The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

5 Days ≠ 5 days

Ski season demands a different kind of energy than bike season. In some ways it's lower. If we have good snow, leading to active rentals and retail sales, we have to deal with a lot of immediate customer needs, but almost nothing spills over into complicated services. Dealing with the public can be tiring and annoying, but it's basically a revolving door kind of transaction. They trample in, we hand them gear, they trample out. In the afternoon, renters return to drop their wet gear and leave again.

I work some long days in rental season, arriving early to set up the shop after wet boots have laid out overnight to dry. My personal life goes on hold for as long as the peak period lasts. That depends on the weather. It could be a couple of months or a few days. It only demands patience and infection control. The five-day week is tiring. I'm always glad to get to the shorter hours of spring.

Here's the thing: bike work, especially service work, is way more exhausting than ski work. Winter is exhausting in its way because I have to take care of my house, clear my driveway, shovel my roof if the winter calls for it, and still get to work on schedule. It taxes my body. But bike work absolutely drains my brain, and has an emotional component as well as I try to handle all of the variables.

Bike comes in for service. What kind of bike is it? How old is it? Expensive or cheap, was it well made? Plenty of expensive stuff out there in the last 20 years is poorly thought out. Some of it, particularly from fringe e-bike companies, is shamefully crappy. But even the "good stuff" from what are perceived as reputable companies suffers from technophilia. So when I assess it I have to determine if it was ever fixable, let alone whether it is still supported.

As the 20th Century neared its end, bike companies started getting more and more coy about publishing tech information and specs. For a while we could keep an archive of printed catalogs to have some idea. Back when we went to trade shows, we could pick up materials from the brands that we didn't sell as well as the latest from our own vendors. That not only helped us when chiseling customers quoted competitors' prices to us. It also helped us repair those bikes. And the bikes themselves were simpler, which helped everyone, especially riders, whether they realized it or not.

I advocated for simplicity as I saw the trend in the industry toward complicated, expensive mechanisms. No one listened to me. Customers voted with their wallets in two ways: A bunch of them abandoned biking altogether. The remainder were technolemmings eager to run off of whatever cliff the industry put a shiny new gizmo on the edge of.

The next steps after figuring out if a repair is possible at all are to determine if we have parts on hand or can get them. At the same time I have to calculate the cost and see if the customer is willing to pay it. People will sink astonishing amounts of money into a piece of cheap junk, while others will walk away from something in the mid or upper price range that could be fixed for significantly less than the price of a new one. It's just that new ones are so expensive that "significantly less than the price of a new one" is still several hundred dollars. We have repairable full suspension bikes abandoned in our basement because the owner ghosted us. More than once this happened after they said, "I do want to pay you for your time." No you didn't. Don't even bother to lie.

You might think that we can then spiff up those bikes and sell them for enough to recover our sunk costs, but with all of the other things that we have to do with a rapidly aging skeleton crew, like vet our decrepit rental bike fleet and keep up with the billable work for customers who do want to pay us for our time, rehabbing a mountain bike rapidly going out of fashion never seems to get done.

As a repair moves through the process, setbacks might occur that lead to additional charges. Then I have to feel out the customer without scaring them off and figure out how much, if any, of the extra cost we can recoup to avoid losing our entire investment of time and material in the repair so far. Most people don't need their bikes. It's all discretionary spending.

The ones who do need their bikes don't usually have a lot of slack in their budgets, no matter how willing they might be in theory to pay us what we're worth. We've had two bikes hanging downstairs for at least four months while the owners try to scrape up the money to have a flat tire repaired. We know from experience that if we fix the bikes and let them go without payment, the owners won't get back to us with the money. Heck, we've got a guy who actually worked part time for us to score employee discounts who is into us for a couple thousand for an e-mountain bike and trailer. Times are tough. A lot of our inadvertent charitable donations are not tax deductible.

The work no longer inspires hope or is particularly satisfying. Some customers appreciate it. Others take it for granted. The cool kids are all way cooler than I am, so I'm barely a step above someone pushing a broom to them. Maybe not even. So at the end of the day, and emphatically at the end of a week, I'm fckin' done. I want as much of the season of light and warmth as I can get. All too soon we go spinning into the darkness again, to grapple with whatever passes for a winter.

