New Shop vs Old Shop

 Long before I arrived, the shop where I work opened in 1972 with a few simple tools. The bike side started as a way to generate summer income in a business primarily focused on cross-country skiing.

They picked a great time to go into both of those markets. As the shop grew, the owners were able to amass more tools, both new and by purchasing at the liquidation of one or more bike shops that went out of business in the region. They never had the legendary Campagnolo tool chest, but they had a lot of classic tools by the time I showed up in 1989.

Remembering a few items that were extremely useful in my first shop job, I introduced them to the lineup. Most frames were still made of steel in 1989 and into the 1990s, so frame prep tools were a sensible investment to increase our capability in the competitive business environment of the mountain bike boom. We started keeping an annual wish list of tools to add.

When suspension forks became standard, we tooled up to service them. But that's when the math got more complicated. Suspension designs evolved rapidly. The tool kits to service each generation changed as well. Now we had to consider how many jobs we could bill for, to offset the prestige of being able to do them at all. We could easily spend a few hundred bucks to work on something that consumers and industry would quickly abandon for the newer and better model. Some of the tools might still apply, but designers were looking ahead much more than considering backwards compatibility in anything.

For the latter part of the 1990s, with threadless headsets now the standard, and fork designs changing every year, it made more sense for consumers and for us to have them buy a closeout fork that was newer than the one they had worn out, but not the latest greatest for the typical high introductory price. We could install a threadless fork for cheap money. They might pay more than an overhaul cost, but they would have a better fork. Every single customer went for it.

Before the internet, we competed with mail order. Customers would come in with their catalogs and ask us to match prices. Sometimes we could, but often we could not. We might get them to buy what we had because we had it, so they didn't have to wait for shipping and pay that extra cost. Sometimes we would tell a customer that we would match the mail order price but they couldn't have the product for five days. Pay now and wait, just like they would have to wait for delivery of their bargain purchase. Mail order places that gave free shipping put more pressure on us, as do the internet vendors today. A huge amount of retail has gone online, where big retailers seem to be feeding upstream from wholesalers, putting pressure on the whole supply chain for in-person shops like ours. The online stores can low-ball pricing and still make their margin, while wholesalers can't offer low enough prices to make in-person pricing competitive.

Service can't be automated. Maintenance and repair takes a human with knowledge, spending time and using tools. But tools and knowledge come at a cost.

As bike tech mutated through the 1990s, a lot of service was still intuitive. You could look at a mechanism and figure out how it came apart and went back together. Shimano led the way making inaccessible components, followed by Fox shocks that had scary labels warning that you were basically holding a hand grenade, but the progress to our current state of technological paralysis was gradual. We sidestepped the suspension service side until mountain biking suddenly died in its tracks shortly after the turn of the century. And it really did. Around here, it went from the thing everyone was doing, almost every day, to almost nothing. The remaining regular riders switched to road biking for perhaps as much as a decade, but even there the numbers overall were lower as the prices crept higher and motor traffic steadily increased. 

Road bike tech evolved more slowly than mountain bike tech. And in areas of the country where mountain biking hadn't died back as dramatically, the machines were mutating wildly, seeking the motorcyle-esque configuration that they have now. When some demand suddenly returned, we'd had no financial incentive to be ready for it.

When the mountain bike boom began, it built on the frugality of the ten-speed boom that had preceded it. One of biking's great appeals was that it was cheap fun. Buy the bike. Get some clothes and shoes if you want to get that much further into it. But then you just have to keep up with routine expenses like tires, chains,, lube... You could do a lot of riding for a little money, and have the rest of your cash left over for the delicious food that fuels your travels. Early mountain bikes started out as cheap beaters. Off-road riding was just kind of a hoot, a side line. When it seized the public consciousness and took off, the bikes were still made on the principles of the ten-speed era: solid, as affordable as possible, and marketed as fun and practical at the same time.

"Practical" went in the dumpster a while ago. Fun is a matter of opinion. "Affordable" was replaced by "money is no object."

With recent sporadic demand for suspension services, I reopened the inquiry to see what we would need to invest to tool up. For just two brands of suspension, Fox and Rockshox, the tool cost got close to $6,000.00.

