"Consult a professional bicycle mechanic"

 Another tubeless tire victim came through a while back. He said he'd had the tires mounted at a shop where he lived. The staff there assured him that the process is simple and reliable. A few days later, the rear tire was losing pressure within hours. Now he was away from home, trying to enjoy his trip.

With tubeless tires, the problem never seems to be the simple one you want it to be, like tightening the nut at the base of the valve stem. It's almost always the rim tape. Rim tape is the fatal weakness of the whole ridiculous system.

When I removed the tire, the rim tape was wrinkled and detaching. This had been professionally installed by a confident technolemming who fully believed in the technology. This was the A game of a committed disciple. It's nice to see that even the true believers can screw the pooch this badly.

Wrinkly

Floppy

And the sealant mess looks like the floor of a triple X adult theater at closing time.

I had estimated a price to throw a tube in there before I saw that the rim tape couldn't be saved. I knew it would be compromised. I didn't anticipate that it would have floated loose completely. It didn't make a huge difference to the price, but it added a bit, as well as requiring more comprehensive cleaning and drying to get new rim tape to adhere properly.

The only way to make a reliably airtight rim is with a fully sealed floor. This requires novel approaches to spoking. The majority of players in the tubeless sector rely on tape. The sealant in its fresh, liquid state actually attacks the adhesive of the rim tape, as seen here. Any flaw in the tape job provides a starting point for the sealant to start weakening it. In addition, rims seem to be coming with shallower center sections now, as well as really tight tire sizing. This means that anyone mounting a tire might take advantage of the absence of an inner tube to use tire levers to pry the casing onto the rim, only to cut the rim tape.

Tubeless makes everything worse, but the fad has not run its course. And like all diseases, it will never be fully eradicated. All we can do is treat it when it flares up and inoculate against it as much as possible.

There go my Google reviews...

 When I arrived to start my work week on Wednesday, a set of fat bike wheels waited in the workshop. The customer had tried to mount his own tubeless studded tires, and had failed, so he brought them to us.

I was not intimidated by the challenge, having successfully mounted more sets of tubeless mountain bike tires than I can remember. The number isn't huge, but I do my best to forget them as soon as I finish. I've had my ups and downs learning about the aggravating and overly complicated technology so dear to some riders. On mountain bikes a tubeless system makes a little bit of sense, as long as the rider is willing to put up with the inconvenience of their installation and care.

I laugh every time I read anything that extols the weight savings of a tubeless system on a fat bike. Really? You're on a 30-pound clownmobile and all of a sudden to you want to pare a few grams? I have mounted at least one set of tubeless tires on fat bike rims, but I believe I got lucky when that went smoothly.

Nothing went smoothly on this week's merry romp through technolemming hell. The tires were not new. The rims were very wide. The floor of them was not well shaped to catch the bead of the big, floppy 27.5-inch casing. Yep. Twenty-six-inch tires five inches wide weren't behemoth enough. We had to go 27.5.

Undaunted by what I did not know lay ahead, I did not rush to begin the job, dealing with a few other things first. For instance, the compressor died last week, and the new compressor was still sitting in the dark, dank basement in a box. So first I had to go down and up and down and up and down and up with tools and a flashlight, figuring out what I needed to hook up the new compressor to the existing system of air lines that feed our several outlets. The new one was ostensibly identical to the one that just died, but the master connection was different, requiring me to scrounge in our many repositories of potentially useful bits and pieces to find one that fit. Some time after lunch I went through my normal tried-and-true procedure, getting the beads onto the rim, hanging the wheel on the arm of the workstand, pouring in the requisite amount of sealant, and blasting it with compressed air.

I applied nozzle to valve stem and got...nowhere.

Demonstrating Bernoulli's principle in action, the flow of compressed air into the cavernous bowels of the floppy tire casing actually pulled the beads away from the sides of the rim. Sensing that it was probably hopeless, I tried several different ways to apply circumferential pressure to the casing to get the skirts of the bead to catch just long enough to get wafted on their way, but no luck. I headed to the Internet for guidance.

Lots of suggestions came up, including spraying a volatile aerosol into the casing and igniting it, seating the beads with an explosion. The success rate looked like about 50 percent, with the other 50 percent leading to variously humorous incendiary catastrophes. No one was doing it for a paying customer.

