We are the ER of vacation fun

 In Resort Town, our bike shop sees not only a seasonal surge of service work, but intense spikes within it as vacationers and weekenders face unexpected mishaps.

Overall, the work load is far less than it was in the 1990s. We had two full-time mechanics and two full-time staffers who worked the sales floor and the workshop as needed. This level survived into the first decade of the next century, even though the bike industry had already torpedoed itself, and "supply side" economic policies were still hollowing out the general economy. It took at least twice as much work to bury us as deeply as we are buried now with just two elderly mechanics.

When the emergency cases started piling up this weekend, the long-term repair queue was basically empty. Most of the intensity had centered on renters picking up bikes on Friday for the local triathlon on Saturday morning. I had one flat tire job for kid or grandkid left over from the day before, and a repair estimate for a job for later in the week. Every walk-in flat tire or dropped chain qualified for a same-day turnaround. "I'm only here through Monday." "We're only here for the week." "We were just starting out on our ride." Within an hour, we had a full day of rush jobs.

Promise is too strong a word for the assurance we give that we can finish what looks like a simple job within minutes or hours, but it's close. We proceed with confidence because we succeed more often than we fail. You see it all the time on the television medical dramas. Simple diagnosis, initiate treatment, sudden downturn, beeping alarms...

Job 1: flat tire on a Surly Grappler. Clean bike, custom equipped with Brooks saddle and a fairly narrow -- by modern standards -- upright handlebar. Tube tires, so a nice, clean prospect. But then the bead fit was super tight coming off. Tubeless-ready rims are a plague, with their little shelf for the bead to snap into. But breaking the bead loose from that was only the first hurdle. I didn't start that repair, but it got handed off to me because I still have some residual grip strength. This only consumed a little extra time. By the end of the day, all those littles add up. hell, by the middle of the day they add up. Fortunately, the tire went on more easily than it came off. This is often the case. Inexperienced or impatient mechanics will panic and resort to tire levers.

Most of the repairs tumbled in at the same time, as people beginning their Sunday fun discovered their problems. I had already checked in a guy's road bike with a broken pad retaining bolt on the front disc brake and a broken spoke in the rear wheel. The full length of the broken spoke was still there, which meant that I could connect the new spoke to the old nipple, and that enough of the old spoke remained to get an accurate measurement. Pfft! No problem!

The pad retaining bolt, or screw, or pin, depending on you choice of internet search term, was the kind with threads right under the bolt head. The rest of the pin sticks though the tabs on the brake pads and out the other side of the caliper, with a retaining clip on the end of it. Although the customer had somehow managed to twist the head off of this small fastener with a 2.5mm head, I knew I could grab onto the other end of the pin and unthread it from there.

Grabbing the end was relatively easy with our smallest locking pliers. However, the space available in the Shimano 105 brake only allowed me to get about one-eighth of a turn at a time. Progress was imperceptibly slow at first. Everything in there is black or dark gray. Finally I saw threads emerging. This did not speed the process, but it verified progress.

Our stash of pad retaining screws did not include one long enough. I checked our suppliers. No one had one, including Shimano's B2B website. You could find them on retail sites, including titanium ones for stupid amounts of money, but we didn't have one and had no wholesale source. No matter. The customer needed it that day. I used a cotter pin, the way so many brakes do anyway.

On to the spoke. Rear wheel. Remove the cassette. Remove the brake rotor. Center-lock rotor using the same tool as the cassette lockring. Nice. All I have to do now is extract the broken spoke from the nipple and thread in another spoke to keep the nipple from disappearing into the rim.

The broken spoke was welded into the nipple. Fortunately, it was a brass nipple that could take some torque. Holding the spoke with the locking pliers, I twisted the spoke wrench. The nipple moved a little, with the protesting ratcheting noise of dry metal against dry metal. I flooded the area with penetrating oil. One nice thing about disc brakes: no need to keep a braking surface clean on the rim. With the rotor off the wheel, it was safe from drips as well. Good thing, too. It was at least a half hour freeing that spoke without destroying the nipple. If I needed to replace the nipple, that would mean removing the tire and peeling up the rim strip. Sometimes that only requires deflating the tire, pulling back the bead, and prying up a section of non-adhesive rim strip. These days, though, the rim might have "tubeless-ready" rim tape stuck down, not to mention an absurdly tight tire fit requiring more complete removal of everything. Hey, I don't give a shit, I get paid by the hour and bill accordingly. But when we're trying to accommodate a whole flock of people whose vacation fun depends on getting their bikes fixed now, extra steps just add more stress.