In the 1990s it was a point of pride, but also a competitive advantage to be able to do things that other shops couldn't, even if you only did it once or twice. Reputation mattered when shops were competing across a fifty or hundred mile radius. Actually, with our summer population, we had to withstand comparison to shops more than a thousand miles away. But the investments were incremental. Even if the demand was inconsistent, it enhanced our legend to have done it. Replace the ratchet springs in your Campy brifter while you wait during your ride around the lake? Can do! Just take a long lunch. More elaborate services took longer, but every time we exceeded expectations it built our reputation. However, the budget to do that depended on a lot of cash flow from the other sectors of the shop. Our reputation-builder jobs seldom paid for themselves directly. Campy ratchet springs are cheap enough, but suspension service takes up a lot of clean space and requires tools and parts on hand.

A new shop starting today will invest in the tools needed for the technology of today. A new shop aimed at the new clientele of incoming young riders and established riders still spending the money to have current technology will make their money back on the jobs those riders demand. Over time, the new shop will mature, accumulating legacy parts and tools as they fade from the leading edge and become "that old stuff." In an old shop, our old stuff reaches well back into the last century. But we acquire our new stuff based on actual demand, not anticipated demand. We don't manage to keep a full representation of tools and parts for whatever might come in, because we only make survival margins on what actually does come in. And what might come in probably won't bring with it enough money to have made our preparations worthwhile.

The arc from new shop to old shop to used to be a shop plays out everywhere in different proportions based on local conditions. A big shop in a busy area will be able to invest in tools and training. They stand a better chance of recruiting young mechanics who will put in their few years before moving on to something that might actually earn them a living. At the same time they will accumulate old parts and tools to service the variety of machines that might come to them as bikes remain in service for decades. The bikes that remain in service for decades are not the ones with all the fancy new crap. The new shop, focused on the latest, will have to make an extra effort to learn about the antique stuff, and master the skills to care for it.

Wolfeboro has a mountain bike subculture now that exists completely separately from our shop. No one has yet invested in a new shop to serve them officially, but one or two amateur operations do it now as hobbyists.  It would cost us thousands of dollars to prepare to compete with these hobbyists, with no guarantee that we would prevail. In all likelihood, we would never see a return on our investment. So we limp along as those contemptible old geezers with a noisy bar underneath us and toilets flushing over our heads from the short-term rental condo above us.

In another part of town, a "makerspace" offers bike services through a hobbyist who retired from medical practice, and perhaps a few other volunteers with varying degrees of knowledge and experience. People pop up all the time who "used to work in a shop" before doing something actually respectable for the bulk of their earning years. Some of them possessed a high degree of skill for their time. Absolutely none of them have the slightest interest in picking up a couple of shifts in our shop to cover small gaps in the schedule. The makerspace does free service and offers repair instruction by the good doctor. He seems to be fairly competent, but only with what he has personally used. And he's devoted to tubeless tires, so I consider that a bad influence on inexperienced newcomers.

We never get to find out who didn't come to us because they went somewhere else. Our overhead dictates our pricing, so we face an immediate handicap against hobbyists who require little or no money for their services. That's one of the pitfalls of the "free market." People who will do the work for free have to be pretty bad at it for the average consumer to choose to go to someone who costs anything, let alone charges a rate that tries to keep pace with the cost of living. Even a spiffy new shop equipped with the tools and parts to fix your space-age marvel will face that challenge.

Voluntary servitude: Is what you're getting worth what you're giving up?

 A regular seasonal customer wheeled his bike in last week to leave with us because the rear hydraulic disc brake has gone squishy. He's been coming to us for a few years now, perhaps as much as ten. He has been bringing us lightweight drop-bar bikes with everything routed inside the frame the entire time. We don't know where he gets his money, but he has enough for a house here, one in Florida, and a collection of modern road-oriented bikes. He has never bought any of them from us. No hard feelings. We make money on service, too.