The coming recession

 Back when the economy sagged around 1990, mountain biking surged, because it looked like cheap, accessible fun. A thousand bucks was still a lot for a bike, but sporty, capable machines costing $500 to $800 were an easy sell.

The recession in New Hampshire started a little sooner than 1990, because the 1980s had spawned a real estate boom that began to falter as the '80s ended. We went down a little sooner and stayed down a little longer than the official dates for the recession period. But the shop stayed busy because the many families that had been feeding off of the building boom couldn't just uproot and leave. Where would they go anyway, when the economy was spongy all over the country? So they stayed.

People from away still visited. People who might have taken a more expensive vacation to a more distant, bragworthy destination stayed closer to home.

Mountain biking thrived because it didn't require much investment after you bought a bike and a few accessories. You didn't need to buy fuel for it, register it, and insure it. Just buy a bike and go find the local trails.

Trails did exist. We rode for miles on logging roads and snow machine trails, and tried out hiking trails with varying success. During mountain biking's exploratory period, mountain bikers hadn't become as jaded and demanding as they are now. Consequently, there were a lot more of them.

By the mid 1990s, when the economy had revved up again, mountain biking was a habit. The bike industry was busily technologizing it to death, but it was a slow poison in pursuit of perfection. The mountain bike of today is truly an impressive product of evolution, well suited to the style and environment of its use. It's also never going to be cheap again, because you can't make a machine that will stand up to the demands of technical trails and fearless riders by keeping it simple. You want a simple bike? Stay away from mountain biking.

Because the bike industry grew obsessed with increasingly expensive technologies in all categories, their user base shrank, leading to much larger and more rapid inflation than in the rest of the economy. They had to farm fewer people for more money per person just to try to tread water.

Changes to mountain bike design do reflect lessons learned from the period of its greatest popularity. Front end geometry is designed around long travel suspension forks. A longer rigid fork would not provide the secure handling that a suspension fork provides, because it would not redirect the force of bumps and bashes the way suspension does. Front suspension allows you to put the front wheel out in front more, while the rider stays back behind the steering axis, which helps reduce the chances of going up and over the bars. Because the suspension telescopes, the wheel moves toward the bike as it moves upward. With a rigid fork, the wheel would stay out there, exerting its full leverage on the fork legs and lower headset bearing. Your simple bike would have to have the archaic geometry of the 1990s. Your riding style would have to reflect that.

You can still take your old 1990s single speed on many trails. Routes we used to ride still exist. Just make sure you don't impede the rightful masters of those trails who paid a lot more for their bikes, especially if you are on one of the trails that they also paid a lot of money to have built.

The combination of tariffs and economic instability looming before us for this summer spell big trouble for the bike industry. Even the sales of cheap e-bikes will suffer, because they are entirely built in tariff-affected countries. Even with that, cheap e-bikes will stay viable because more and more low-level workers will not be able to afford even a beater car. Hard to say how it shakes out nationwide, when so many urban areas have been designed around the armored cavalry model of transportation.

The way the economy is being collapsed, it won't all fall in at once. This will help the administration, because the people who go down first have the least political leverage. They (we) are quite numerous, but easily divided over trivial matters. But the bike market has been fragmented for almost 20 years now. People in general seem to have less to spend on recreation, and far more options to spend it on than they had in the 1990s.

In hard times, people do pay to repair their older items, but they still have limited funds, and repair parts are subject to the tariffs and inflation.

Cog blocked

 Blue is almost but not quite perfect. The gearing covers a little wider range than on my original Cross Check. As I’ve put more miles on, I noticed that the steps in the cassette could be a little more even. What’s on there is 13-15-17-19-21-24-28-32. 

On the green bike, I had added a 30 to a seven-speed block with the same gears that the blue bike has, only culminating in a 30 instead of a 32. So the intervals from the 13 to the 30 were 2-2-2-2-3-4-2. By subbing in a 27 for the 28, I made the intervals 2-2-2-2-3-3-3.

