seen crisis levels of repair volume since last year, when people who couldn't go to work or socialize in groups discovered outdoor activities. Because new bikes have been almost impossible to get, people repaired a lot of things that they would have discarded in the convenience-oriented consumerist fashion we've been encouraged -- if not forced -- to adopt increasingly since the 1960s.

Growing up, my family wasn't poor, but my parents both were born just before the Great Depression, and were raised in and immediately after it. Their values were shaped by the idea that money can be hard to get and harder to keep, and that you take care of your stuff because you might not be able to replace it.

The bike boom of the 1970s and the cross-country ski boom that overlapped it might have been fueled in large part by the other kids who were raised in similar households. The major expense of either of those activities was the initial purchase of the bike or ski set. After that, participation was cheap or "free." Bikes needed maintenance, and you might decide to upgrade to something lighter or more shaped to a style you liked -- racing versus touring, for instance -- but you could have bought a nice mid-grade bike with sort of middling frame geometry, and ridden it for years, needing only tires, brake pads, chain lube, and other minor consumables. As for skis, your "skinny skier" hoped to find usable snow in parks, golf courses, and other public spaces, or perhaps would shell out the couple of dollars that a proper touring center charged for what passed for grooming at the time.

Subsequent generations have not received the same indoctrination. But for many, money is still hard to get and harder to keep. I ended up living where I live partly because working people couldn't afford housing where I used to live. I had several different full-time jobs and could barely afford to share a grubby apartment, let alone have one to myself. And roommate roulette is a risky game. By the time I fetched up here, chasing a job that disappeared within a few months, I couldn't afford to move again. All this reinforced my reflex to fix what can be fixed.

An affable guy who seems to work in the restaurant business brought us his dilapidated Fuji hybrid. We did a few necessary things to keep it running over the summer, but he needed more in-depth drive train work as soon as he could spare the bike and the cash. It needed chainrings -- or a crank -- a chain, cassette, both derailleurs, and some shift cables. With chainrings unavailable for his existing crank, we had to spec a replacement of lesser quality, but at least it was new. Because the industry has been playing with crank arm profiles as well as the plethora of bottom bracket standards, the bike needed a new, longer BB to match the profile of the crank. All of this was going to run him a bit over $200. With incidentals and a bit of a cushion, the estimate was $275.

In the process of stripping the bike down I noticed that the cable adjusters in the downtube cable stops were run out far enough to get bent, and that they were severely rusted. I dropped penetrating oil on them and let it soak for a day or two. When I tried to turn the one on the right, it twisted off and broke at the frame stop. I knew immediately that this was going to take a lot of work, if I could extract the stub at all. If I couldn't, the remaining piece would prevent me from fitting any other kind of ferrule there to use as a fixed stop. I had to win or the bike was dead. The owner would have no bike and we would get no money whatsoever for the time I had put in.

The busted adjuster

 

 The repair queue has lightened up a little from the crisis level of summer, but the complete hiatus that followed Labor Day quickly ended in a mini-surge that pushed us out to a week or more. It seems like more than half of these jobs are grimy slogs, too. But you do what you have to do. For decades I have imagined the life of someone in what we used to call the Third World, then the undeveloped world, and now the over-exploited world, working in a mud-brick stall with improvised tools to keep simple machinery operating for people who will never see our privileged lifestyle. This is the neighborhood that privileged nations -- and the consumers living in them -- roll up the windows to drive through, while simultaneously appropriating the tastier and livelier aspects of culture that might appeal to us.

Since the 1990s our shop has faced the need to salvage our investment of time and parts countless times when a stupid little detail threatens to send a repair job off the rails. Sometimes the fault lies with us, too quickly and superficially diagnosing a problem at check-in. Other times it's a serious but small thing, like a stress crack, or these rusted adjusters. It's especially tricky when someone who works very hard for their money has trusted us to help them and agreed not to bitch about the price. They're not rich whiners, chiseling for the sport of it.

No drill would line up correctly with the frame stop. Two kinds of screw extractor failed to budge the rusted remnant. Floods of penetrating oil, followed by torch flame, did not break the bond of corrosion. 

Thinking I might break the piece loose by threading a coarse screw into it and torquing on that, I found a self-tapper with an 8mm head and cranked it in, careful not to twist too exuberantly and wring that off in there.

Very slowly, the coarse screw extracted pieces of the rusted-in adjuster.

The curly piece came out initially, sparking hopes of a quick victory, but the reality is shown by the collection of filings in the threads of the screw. Working from one side and then the other of the adjuster, I cranked the screw in and backed it out, extracting tiny loads of metal filings. Eventually, the screw was able to pass all the way though.

Following that, I could get the Dremel tool to line up a little better than the big cordless drill, to cut away material that the coarse screw had left. At best I hoped to be able to set a smooth ferrule into the frame stop, leaving me with the adjusters on the shifters and rear derailleur to dial in the gears.