He's generally respected our skill and experience, despite his technolemming embrace of the modern. He has not devoured it with the appetite of the truly addicted, but he has no peers and mentors in his riding circle to discourage him from buying in eventually. This gravel bike reflects that. In addition to the hydraulic disc brake problem, he mentioned that it has tubeless tires that have been on the bike for a year.

"There's some kind of goo in there. Shouldn't that be renewed or something?" he said.

There is indeed goo in there, and the tubeless tire gurus will tell you, especially in the fine print that comes with the products themselves, that you should do all kinds of procedures "for best results" that no one is actually doing. For instance, if the bike is going to be laid up for a while, you're advised to take the tubeless tires off, clean them thoroughly, and hang them separately from the bike in a cool, dry place. While the wheels are naked, clean them thoroughly as well, and check the rim tape for damage and defects. Or just do what the vast majority of tubeless users do: treat the bike with the same level of neglect that you always did, and deal with a problem when it eventually forces itself on you.

Truly addicted tubeless users do whatever they have to. Maybe they find enablers at a shop. Maybe they take on the tasks themselves.

I told him that we charge by the hour. Cleaning out a year-old tubeless tire and remounting it might go smoothly or it might not, but peeling out all of the old sealant boogers is a tedious and unrewarding task, especially if you feel, as I do, that tubeless is asinine and should never have been inflicted on us. And despite the reputation of tubeless sealant that it can take care of punctures without you ever being aware of them, it is surprisingly finicky about sealing a bead to a rim if there is some tiny granule of dirt or a particularly crusty booger in the way. It also will not seal defects in the rim tape. It can even float the rim tape loose, completely demolishing the airtight floor on which the entire concept depends. It is pointless and stupid.

I got a vibe of amused contempt from our customer. It was a new thing from him, but quite familiar from the 1990s, when mountain bike punks came in constantly to try to stump us with their little scrap of nouveau knowledge. We're in a new age of it now, but see little of it because the riders who want to enjoy their bad decisions tend to go to places where those bad decisions are embraced and fortified. It was a disappointing surprise to see it from this guy. I'm guessing it stemmed from his recently completed Southern Tier transcon in a peloton of technolemmings, all bonding during their immersive challenge of a sagged, packaged tour.

Regarding the tubeless tires, he bragged that he rode on 36mm tubeless tires for the whole 3,000 miles without a single flat. I replied that another customer had just completed the same route on his Surly Disc Trucker on 38mm tires with tubes and he hadn't gotten a single flat, either. At that point, tubeless guy admitted that one other rider, on 32mm Continental Gatorskins with tubes had also made the entire trip without a flat. Most of it comes down to luck. I can go more than 6,000 miles using three different bikes over a couple of seasons without getting a flat, and then get a rash of them.

Not enjoying my input, the customer turned to The Owner, only to have him completely affirm my position. El Queso Grande then rather brilliantly led the customer through a decision tree of questions about tubeless. He mentioned the ride quality and asked if the customer had experienced a massive improvement there. He mentioned the suggested procedures for proper care and maintenance compared to tube-type tires. At the end of it, the customer had figured out for himself that he would rather just have tubes.

Did we browbeat the guy? Will he get razzed by his technolemming buddies who still drink the sealant? Will he have the courage to stand up to peer pressure not to do the stupid thing that everyone else is doing? Will he end up hating us for trying to save him from it? Every time he gets a flat he will wonder if he would not have gotten it if he had just stayed faithful to the new religion.

On the trip, he wore through the tread face of his rear tire. Another rider in the group, "a racer" who was "the best mechanic" did a complete tire change in ten minutes! Note: in a shop, ten minutes is a leisurely time for a tire change, particularly with a tube. On the  roadside, maybe longer, but mostly for the pumping if you still use a hand pump. I'm seriously tempted to buy one of those little rechargeable micro air compressors. But this wizard was working from the supply van and had a burst pump.

The customer looked mockingly at me and asked whether I put the sealant in before or after I seat the beads. 

"If you put the sealant in first, it goes all over the place when you seat the beads," he said with the smug assurance of someone who has never actually done it themselves.

That has not been my experience in the numerous times I have poured the sealant in and then seated the beads with the compressor. I have also dry-seated a tire, but I prefer not to pour sealant through the valve stem, because sealant will clog the valve stem soon enough on its own. Why give it a head start?