Videos abound, of course, of smoothly edited best-case scenarios that don't feature pyromaniacs, that make tubeless tires look like simplicity itself to mount and maintain. Kiss my ass.

Out of all this I figured I would try the suggestion to install the tire with a tube in it to set the beads, and then dislodge only as much as necessary of one bead to allow me to extract the tube and only have to re-set the remaining bead. This meant, of course, removing the  tire and extracting the sealant that I had poured in when I expected routine success. Time is money, y'all, and when the method works it's pure gold.

We didn't have any 27.5 fat tubes. I figured a 26 would do for this exercise, since girth was of primary importance. Lacking any salvaged fatties, that meant spooging up a brand-new tube with the sealant residue I had been unable to wipe completely from the inside of the casing. I did what I had to do: seated the beads, gingerly unseated the one, dragged the tube out through the gap, and applied the air again. I had already pulled the valve core out, to deliver the maximum volume possible through the dinky barrel of a Presta stem.

The bead looked tantalizingly close, but no matter what I did I could not get it to engage the rim floor and blow the rest of the way out to its proper seat. Lay the wheel on its side, nope. Squeeze it here, there, and there, nope. I tried more positions than the Kama Sutra. I even did some bondage, wrapping a 29er tube around the outer circumference to squeeze everything in evenly.

Closing time came and went. I hung it up so that I wouldn't stomp it into a pretzel. On Thursday morning the battle resumed.

All the tire needed was something to provide momentary resistance so that pressure would build up inside the tire rather than having a rapid stream of air flow through it. I looked around for shaving cream. Various personal care products have accumulated around the shop over the years, so it wasn't too far-fetched. Unfortunately, the can of Barbasol that I could see in my mind's eye remained a mirage. My reasoning was that the foam would provide an ephemeral dam, and the soap would be no worse than the soapy water recommended to lubricate stubborn beads. I wasn't going to schlog the whole casing full of it, although that would be a good joke. I also thought about whipped cream, because the nitrous propellant wouldn't react with the sealant either. But the milk would sour eventually. It might be okay during the cold months, but come spring it would get nasty.

Some mechanics referred to the "split tube" method of sealing a rim. It was conceived to seal non-tubeless rims, but I believed that a variation of it would provide the resistance I needed at very little weight penalty (lol), and without the need to clean and dry the rim to add adhesive-backed tape layers, as many posters suggested. The less I  have to depend on glue, the better.

A 24-inch mountain bike tube offered the ideal circumference and width. That meant that I had to do a treasure hunt to find a couple of punctured ones to cut up, because I wasn't going to butcher new tubes for this annoying project. Then I had to cut my two prizes carefully to get strips that covered the area I needed, no more and no less.

I could shove the rubber strip into the casing of the tire already on the rim, and position it beneath the floppy beads before carefully positioning the beads to minimize the gap. I put the 29er tube on it again before I hit it with the air. No good. Resisting the urge to start wailing on it with a large wrench, I lifted it down from the work stand and bounced it lightly on the floor in a couple of places, while attempting to keep the air flow going into the valve stem. Abruptly the beads billowed outward. The tire gradually seated.

The rubber strip, of course, had shifted so that the edge of it was visible in a couple of places at the edge of the rim. In the official split tube method, the rubber strip is supposed to overlap the rim all the way around. The bead seemed to be sealing okay. I was not going to take anything apart in search of cosmetic perfection.

Having perfected my method, it would be a simple matter to install the final version on the remaining wheel, right? 

First I had to remove the non-studded tire that the customer had left in place when he threw in the towel. It was full of sealant, of course, of a different color and unknown type, so that had to go. I had to get rid of the fluid in the tire and clean the rim bed. Then the studded tire for this wheel -- the rear -- was as dirty and gritty as it had been since it was pulled off the rim last spring. Great. I cleaned things up a bit and moved ahead happily with my assuredly successful mounting technique. Starting from a bare rim (except for the existing rim tape that I wasn't going to fut with), I could lay in the 24-inch rubber strip before slipping the beads of the studded tire into the accommodating middle of the rim channel. So far so good. I was going to set the beads before I poured in the sealant this time.