I'd already done some grinding with the big drill, limited severely by the angle as the chuck came up against the frame. And I broke a bit that way. The Dremel didn't line up perfectly, but the largest bit it held was small enough to pass all the way through without deviating the bore too severely. But the bits aren't designed for battles with recalcitrant metal, so it wasn't worth persisting too long with that tool.

I had a broken-off chainsaw file that fit the hole, and a pick that continued the dentist vibe generated by the sound of the Dremel.

The picking and scraping reminded my of the piece I wrote about bike mechanics and dentistry over the winter.

I noticed what looked like some of the original threads emerging as I picked out more and more of the adjuster debris. I found a bolt that looked like it might be made of some good old hard steel, and threaded it into the frame stop. Working very gradually, I used it to dress the threads and push out remaining pieces that I had not been able to dislodge with the pick. I was winning, although it was like digging your way out of a prison cell using a teaspoon. I'd tried a proper tap, but they're brittle, and don't offer a good purchase for a leverage tool in a tight space like that frame stop.

The salvage bin of derailleur parts held an adjuster that I was able to thread into the newly-cleaned frame stop.

We can win this thing. But I still had to do the left side. It had been soaking in penetrating oil for days now. Would the old adjuster cooperate and back out?

No. It wrung off without hesitation, with only minor torque. I began my now official procedure, moving from one phase to the next. It still wasn't fast, but it wasn't as slow as when I was still figuring it out.

Within a couple of hours, the left adjuster nestled in its spot and I could stomp through the rest of the assembly to swap out the drive train parts. There was only one minor glitch when I inflated the rear tire and discovered that it's too wide to fit the frame, even though it's nominally the same width as the front tire of a different brand. I swiftly dished the rear wheel slightly to gain sufficient clearance.

Based on our shop hourly rate, I should have charged about $375 just for the rusted adjuster portion of our festivities, bringing the total close to $600 for a job with an estimate of $275, max. In happier times, when we had used and new bikes more readily available, we would probably have suggested redirecting his investment toward one of them. But these are not those times. Instead we find ourselves more and more often like Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, repairing the propeller of the African Queen alongside a jungle river.

A lot of times, a problem I solve may not be a big money maker at the time, but provides the basis for other solutions later, that might get us out of a jam or factor into a more lucrative job. Knowing something can be done, I can streamline the procedure as much as possible and add it to the menu of offerings to keep bikes on the road and out of the landfill. Or maybe I learn that it's such a time-sucking loser that we learn to screen for it rigorously at check-in, to avoid the pitfall in the future. Either way it's a gain.

Busy, crazy, hazy days of summer

Your handlebar tape should not smell like a sweaty sock. And maybe you should see your dermatologist if it does. At the very least, burn your cycling gloves and get some new ones, because they're beyond washing at this point.

I did not say this to the customer who came in with a sudden case of skippy gears on Saturday. I think he'd already headed off to drink and snack in a nearby cafe while we performed whatever instant miracle we could devise. I doused the tape with Lysol before getting near it again. It was white tape, a little grubby but not outright grimy. Something must have been fermenting under the brifter hoods, though. I resisted the urge to set the Lysol on fire.

That rider's gears skipped in the mid range because the rear derailleur pivot was corroded, so the derailleur stuck in the fully-extended position when he rode in the Ned gear. The Ned, named for its most famous proponent, Ned Overend, is the full cross from big chain ring to biggest rear cog. Here was yet another newish road bike suffering from abuse and neglect. The left crank arm had a coating of orange rust all over it because of the rusty water oozing out of the bottom bracket bearings.

Fancy-zoot modern frames with internal cable routing and inset headsets and whatnot have all these entry points for water. It checks in and it doesn't check out. It flows to the lowest point. It gets in from riding in the rain. It gets blasted in from driving in the rain with the bike on a rack. It forms inside from condensation when a bike is stored in a space with wide swings of temperature and humidity. Because no one has to do overhauls anymore, it remains undisturbed for months and years.

I was able to flush out the crud with floods of spray lube and restore full function to that derailleur. The customer was laudably appreciative. He did not say anything about the disinfectant odor hanging over his slightly damp bar tape. Perhaps his pungent gloves kept him from feeling or smelling that anything was afoot. Or no longer quite so much like a foot, anyway.

Some time after that I was doing a "tune up, rear brake pads, call if anything else" repair. I had knocked off the major points when I noticed one pedal seemed to be unthreading from the crank arm. This sometimes happens. If you're lucky, you can thread it in and it will stay. If not, the wiggling pedal has gouged out the threads in the crank arm.