Into the chaos came a walk-in with a folding bike. She was half of a couple, but only one bike needed our attention. Based on its condition, I would bet that the other one did, too, but as long as they were satisfied, I wasn't going to instigate anything.

"The chain keeps falling off here." She pointed down between the small cog and the dropout. I could see that the derailleur was hanging funny. "I was trying to tighten the brakes. I messed with this cable too." That was the shift cable.

It took a while to get it onto the stand. The limit screws on the derailleur were run all the way out, so you had your choice of whether to drop the chain down beside the small cog or throw it into the spokes. The customer had run the brake cable the wrong way around its anchor bolt and graunched it down, oblivious to the deeply and unevenly worn pads. The shift cable anchor bolt was rotated in a way we see often, thanks to a quirk of Shimano design. There's a little tab that is meant to hold the plate in the proper attitude while the cable runs under one edge. Instead, people are constantly turning it to put the cable under the little tab. The bike could have used another hour of cleaning and adjustments by the time I got the derailleur working and replaced the brake pads, but it was safe and functional. It can be admitted later for the less acute problems.

Just before the weekend I had done a spoke and tire job on a mountain bike with tubeless tires. That one worked out well, because the customer used spoke hole plugs instead of stupid rim tape. The breaking spoke had popped its plug loose, deflating the tire quickly and completely. I had ready access to the spoke hole to install the new one. We had some rim plugs sitting around, to replace the one damaged when the spoke blew out. The tire re-seated and held. So that was nice. There was only one complication. When I had everything back together all snug, I spun the wheel and heard something rattling, either inside the tire or the rim itself. Fearing it might be another old rim plug or some other debris I had overlooked inside the tire while the bead was detached, I took everything apart to remove whatever was rattling.

There was nothing in the tire except still-wet sealant. The noise was in the rim. Broken nipple? Bits of rim plug? I shook and shook and shook it to move the object to a spoke hole. Eventually, a perfect sphere of something fell out. It was dark and appeared hard. Ball bearing? Too light. And it crumbled under a firm pinch with my fingers. Also, the rim still rattled. I shook it over and over as it released a total of four of these little dung balls. Near as I can figure, they're composed of sealant, trail dirt, and carbon dust, spun into spheres by wheel rotation.

That was just on my stand. El Queso Grande had his own set of urgent care cases, as well as launching most of our renters, and working the register for sales of clothing, sunglasses, daypacks and other merch. It's like the ER staff also operate the hospital gift shop. Hurry up and stitch that laceration! Someone needs a tee shirt! Fortunately, no real lives are at stake. I mean, we need to do our work right so that riders don't end up in the actual ER on our account, but successful repair doesn't depend on speed and precision the way emergency medicine does. However, some of the clientele get fretful over how their planned day of fun is bleeding out on the bike shop floor. We're here to literally save the day.

Between the end-to-end days and the bike commutes on either end, the hours left over go to preparing for the next day and trying unsuccessfully to get enough sleep. The days off go to catching up on that sleep whether I want to or not, and all of the routine chores to get ready for another week. And summer's over and the days are shrinking and we face east awaiting the sun again. Sure, there are a few weeks left, and all of fall, but the cellist is leaving for her school year job, leaving behind the keening silence of tinnitus and the decaying sunlight of our turn toward the season of darkness.

Endless weekend

 We've reached the part of summer where every day feels like Saturday. Saturday doesn't mean the same thing in a bike shop as it does in the normal world, especially in a resort town. Saturday is peak intensity, the opposite of a day of leisure.

A particular day might seem like a slow Saturday or a busy one, but any summer day can bring in a sudden crowd of people with the day off, looking for something fun to do. It's a very different pattern from winter's ski business, in which the peaks are solidly on the weekends, or on designated short vacation periods.