Everything in position, I applied the air and heard the now-familiar rush of no help at all, charging through the interior at 120 psi. Clearly it needed a little something it wasn't getting. I picked up the bottle of sealant, which needs to be shaken vigorously for an hour and a half before every application, and every 22 seconds during installation, to squirt a bit along the beads to create what I hoped would be enough surface tension to work. That, combined with the 29-er tube around the outside, and strategic floor bouncing, finally did the trick. Then I had to deflate the damn thing so I could inject the sealant through the valve stem. The whole time I dreaded the sight of the beads pulling away from the rim. Properly seated, they're not supposed to, but tubeless tires are from Hell. Setting them with fire is actually fully appropriate.

It was now about 45 minutes after closing time. This is one reason I eat supper at 10 p.m. so many nights. Get home, light the fires, feed the cats, clean the litter boxes, prep and cook my own food, muck out the email inbox. Then it's off to dreamland some time after midnight, to be dragged across the jagged lava fields of morning when the alarm goes off in the predawn darkness. I knew better than to call triumphantly to report success. One or both of these tires would be flat by morning.

This morning, the rear tire, the dirty one, lay shriveled on the floor. Fortunately, its beads were still firmly in place, even though it, too, had little bits of the rubber rim strip showing under the bead line in places. No worries. I gave it a shake and roll to distribute sealant, put some air in it, and danced with it some more. The other tire had held up overnight. I added more pressure and listened to the hissing so I would know how to tilt it to get the sealant to concentrate there. It quieted. I put them both in post-op recovery for a couple of hours.

What to charge for this messy job that monopolized hours of shop time? My formula for jobs that I don't really like is to push the price up until the customer winces, but pays it. That way I know I'm getting the absolute maximum that the trade will support. Once people become inured to it, nudge it up again, unless I've learned either to like it or to streamline it sufficiently that it doesn't occupy too much time and energy. We gain nothing by giving the false impression that a particular category of service is casual and worth little. It's especially irksome to get pushback on pricing when a customer has tried it themselves and seen what a bugger it is, and they still want it for cheap. Specialty shops suffer from a tradition in which the staff are either fellow addicts who do it for the love -- which at times was truer of me -- or co-dependent sycophants who need approval.

Years ago we used to change the dinky little pneumatic tires on a certain brand of roller ski, that came with solid plastic wheels with a bead seat diameter of no more than three inches. There wasn't anything to hold onto, and you couldn't use tools or you would puncture the tube. Our listed price for tire changes was something like ten bucks. One big moose of a guy was bringing in a tire job a week. I'd finally had enough. The next one he brought in I charged $35 per wheel. His wife picked up the wheels. Not knowing anything about the price he'd been paying, she just forked over and took them home. I waited. The phone rang. It was the moose. He was a bit irate.

"What's with that price?" he asked.

"Why do you bring the tires to us to fix?" I asked him.

"Because they're horrible to work on! My thumbs get all ripped up, it's impossible --"

"Precisely," I said. Right through the phone I heard the light come on in his brain. No more complaints about the price. He could fight his own battles, find someone who would do the job for less, or come pay us to take the pain. We were both relieved when split rims came out, ending the bitter battles with the tiny, evil wheels. 

Initially I put a price of $140 on today's tag. Then, checking prices on line, I felt like I might be pushing it, so I dropped it to $120. On a forum I found people complaining about a shop charging $100 to mount a set of tubeless tires. Forum posters love to pour scorn all over bike shops and their service departments. I saw that hundred bucks and went, "damn right! I know exactly where you're coming from." But average prices among the addicts and sycophants run down around $20-$40. They do us all a disservice.

I have no vested interest in tubeless technology working. I see it as a complete pain in the ass for extremely dubious gains for the average rider. But as long as shops are willing to endure the nuisance and riders are willing to learn to do their own work, the tubeless will always be with us. Indeed, I fear that we will soon be unable to buy a decent rim that doesn't have a "tubeless-ready" bead, making regular tube type tires harder to handle for those of us who haven't run off the cliff with the rest of the herd. Is that the right word for a group of lemmings? You could certainly call it a pride. They head for that cliff full of hubris.

The customer made a face when he saw the bill. I didn't stick around while he checked out, but I guess he gave further evidence that he didn't consider it reasonable. Here's the deal: when you get someone to do work for you, you are buying a piece of their life. That's true no matter what the work is.  If it was too hard or too dirty or beneath you, or whatever else compels you to get someone else to do it, you are buying another person's time and effort. It's nice when it turns out not to cost a lot, relative to what you thought it should or would. 