Large intervals and strange intervals mess with your cadence and power. On the 13-32, I wanted to Frankencog a 22 for the 21 and a 25 for the 24. That would make the intervals above the 19 go 3-3-3-4. At least three of my bikes have cogsets I assembled for them to suit my needs. I have a cog farm at home, and we have a deeper one at the shop.

A 12-25 used to be common on road bikes in the late 1990s. Some riders still ask for gearing that high. Surely a 25 lay in the big treasure chest at work. The 22 might be more challenging, but I remembered some combinations that had not interested me before that might contain one.

Nope. No 25, no 22. A search for new cassettes turned up one, described as a downhill mountain biking cassette, that had a 25. I’m not going to shell out for a whole cassette just to scrounge two cogs. The industry has cog-blocked me. Maybe a 25 will turn up eventually, but without the 22 it only creates a weird 4-3-4 sequence in the lowest three gears.

I should have bought up as many Miché cogs as I could get, back when they were available. I used some of those to make my “8 of 9 on 7” cassette for the Isaac/Trek.

If a particular part becomes too rare it negates a lot of the value as a reliable tool. True victory over the technofascist bike industry is won by using durable but also replaceable parts to rejuvenate a simple bike indefinitely.

Train your customers to reject simplicity

 Another breathless article about the "advanced" features that some bike brand or other might be slopping over onto more and more models illustrates the evolution of bicycles from vehicles of personal independence into vehicles of technological dependence.

A certain percentage of bike users will learn to work on them, regardless of how complicated and temperamental the mechanisms get. These riders will feel independent for as long as they can maintain their investment in tools and time. But it reminds me of people I know who work on their own cars, but who don't own a real auto garage with lifts and compressed air, and some level of machining capability. Those drivers have to make arrangements of various kinds to use a shared facility that they have to go to at the available time. The less of a workshop a given rider has, the more that rider will need to pay for a facility in which to work or someone to do the work.

The latest article on "improvements" in bike spec reported on the steady retreat of rim brakes in favor of disc brakes. This goes along with the overall weight gain among certain categories, as electric motors are added. Motor vehicles need more powerful brakes that impart the braking force more centrally, but that comes with several costs. A brake light enough to be carried on a chronically under-powered vehicle (even with electric assistance) will have relatively small brake pads that have to be replaced frequently, if you can find them in stock. Brake rotors are more prone to deteriorate when the bike sits idle, compared to your aluminum rim. Disc brake calipers are full of little crevices in which water and dirt can brew up mischief. Hydraulics complicate disassembly.

I could go on, and I have been known to. Suffice to say that bike maintenance is ever more the province of a professional mechanic with a lifestyle to maintain, as well as his or her shop full of expensive tools that have to be constantly updated, because manufacturers like to squeeze money out of them, too. To the consumer, that means steadily rising prices and a hunt for really good mechanics, akin to what we have gone through for years trying to keep cars on the road.

Key to this progression has been the ongoing campaign by the bike industry to get customers to scorn simplicity and embrace complexity in the name of performance. Niche riders are most susceptible to this. Triathletes want the most sinuous steeds that slice the wind. Mountain bikers want bikes that serve their specific interest, which seldom means pedaling up a hill. Just as alpine skiers don't ski up the Alps, mountain bikers aren't interested in climbing for its own sake. To be fair, how many of us who pedal are truly interested in climbing for its own sake? But still, it used to be a respected skill for a complete rider. But beyond the allergy to strenuous aerobic efforts, the mountain biking community also has come to depend on the suspension technologies that allow them to bomb down their trails without picking their way among obstacles that can't simply be launched over.

The varieties of unpaved trail surfaces and degrees of slope have led to very specific subsets of mountain bikes, each more than $1,000 (at least) to purchase, and costing hundreds of dollars a year to maintain properly. Or you do what most riders do, and ignore problems until the machine simply won't go anymore, and then either dig into it yourself or dump it on your chosen expert.

A thousand bucks ain't what it used to be. I've had a theory since the 1970s that the real driver of all economic fluctuations is the price of gas. By gas I include diesel. Motor vehicle fuel, anyway. The basis of all currency is the petrodollar. Right now, for instance, Americans are all freaked out that gasoline is over $4 a gallon. Back when I started driving, and gasoline was 28 cents a gallon, I had to endure the horrifying spectacle of it doubling in price within a couple of years. By the end of the 1970s it had topped one dollar! Eek! So either gas prices drift down again or everyone gets used to it as all other pricing adjusts to make it normal. Workers' wages will still lag. The rich will get richer. The international situation will be desperate as usual.