Particularly now, in the Summer of Denial, a population restless after a lost year is ready to push the limits of safety and gather with their naked faces, as case numbers spike in some regions and crawl gradually higher in others. Our particular part of New Hampshire has notched up to Moderate, while an adjacent county has reached Substantial transmission. We're seeing more masks, and wearing our own again much more of the time, but it's not general. 

Last week, a local man came in for some repair work. In conversation it emerged that he had never masked and he refuses the vaccine. He told us that all you need is hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and that masks clearly don't work because the guidance on them has not been consistent from day one. He is always affable, even when he can see that we disagree completely with his position. He's the same guy who wouldn't buy a Fuji Wendigo fat bike because it was named for a demon and he believes in God. And yet his regard for the gentle savior does not extend to such small gestures as wearing a face mask. He's a member of the Superspreader Church of Christ, down the street, where they gathered throughout the early rise of the pandemic until they spawned their very own cluster.

The shop remains shorthanded. It's always hard to find competent help, because we need someone smart enough to do the work and dumb enough to do it for a living. Failing that, we at least need someone who can show up on a regular basis and perform many of the basic mechanical tasks that confront us. We have no new bikes to sell, but repair demand is still high. Parts can be hard to get, but enough come through to keep us going. We're getting killed on freight, because we have to pounce on things as soon as they are available, rather than waiting to fill out larger orders at longer intervals.

Fifty years of bike technology in a typical day

 This scrappy old street dog is actually only 48 years old, according to its owner, but fifty is a nice round number. And on any day we might see stuff at least that old, or older.

Looking at the Nishiki head tube badge, I didn't notice for a while that the bike was actually "Produced for American Eagle." 

 

Interestingly, little color accents on the fork blades are German colors, not American. There's nothing red, white, and blue anywhere on this bike, at least not all together in one spot.

Für deutschen adler?

The bike is designed for touring. Lots of people were happy to ride something like this across the continent in the 1970s. The owner said that it came with fenders and a set of lights. He did not keep those, but the bike still has its randonneur handlebars.

Randonneur bars are kind of brilliant. The tops rise from the center and are sometimes swept slightly back. This provides higher hand positions and back angles for the rider, but still mounts to a stem with a negative rise, for better handling overall.

Because the steering axis of a bicycle is not vertical, stem angle changes how the steering feels. The shape of the connection changes how your weight controls the system. A stem that drops forward of the steering axis tends to center itself better than one in which the stem rises above 90 degrees to the steering axis. The steeper the rise, the more noticeable the effect. You can get used to anything, but once you know you can't overlook it. It's very annoying. That's why on so many of my bike builds after the advent of threadless headsets I left the steerer tubes long, piled up the spacers, and mounted stems with an angle of 90 degrees or less.

The bike industry reinvented the randonneur bar, as seen on some Specialized Roubaix models and elsewhere. The newer version has a wing top for more comfortable hand support, and rises more abruptly. They can do this because stems almost all have open clamps to allow for more weirdly-shaped handlebars that no longer have to thread the needle of an old-style single-bolt clamp.

You could really go on a Safari with this bike, or so the name implies.

Double eyelets on the fork would take fender stays and either a front rack or the more common handlebar bag with bungee cord stabilizers that hooked in down at the dropout.

The crank says American Flyer

The rear derailleur was bent. This was repairable in the Dark Ages of friction shifting:

Less repairable was the Suntour freewheel.

 I liked Suntour freewheels, but they had a tendency on occasion to disassemble themselves while you were riding, allowing the innumerable tiny ball bearings to fall out along many yards of highway. You could theoretically purchase replacement ball bearings and spend a meticulous hour putting the freewheel back together, provided that the pawls hadn't also escaped, but more often you would just buy a new freewheel and graunch down on the outer plate that held the whole apparatus together before trusting it. But the failure could be catastrophic. The worst case I saw was on a climb in Northern California, near Rockport. The rider's freewheel on his loaded touring bike came apart and cracked the flange of his nice Campagnolo Record hub. He and his riding companion had to camp on the side of the road for the night and hitchhike back to the nearest bike shop the next day, to get a wheel and freewheel so that they could resume their northward journey.