When I adopted the bicycle as a vehicle both practical and pleasurable, its simplicity was a huge part of its appeal. Don't complain to me if fashionable complexity has made it inaccessible, temperamental, and expensive. It was the market's choice to make, and as far as I'm concerned it did not choose wisely.

Not the fire ax

As predicted, the road tubeless tire that I had such fun with last month came back last weekend because the tire had lost pressure. The rider told me that he had been having problems with the tires since he bought the bike. I'm pretty sure he's going back to tubes. I put a tube in the troublesome front tire, no charge.

A rim with a solid floor would eliminate the problem of rim tape, but requires a non-conventional approach to spoke nipples, such as putting them at the hub, which makes a wheel much harder to true, or threading them into the rim from the inner circumference, in the style of Mavic. In that case, you have to have their proprietary nipples to replace any that get damaged, and use a special spoke wrench adapted to them. Mavic has spawned two or three sizes already. Other companies have had to develop their own spline patterns. This is in addition to more traditional shapes with non-traditional sizes.

Because I started out as a self-sufficient home mechanic, I judge things from the perspective of a self-sufficient home mechanic. One of the greatest strengths of the bike as personal transportation that a rider could also use for fun was the relative cheapness and simplicity of the workshop one would need to support the machine or machines. I got drawn into it further than most, but even with the shop-quality workstand and truing stand my investment was far less than the price of a used car, let alone a new one.

There have always been some specialized tools. You can't fake cone wrenches or a headset wrench. You can put a big honkin' adjustable wrench on the top nut of a threaded headset, but you need the flatter wrench to secure the cone beneath it. And some form of fixed cup tool for cup-and-cone bottom brackets really assures that the cup stays fixed. There were few things more annoying than having the drive side bottom bracket cup working its way out of the frame on a long ride.

                                           Cone wrenches   Double-enders were handy for a home mechanic and to take on trips, but single-size shop wrenches with longer handles are more pleasant to work with when you have the luxury of better facilities. I've been spoiled a bit by the professional life. In either single- or double-ended form, the 16mm is the size to remove bottle caps.

                                            Headset wrenches     The upper one has a 15mm jaw on the small end, for pedals. The lower one has pins that would fit Sugino adjustable BB cups, as well as many other brands. You could also get adjustable pin spanners (not shown) just for BB cups, which I eventually did. 

Cranks used to come with a crank puller. They mostly looked similar to this Campagnolo puller that I got as part of a barter deal for some work on a guy's Schwinn Paramount. He had no use for tools he didn't know how to use, so I did the work in exchange for a nice collection.

I soon acquired a Park shop-type crank puller because it was convenient and I had little else to spend money on. Unpublished writers and bike nerds are unencumbered by social life.

You have to keep your crank bolts tight if you want the crank arms to remain obediently attached. First I got the Park multi-size, because common bolt sizes were 14, 15, and 16mm

Then, as part of the trade deal, I got a genuine Campagnolo peanut butter wrench. It was so named because the handle was perfect for spreading that affordable nutrient on your crust of stale bread.

While we're down around your bottom bracket, the official wrench for the most common flattened-oval fixed cups looks like this:

The hooked end fits the notches of the common BB lock ring. The wrench itself could be secured with washers and a crank bolt so that additional force or leverage could be applied to either seat the fixed cup or bust it loose as needed. There are cooler tools specifically for the task, but they've always been a little pricey for the slight advantage. I invested later, when I had a brief period of accidental prosperity. Rather than piss it away on frivolities, I invested in tools. Of course they were tools for tasks that nearly no one needs done anymore... but in the perfect post-apocalyptic, post-consumerist fantasy future, bike design would return to the accessible basics that were hallmarks of the late 1970s and the 1980s, minus the annoying nationalistic variations. Sort of a neo-classical period. Barring that I have a great supply of eccentric paper weights.

The well prepared home mechanic would have a chain tool. These became part of the take-along kit when mountain biking got big, because people were breaking chains right and left. This became especially common after Shimano introduced their "special pin." I developed a whole slew of phrases based on the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" PSAs on TV, starting with "friends don't let friends ride Shimano chains." 

Continuing the process of upgrading tools, I did get the fancy Park one that would handle up to a 10-speed chain.

Now, of course, you need one that will do 11, 12, and 13. I haven't bothered to equip for tinfoil chains, just as I never got sucked into buying new tools every year to keep up with changes in suspension design. I'm still holding out for that return to an ethic of simplicity and durability. Be the change you want to see, even if you know full well that it will never happen and that the world will cheerfully obliterate you and everything that you hold dear.