The fact that a widespread adoption of simple bikes for transportation would have headed all this off in the 1970s isn't even worthy of academic consideration. The "ten-speed boom" started a little social movement, and the mountain bike boom drove it off the road. It turned cycling back into a consumerist hobby.

As factors combine to give transportation cycling and other riding on the public streets some leverage, it also depends on the expense and complexity of electric assistance to exert that leverage. All of these technologies have their place, but it's in addition to older, simpler machines, not instead of them. Soon, very soon, I will pump up the tires on the old fixed-gear and start riding again. It's that simple. Each bike in turn as I need it comes down off its hook, gets dusted off, tires checked, and off I go. There's not much to go wrong with a simple machine. It won't suck money out of you relentlessly.

The difference between culture and subculture

 When mountain biking boomed and took the bike industry with it, to levels of social popularity really never seen in the industry's entire history, it made biking -- particularly on mountain bikes -- part of the general culture of the country for almost a decade. Mountain biking was accessible, affordable, and widely appealing.

As the activity evolved, its tributaries exerted their influence and ultimately narrowed its focus, turning mountain biking into a subculture.

Culture is inclusive. It draws from social connections outside of itself to weave a discrete activity like riding what was then considered an off-road bike into the general lifestyle of a majority of people. Only a minority of participants actually spent a lot of time on technical trails, but the bikes were affordable and fun to ride, with a popular configuration. They were simple enough to modify readily to suit an individual rider's preferences. The bikes were everywhere, along with a general sense of belonging at least to some degree to a vast and accessible community.

Subculture is exclusive. It develops its own language and customs, designed to exclude the masses in favor of the qualified. Anybody with the money can buy the equipment, but it takes knowledge and experience to become a recognized member of the group.

Fragmentation is inevitable as personal styles gravitate to each other. Tribal affiliations form around specific types of riding. Within these tribes, hierarchies develop. In mountain biking, rank depends on exposure to personal injury. Whether it's overuse injury or crash injury, the group is isolated from the main stream of society by its adherence to technical off-road riding, and further narrowed by its adulation for participants with no sense of personal safety. The biggest risk takers are the most admired. Below them are the riders of lesser skill and daring, who may be completely content at their level. Some of them may pose or aspire to higher status, but many of them just enjoy their personal best and are happy to be part of the scene. It's safer than riding the road, while at the same time perceived as ballsier because of the public spectacle of stunt riders performing sick tricks and even releasing the videos of their spectacular failures. How else will the audience appreciate the extreme risk involved in being a true master of this thing that doesn't need to be done?

Not every category of biking forms a subculture. Mountain biking and BMX are strongly subcultural. Recreational path riding isn't subcultural at all, except to the extent that not everyone in our general culture rides a bike at all. But path riders and urban transportation cyclists don't have the special clothing and conscious pursuit of fitness and technique that other disciplines of riding have. Any category that uses special shoes and pants is a subculture at this point. At the height of mountain biking's cultural saturation, bike shorts and shoes were darn near mainstream, but they aren't now. Whether you wear tight, shiny shorts with a chamois or proudly display your disdain for aerodynamics and crotch padding with your off-road attire, it's generally tailored to riding. And flat shoes for shin-gouging flat pedals are still "biking shoes" just as much as pointy little hard-soled things with a cleat on the bottom.

Mountain biking now depends on constructed courses. The better ones offer trails with varying degrees of difficulty, in order to attract and maintain the interest of riders who will inject money into the subculture's economic sector to help support the interests to the minority of elite performers. This is much more vulnerable to economic fluctuations than the old exploratory style of off-road and dirt road riding that we pursued in the early years. We had to worry somewhat about land closure, but one's vulnerability was directly proportional to one's addiction to a certain kind of terrain.