I have encountered instructions for three different methods to seat a tubeless tire. Method one calls for fitting the tire to the rim and pouring sealant into it before the beads are seated. When I do this, I have the valve at the top of the tire, opposite the sealant pool collected at the lowest point. I hang the wheel from the work stand so that I have both hands free to blast air though the valve stem -- minus the valve core -- to seat the tire. Once the beads snap into place with their signature scary pop, I shove the core into the whistling valve stem to stop the outflow of air. And only air. Then agitate the wheel to distribute the sealant and set it aside for monitoring to make sure that it retains pressure.

Method two calls for dry-seating the beads and then breaking one of them loose again to pour in sealant before re-seating it with another blast of air.

Method three calls for dry-seating the beads and installing sealant thorough the valve stem before replacing the core. The valve stem is a very small hole, so you need some kind of injector or funnel, and the patience to let it flow.

Method one is the Q&D, wham-bam fastest. It's my first choice, because it gets the job done in the fewest steps.

After the customer left, I went over and kissed my own bike on the handlebar tape. I love my own bikes more and more every time I have to deal with the stupid designs and bad decisions of the modern industry and its unwitting slaves. They have given up freedom and versatility in favor of whatever the industry grants them in its wisdom and generosity, except that it possesses neither.

Earlier in the day, a man young enough never to have lived during the era of friction shifting was explaining to a younger woman (little sister maybe?) how derailleur shifting operates with the trigger shifters and brifters that have become inescapable. 

"You push this lever to click it this way against the spring in the derailleur, and this other lever to let the spring pull it the other way." On the whole, it was a good, clear explanation of the concept. But then he said, "With friction shifting you just pull or push a lever and feel around."

"Ew, no!" the girl giggled. And out they went. I didn't have time to explain the loss of freedom and versatility that index-only shifting brings with it. I didn't have a chance to use my violin analogy, where you make an infinite variety of musical tones by having no frets. You have to learn to place your fingers accurately to get the desired tone, but you can do all kinds of things that someone with frets or keys or buttons can't.

Technological enslavement is forced on us through every consumer product now. It's especially noticeable in electronics. You have intrusive apps and subscription services instead of just owning your device and operating it to meet your needs. Use the cloud! Use our AI.

You can't spell "Aieeeeeeeeee!" without ai.

I started working on bikes just as the era of nationalistic standards was fading into a narrower range of variation. Things were kind of stable through the 1980s, except for attempts at aerodynamic streamlining. I like aero brake levers better than the ones with the cable coming out the top. Step-in pedals didn't suddenly obliterate slotted cleats and traditional pedals, so we could coexist for many years. Most bottom brackets used English or Italian dimensions. English became the de facto standard. Lots of options fit that shell size. Chainring BCD options settled to mostly 144, 130, and 110, more or less. Certainly by the 1990s, it was pretty much 130 for road (135 for Campy) and 110-74 for triples. Then 94-58. Then the lid was off and variation became the norm. But on the way we had a period where 104-64 four-bolt was pretty widespread. Now it's just nuts.

Index shifting started with progressive levers that had a friction option and mounted to standard shifter bosses. Index-dependent riders had to pay attention to whether they had Suntour or Shimano, because they used different cog spacing and pulled different amounts of cable for each click. It was a nuisance, but not crippling.

When Shimano forced index-only shifting on us, starting in 1990, it began the decline that led us to today's temperamental proprietary systems. I complained at the time about all the gimmicks, but most consumers didn't know enough to object and vote with their wallets for anything else. They still don't, because they just want to ride. They'll ride whatever "a bike" is at the time. Their wallet votes aim only at price point, not at design critique.

If you want a solid, simple bike now, it's a custom bike, with all the costs that entails. Maybe you get lucky with an older bike you find. Maybe you find someone who is still building them that way. The modern addiction to tricky-dicky shifting systems means that custom builders tend to build around the needs of those systems. You have to make a special effort to seek out the simple, sturdy parts that make a low-maintenance bike that's still lively to ride.