Closer examination revealed that the other pedal was also protruding. Even closer examination revealed that someone had managed to thread the left pedal into the right arm, and the right pedal into the left arm. Things had jammed up about five-eighths of the way in, so they called it good enough.

I was able to extract the pedals. Then I had to run taps through the threads from the back side, starting in the undamaged threads, to establish the proper angle. I should have added to the charges for this, but I did not want to play phone tag and try to explain a weird problem to a customer who wouldn't understand it anyway, so I got through it as quickly as possible and ate the labor on it.

Mid-week a woman rented a road bike. She had brought her shoes and helmet, but forgot her jersey with the handy pockets in the back. When she left the shop she had all her little items stuffed in her bra and the waistband of her cycling shorts. She was a humorous person, and obviously practical in a quirky way. She rode off, oddly bulgy.  When she returned the bike on Sunday morning, she had what looked like a nice piece of banana bread in a plastic bag, stuffed into her cleavage.

In a companion to Bike Shop Gynecology, I had male customer looking for a saddle that would not only support his pelvic bones properly, but also keep his genitalia from "flopping around." I asked if he wore proper cycling shorts, whose constrictive fabric famously inhibits "flop." He said he did. Fortunately, he did not try to show me the problem. I tried not to imagine what sort of hefty, flaccid apparatus could still manage to flop when constrained by the well-constructed 'nad prison of proper bike shorts. I urged him to pursue his own research program.

About an hour into Sunday morning, a rider came in from the road, with the bike in one hand and the chain in the other. His rear derailleur had been yanked around to the top of the dropout when the chain jammed in it after it parted at the "speshul pin," as they so often do. Because he had the chain, I was able to gauge it and determine that it had been worn past the end of the scale before the pin popped. That meant the cassette was toasted. The middle and outer rings were also worn to where they would not properly engage the chain. The rider agreed to a full drivetrainectomy and replacement, if I could dig up the parts from what we had in stock. He did not want to wait for anything to be ordered.

Of course it turned into a scavenger hunt. To duplicate the gearing he had, I was going to have to take apart a 10-speed cassette and re-space it to make a tighter 9-speed than what we had on the shelf. The rear derailleur had to be scavenged from a trade-in road bike we'd put on rental. We had no new chainrings to match his old ones. We'd have to hope the old ones would last the week so he could get home and get new ones. The used rings I found did not seem worth the trouble and expense to install if we did not absolutely have to.

When I called to explain his options, the customer liked the sound of the even easier gearing he would get with the 9-speed cassettes we had on the shelf. He'd had a 12-24. The cassette I was going to improvise would have been a 12-25. Our stock offerings were 11-28. Since we were putting on a new chain, the 11-28 was no problem. So that saved some time and fiddling.

With about 20 minutes before the shop closed, I had the bike back together. On my test ride it functioned well. I called the customer. He came right down, paid and rode off.

Minutes later, he rode back. The chain was slipping on the chain rings. I ride pretty lightly, so I had not gotten it to do that. He was misidentifying it as skipping in the rear. It was pretty dramatically slipping in the front when I rode it after he brought it back.

The chainrings I dug up were going to give him problems shifting, but they would at least hold the chain once it was on there. The middle ring was stamped steel, so it needed those annoying spacers that Shimano used in the 1990s when they were making thin chainrings. The crank was an FSA, so it had those annoying Torx chainring bolts. I didn't want to open any more Pandora's boxes by pulling the crank to replace the rings, so I was trying to do it with the crankset on the bike and the inner ring only loosened, not removed. The spacers I had were a little too thick to put the rings at the optimal distance apart. The drop to the middle was a little wide and from middle to little was a trifle skinny. I showed him all this on the work stand before turning him loose. We had to charge something for the fix, but I kept it as low as I could.

To add interest, increasingly frequent, increasingly strong thunderstorms were moving through the area. The customer had to wait for a gap after I finished installing the chainrings, while a downpour played out.

I'm sure there has been more, but I can't seem to find all my scribbled little notes to jog my scrambled little memory by the time I get to the end of a week. There's no time to post anything from work these days. As the work load shrinks so we can't afford ample staff, what remains is still more than enough to string out the couple of people who work on any given day. Even our crew of three on weekend days is fully occupied with the backlog and the walk-ins. So funny stuff happens, but it rushes downstream and is lost in the river mist.

The 1990s called. They need their bikes tuned up.

In the past couple of weeks I've looked at more first and second generation linear pull brakes and just post Cranks of Death drive trains than I have since they were new. This reinforces my point about how many bikes get put aside for long periods even if they were bought with the best of intentions.

The mix does include older and newer specimens. It's just funny how a big wave will come in from a certain era. A few years ago it was a batch of mountain bikes from the early 1990s whose owners had finished college and were looking for a little nostalgic fun from their teen years. A few of them actually got back into mountain biking that way.