When I gave up mountain biking near the turn of the century, it was to build a bike that would get me through just about any public right of way depicted on a map, before anyone had decided that "gravel" was a category and tried to exploit it as a profit center for the struggling bike industry in the wake of mountain biking's collapse. I'm still riding the same bike more than 20 years later, on the same type of publicly accessible right of way. Some of them are too deteriorated for regular practical passage, but most are useful connectors, and I don't concern myself with whether they are paved or not. I also don't have to worry about whether they will be too muddy. Most of them are kept clear and passable at least half the year by some government entity at the state or local level.

The Surly Cross Check was eminently practical. Naturally, it generated very little interest. In that way it was similar to the Pugsley -- ancestor of the fat bike movement -- in the way that it languished for many years, developing a slowly growing following before hitting a critical mass and contributing to the birth of a category that the industry could claim suddenly to have invented. I wouldn't ride it slam-bang down rough trails, but it gets me around on a lot of interesting roads less traveled. It used parts that could be mixed, matched, and substituted, for ease of maintenance and better odds of repair if you happened to need it somewhere far from home. It would fit nicely into culture, if culture should embrace simple bikes again.

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.

I haven't sold a bike since 1992

The fun started to go out of the bike business with the arrival of index-only shifting systems in 1990. For a couple of years we could get top-mount shifters with friction option for mountain bikes. We took pride and pleasure in converting bikes back to the versatility and true freedom of friction shifting. But then supplies ran out, and all we could do was sort through the proprietary horseshit being dumped on us to find the least worst. I quit selling bikes and started just letting people buy them. I wanted no part in describing much of what we were forced to offer as "improvements."

Proprietary shifting systems were just the first wedge. Even before index-only systems, Shimano and Suntour used slightly different cog spacing, and other factors to enforce customer loyalty/entrapment. However, you could sometimes fudge something together using a merger of parts that worked well enough. And the friction option eliminated all issues except chain width. Chain width became a non-issue if you used a Sedisport chain, which you would want to do anyway. This was true until the advent of 9-speed, anyway. Manufacturers shifted their competitive aggression to other factors.

I thought about this yesterday as it took me hours to replace cables and housings on a Specialized Roubaix. All cables run internally. The customer wanted everything changed. To change shift cables, you have to run a sleeve over the old cable before unthreading it, to guide the new cable properly through the inaccessible interior of the frame. Because the rider wanted new housing, I had to untape the handlebar. Because he wisely heeded our advice to upgrade to 5mm housing, I had to change the in-line tension adjuster on the front derailleur cable, which is made to fit only 4mm.

Four millimeter shift housing is like deliberately constricting your tendons.

The brake housing was continuous, meaning that the housing itself disappears into the frame and emerges all the way back on the chainstay next to the rear disc brake caliper. The segment is so short and the bend so tight that I had to remove the caliper from the frame to get the housing out of it. This was partly because the ferrule was corroded into the cable adjuster, but also because the emergent section was so short. The section also aims upward, inviting water to wick its way into the housing. The cable I removed was rusty in that area.

To feed new housing, you first want to feed a new cable, and then extract the housing, so that you can feed the new housing up the new cable. Using the old cable you run the risk that the cable will fray as you feed the housing up it, snarling everything in the inaccessible darkness.

This is complete bullshit. The supposed advantages of internal cable routing are utterly meaningless to the average rider, even the average racer. How many non-professional, casual participants have ever lost a crit -- or even a road race -- because of the air drag on their externally-routed shift and brake wires? For that matter, in most amateur time trials, you'll have the Richie Riches who own dedicated TT bikes and then you'll have everyone else doing their best on whatever they have.

Racers will race on whatever they can get. When a competition involves a machine, a competitor will want the best machine, hopefully better than anyone else's machine, to get an unfair advantage. This drives technological innovation, leading to ever-evolving rules about what's allowed. A new advantage rapidly becomes the new norm. All it does, most of the time, is make the machines more expensive and harder to work on.

The Roubaix had looked pretty new when I started on it, but I soon realized that it was merely suspiciously clean. I suspected that the owner is a hoser. This turned out to be the case. The corroded bits were not from exposure to the weather, they were from exposure to misguided care. Do not clean your bike with flowing water. This is especially true with internal cable routing and other modern stylistic embellishments that look protective but aren't.