Time traveling forward to the present, the 21st Century is represented by this tubeless road wheel:

Tubeless tires for bikes barely make the slightest bit of sense for mountain bikers who could be riding on serrated ledges and over a certain size of angular stones while running fashionably low pressures, but even there I hear them lament that they burped a tire on one of those hazards and ended up with a flat tire anyway, often harder to reinflate in the field than a stupid old inner tube would have been. Your magic juice can leak out, making a seal to the rim difficult or impossible to attain. This is why tubeless riders carry a tube with them.

Setting up a rim and tire for high road pressures really highlights the absurdity of applying the latest fad to every category of bicycling. Road pressures severely challenge the sealing technology that evolved at very low off-road pressures. The process makes gluing tubulars look almost casual.

Gluing tubulars is potentially very messy, but at least you can see what you're doing. Move deliberately and methodically and you will succeed. 

Mounting road tubeless puts you at the mercy of microscopic discrepancies that somehow manage to be immune to the properties of the drippy sealant you have to pour into the casing. The setup shown in the picture, on the first attempt, was okay up to about 60 psi. It would not hold anything above that, no matter how I waved the wheel around to distribute the sealant. It was leaking into the rim somewhere. 

The original stem looked cool, but the rubber seal area at the base of it was rectangular, meaning that it covered less rim along one dimension than the other. Also, the rim tape had not bonded well enough, even though that was hard to judge by looking. I replaced the stem and peeled the tape, deep-cleaned the rim with alcohol, and then baked the wheel in the convection oven we use to heat-treat skis for glide waxing, to dry it absolutely thoroughly. That seemed to do the trick. The tire settled in at 90-100 psi and held it to the end of that day. I declared victory and called the customer. He said someone would be in to pick it up for him. My work week ended, and I left for three days.

When I returned to the shop, the bike was still hanging there. I pinched the front tire. It had gone down to squeezably soft. I reinflated it and heard hissing into the rim. Resisting an urge to take a fire ax to the goddam thing, I tried tightening the lock nut at the base of the stem. The hissing worsened. I removed the groovy plastic shim included with the wheel and went straight for lock nut against rim. Before tightening that, I removed the lock nut and pushed the stem into the rim so I could inject sealant around it to coat the base of it. Then I tightened the stem, re-seated the beads, and inflated the tire. It eventually seemed to hold quietly. I had barely walked away from this when the customer's father came in to get the bike. I said nothing to him or to El Queso Grande, who was handling the transaction. The tire was rock hard and seemed ready to ride, but I guarantee it will be back within a day or two. I can decide then whether to go for the tire levers or the fire ax.

The tubeless department had been getting a little chaotic, so I found a bigger receptacle for our tubeless paraphernalia.

The three-speed that this rim tape came out of may have been much older than fifty years.

I could barely make out some inscriptions in Aramaic on these scroll fragments.

A smokeless moped with a flat tire provided official acknowledgment that ebikes are mopeds:

An old Cannondale showcases the destructive interaction of human sweat and aluminum:

When I attempted to coax a stuck ferrule out of the cable stop on the frame, the stop popped off instead, because the aluminum was so oxidized. The deterioration is eating into the frame itself.

The frame also has some nasty dents from chain suck. It is now destined to be recycled into beer cans. Cheers!

The parts shortage this season led us to farm old inner tubes when common sizes went out of stock and would vanish instantly from suppliers' shelves when they became available again.

On to the next thing: This visiting rider said that he was having a heck of a time getting his gears to stay adjusted. At first he focused our attention on the front derailleur, because it's one of those Shimano models where you have to follow a six-page PDF of instructions to hook up the cable and set the tension. Eventually, though, he also mentioned that the rear shifting was incorrigible, too. Shimano's higher end mechanical shifting systems seem designed primarily to make people want electronic shifters.

The bike wins the award for Worst Internal Cable Routing, but that's a highly competitive category. I don't expect this entry to hold the crown for long.

The bike had those crappy brown-coated cables that get abraded almost immediately. Cable fuzz causes drag, especially inside the standard undersized 4mm shift housing.