The bike has Specialized's Future Shock suspension. The rider had thought that the headset needed adjustment, but he was feeling crunchiness in the shock absorber mounted in the steerer tube. When I disassembled that collection of nesting parts held together with small bolts, I found rust in the parts that seemed well protected inside the frame. The shock uses a design similar to Cannondale's Headshok, with needle bearings riding on flat strips of metal. It's protected from above by a rubber boot, but water can seep in below the plastic cover that sits like a little rain hat over the frame at the head tube.

The boot only seals the top, but water comes from all directions. Put this bike on a roof rack and drive 60 miles per hour in a rainstorm. Clean it with a hose, high pressure or not. Water finds a way. I opened up the mechanism enough to get some oil into the needle bearings. That smoothed things out a bit.

On the other end of the shop, Torin was working on two obsolete Cannondale mountain bikes, one with a Lefty fork, and one with a Fox F100 fork fit with a reducing headset into the oversize Cannondale head tube. Both bikes were old enough to have 26-inch wheels.

The F100 fork has a leaky seal. It dates from the period in which we were seeing no mountain bike customers, so were paying little attention to the state of the art.  Our most active riders were all into road bikes at the time, and our most numerous customers were looking for hybrids and comfort bikes for the expanding system of recreation paths in the area. Finding parts looks like yet another treasure hunt. We'll pass on that. The suspension guru from a shop that enthusiastically served mountain bikers in Alton is now working at a shop in Concord. I have no problem handing off a problem to an expert in the field. As for the Lefty, only a Cannondale dealer can service that. We've been able to get some parts from Cannondale Experts, but we don't have the latest tools and factory support.

I said I haven't sold a bike since 1992, but that's not strictly true. Whenever possible I have sold bikes that combine some genuine improvements with the traditional simplicity and longevity of bikes from the mid and late 20th Century. They don't have complicated and inconvenient convenience features, or bulbous, modernistic frames. They're too sensible to be popular. Mostly they come from Surly, but there are other sources, like Rivendell.

Whenever someone says to me that their bike is 20 or 30 years old and they feel like they should get rid of it and get a nice new one, I tell them to let me have a look at it first. If it's a nice old bike in good shape, I tell them to invest in a few modern touches that improve on the simplicity rather than a whole new bike that obliterates it.

If someone wants a technical mountain bike or anything else excruciatingly "categorized" I nudge them toward their own research and let them pick their own poison. I'll assemble it, maintain it (for a price), and repair it to the best of my ability and the industry's indulgence, but I won't recommend anything.

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.

Your Personal Relationship with Cog

The departure of winter weather has brought in the first bike repair of the season.

New England has always had five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and "none of the above," but now they're more jumbled up than ever. We're definitely in none of the above right now. It can get as warm as it likes, and we still won't see growing plants for another month and a half. Still, if we don't get appreciable snow in that time, more cyclists will emerge. Or we could get slammed. Water-soaked ground won't refreeze, so a bunch of snow won't reinvigorate winter fun.

Of course this first patient is a dedicated roadie.  He told me he took this bike out for 53 miles a couple of days ago. That right there is a dedicated roadie thing to say. We know how far we went. It's not an approximate 50-55. It's fifty-three. Sometimes it's 53.7 or 52.89.

He told the tech who checked the bike in that the bottom bracket is noisy. Also, as a rider who has experienced fraying shift cables inside a brifter, he wanted those checked as well.

The bottom bracket is fine. He's just ridden the bearings out of his plastic-bodied Look Keo pedals. And his chain was worn out.

How do you know if the chain on your road bike is worn out? Answer a couple of simple questions:

Does your bike have 10 or more cogs in the rear gear set?

Has it been a month since your last new chain?

If you answered yes to those, you need a chain.

The cable for the right shifter had started to break, so I replaced that. The cable for the left shifter had a weird little kink in it, close to the swaged end inside the brifter, so I changed that one, too. We should be good to go, right?

When I ran the bike through the gears, I had to dial in a little more cable tension to get it to carry the chain up cog hill to the lowest gear. This is normal. I'd had the housings out, and they had to reseat. I started shifting back down to the high gears. First click: one cog. Second click: four cogs. Third click: chain chatter and finally a shift. The chain moved reluctantly the rest of the way.

Sometimes the cable has gotten hung up somewhere so it didn't get proper tension. I disconnected it,  checked the lead, and hooked it back up. No improvement. I popped the housings out of their stops to confirm that linear wires weren't pushing through any of the ferrules. With the derailleur disconnected, I held the cable while operating the shifter. The ratchet was definitely releasing too much on a couple of those intermediate clicks.

I flooded the brifter with spray lube and let it sit overnight. This morning it might have been slightly better on the first run through, but not on the second or third or any that followed. I doused it a couple more times. You can't do much else to Shimano brifters.

The maddening part is that he had no complaints about the shifting when he brought the bike in. I didn't do anything to it. You can't really. You might graunch on a shift really hard and jam the unit, but that's more common with certain front shifters than with rear ones.

Earwax -- the congealed factory lube that creates the illusion that a shifter is worn out -- will affect the shifting up and down. Clicks disappear. The lever just whiffs, catching nothing. That isn't the case with this unit. The ratchet engages too positively, and dumps several positions at once before the pawls click into place. I've seen it on other Shimano-equipped bikes. But why did I have to be standing there when it decided to happen to this one?

Because the rider has had more than one frayed cable since he bought the bike, there could be one or more tiny fragments of old wire that have finally migrated into position to jam things up. Or some hair-fine spring or little ratchet tooth could have broken off. The bike dates back to about 2012. In modern bike years, that makes it an old piece of junk.

Sophisticated mechanisms stand between you and your personal experience of riding. Mysterious, unfixable controls make shifting easier until they make it impossible. They act as intermediaries in your personal relationship with cogs. As with so many human complexities, we could choose to refuse, but the majority simply accepts that this is advanced, improved technology. The sleek, the expensive, the excruciatingly engineered, they're here to help us. It's part of the price you pay.

I imagine that riders said grumpy things about the newfangled derailleurs in all their wacky permutations as that technology was emerging. The thing is, all that stuff was outside the bike. There were internally geared hubs. There were hidden mysteries. But anything could be opened with the right tools. Someone could fix it. You yourself might learn. It's not brain surgery. It would deepen your personal experience, if you chose. And most minor malfunctions, such as they were, could be treated by the roadside. Minor. I said minor.

As soon as you have to pay someone to fix your stuff, you have to pay that person enough to stay alive and available. There have been bike shops for years, and those shops have had mechanics. But on simpler machinery, a mechanic could handle more jobs in less time for less money per job, compared to now, when the parts themselves take a good chunk out of the wallet, and the technician might have to deal with internal cable routing, hydraulics, exotic materials, electronics, a new tire size every year, and still shovel through a pile of box-store bikes and path cruisers to clear the repair docket. Parts are more and more expensive for shops to stock. Mechanics need to be smart enough to figure out all the different machinery, dumb enough to work for bike mechanic money, and loyal -- or trapped -- enough to stick around.

The simpler your bike is, the more you can do for yourself, and the less will go wrong in the first place. The friction shifters on my bikes will handle eight or nine speeds. I might even be able to swing ten, but I refuse to start using tinfoil chains. The index-dependent systems lock you into a manufacturer's offerings. Ten speed used to be top shelf. Now it's lower middle class. Parts are wearing out? Buy a new bike. You know you want to.

I can't do it. Forget the money. If I'd scored bestselling novel with movie rights money, I still couldn't do it. It's wasteful and it's enslavement. The personal is political. The personal is commercial. The personal is downright industrial. But you can still limit the intrusion to preserve as much of your direct relationship with the world as possible. The bike was a perfect machine for transforming human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too, if you're really adept on your fixed-gear. Multiple speeds increased its versatility without terribly degrading its essential simplicity. Only when innovators turned it into a semi-automatic weapon did things start to go wrong.

It's hard to find a high quality bike without complicated shifting. You can still find some with barcons as original equipment. The industry is so committed to other things that no other point of view can get much economic leverage. We're being dragged in another direction: tubeless tires, hydraulics, electrical things,... If you want something different, you have to hunt it down, and maybe build it up yourself.