This bike did have a full cover over the bottom bracket cable guides, protecting against a major entry point for dirt and water in internally-routed cable systems. The hatch cover was full of carbon dust from the cables abrading the cable guides, and a thick dusting of cable fuzz that had worn off of the wires themselves. 

Step one is always to yank out the brown cables and get some 1.1mm stainless wires in there. Step two is often to replace the housing with 5mm if the frame will allow. But when I was trying to thread the new cables I discovered that he had a bigger problem than cable fuzz and skinny housing.

The problem turned out to be the cable stop on the top tube, where the shift wires enter the frame for their dark journey through the mysterious interior.

 

 

That little doohickey inside the tube is supposed to be on top of the tube. It managed to fall inside, but would not come back out the same way. I had to remove the fork, which fortunately gave me access to the inside of the top tube. 

If you own a bike like this, expect to fork out a lot for repairs.

 

Someone had wrapped Teflon tape around the cable stop to try to wedge it into the hole in the top tube, but that merely reduced the width of the flange that is supposed to keep the stop from dropping in. I peeled the tape away, and reduced the size of the opening from the back edge, where the stop has a longer flange, to enhance the overlap of the narrower flange across the front. It was a bit of a hack job, but much of what we do is meatball surgery for riders who not only need a bike repair, but have limited time. This is bike service in a resort town.

We do have our year-round residents. I believe the doting Dad who wanted us to change the grip-style shifter on his daughter's 24-inch mountain bike to a trigger-style shifter endures the winters with us and doesn't just cherry-pick the summers.

The close-reach kid levers on the brakes don't leave a lot of room for the index-finger lever of the shifter pod.

Finger trap made in China.

Fortunately, kid fingers are small enough to work in the space available, and the pivot of the brake lever keeps it from pinching down on the upshifting finger. A larger lever, shut down to accommodate the daughter's diminutive digits, would end up just as close.

Two department store bikes came in at separate times for separate things and I noticed these helpful stickers on the fork:

We have frequently seen cheaper bikes with the forks mounted backwards, either by the owner or by a disinterested grunt at a big box store who was numbing his way through the assemblies for a management and clientele that don't know the difference. This sticker may help to reduce the frequency of that error.

After a brief hiatus immediately after Labor Day, repairs have picked up again, though not to the flooding volume of spring and summer. And many of the problems continue to be weird and time consuming on top of the lottery odds of finding parts that you need.

Summer is not a bell curve

Summer seemed to arrive sooner and last longer around here 20 years ago. It seemed to crank up at Memorial Day and go pretty steadily until Labor Day, with some peaks and valleys, but all on a pretty high plateau. Whatever has contributed to the decline, the shape has been distinctly different since shortly after the turn of the century.

Summer now is Fourth of July weekend, and August. Depending on the year, July might stay a bit active, but August is as close to crazy as we ever get anymore.

This summer, I left for a vacation trip at just about the worst possible time. Because the cellist has limited time at home with her out-of-state employment, we had to schedule the trip when she had the chance. I knew it would put me on the long-term shit list with my employer, but the cellist has limited time in more ways than one. I spend most of my time disappointing someone. I just have to choose who it will be. So I returned from the trip feeling like the guy who sneaked out of the Alamo before things got really bad, to hit the saloon and brothel. In reality my goals were more lofty than that, but the siege mentality of a small shop with inadequate staff leads to high stress and exaggerated emotions.

Because so many schools go back in session before summer technically ends, the crowds should drop right off this week. Because some schools are making a point to start after Labor Day, we might see more residual activity in this period of tapering. After Labor Day we'll get the early September rush of people who make a point to take vacation after the crowds are gone, when hospitality businesses might be offering discounted rates. That's what I used to do, decades ago, when I took vacations.

Has summer travel always been a business? Back 12,000 years ago, or even just three or four centuries, did seasonal travelers interact with fixed populations in ways similar to the economic exploitation of today? Exploitation sounds like price gouging, but it isn't always. It's just a matter of harvesting a resource when the resource is available. I've used the metaphor of hunting migratory herds to describe our handling of regular cycles of tourist business. We don't actually kill and eat them, and wear their hides -- except perhaps in some of the more remote hollows of the mountains -- but we extract as much as we can from them when they're here, knowing that they will be gone in a few weeks.