In the age of thread-on freewheels, you needed the proper tool for any brand that you had. The tools were small and inexpensive.

My brands were Regina and Suntour. Suntour later went to a four-notch freewheel that was not an improvement. The extra dogs on the tool created instability rather than greater engagement. Splined engagement was better, but only if you could get a tool in there without having to remove things from the axle. Phil Wood came up with the thin-walled tool that would remove Regina and Atom freewheels without having to disassemble the axle.

If you got into changing cogs on your freewheel, or messed around with fixed gears, this cog vise was great to have:

You will not find these anywhere now.

A chain whip or two is not only handy for self defense or really hard core S&M, you also need it to disassemble a freewheel or to immobilize a cassette on a freehub so you can remove the lock ring.

  Cable tension is important. Pulling them with pliers or just your fingers can fail to get things as snug as you'd like. Because of that, the Fourth Hand tool seemed like a worthy investment.

It's especially useful in today's world of high-tension shifting systems. It takes some delicacy not to crimp the cable, especially a skinny shift wire, but it's worth mastering. The Park version doesn't have as fine a nose as this specimen, so it's a bit harder to fit into tight spaces, but it has a locking mechanism that can come in handy when it isn't being a pain in the ass by locking when it feels like it.

Another score from the barter deal was this "Campy 5-mil with a growth on it."

The little knurled burl made it easy to twiddle quickly to thread down a 5mm cap screw.

The 8-9-10 Y wrench was another convenient item for the home tool kit or the carry-along set.

You'd still want regular box-open wrenches in those sizes, but the Y wrench was still worth its weight. 

I bought all of my tools from bike shops. Bike shops carried tools. I suppose there were mail order catalogs when I started paying attention to cycling in 1975, but I lived in places that had well-stocked shops. It never occurred to me to go anywhere else. Even my machinist friend moved into a series of shop jobs for quite a few years before she and her husband got away from retail and formed part of the shadowy support world of referral mechanics: people with the skills and tools to do jobs that the retail shops can't or won't. The referral network supports the shops by taking some of the load off, and fixing the problems that would cost too much money and time for a retail store's overhead.

 

Now I would probably buy on the internet, since shops don't tend to stock the more esoteric and serious tools. If I had to operate without a retail front, I would have to get parts somewhere as well. Depending on how far civilization degenerates once we've finished shooting ourselves and each other in every available foot, we may be scrounging in junk yards and landfills to piece together our mad creations.

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.

Tubeless tires vs. the mechanically inept

Calling someone mechanically inept is not an insult. It’s a diagnosis. The description covers a range of conditions that all lead to dependence on someone else to take care of your machinery.

I am semi-inept at auto mechanics. In the 1970s I could do a fair amount of routine maintenance on my Triumph Spitfire, because it was about the easiest car you could ever hope to work on. Everything was accessible, and four strong people could pick it up by hand and put it on jack stands. Well, maybe not quite. I never had friends that burly. I did what I had to, as a low-budget sports car owner, but I never looked forward to working on it.

As cars evolved, everything became less simple. I hung on doing oil changes for a while, but then I got a car where it was hard even to get a wrench on the friggin’ drain plug unless you were working from a pit or under a lift. Screw it. As for any diagnostics, I take my best shot and then find out from my mechanic how wrong I was. There are always factors that I didn’t consider, things I didn’t know. And it's all easier when you have a shop set up for the purpose.

My car mechanic engages in continuing education, but it’s independent study, the same way we research bike stuff here at the shop. He disparages modern disposable cars the way I disparage modern disposable bikes. But we both have to operate in the current universe of gratuitous technical complexity.

A customer dropped off her bike today to have tubes put in her tires. She’d been told by her hard core mechanic at the shop she patronizes in the city where she works, that tubeless tires were far superior to having tubes, because now she could run fashionably low pressure on her gravel bike without fear of flatting. Low pressure is faster, he told her. I didn’t gather that there were a whole lot of qualifiers with that. Everything is relative.

The front tire had been frustrating her because it goes dead flat overnight. She was tired of dinking with it. When I popped one bead off, I discovered that there was barely any sealant in the tire. It could have lost it a bit at a time with each complete deflation. It could have had too little from the beginning. I didn’t see obvious residue on the tire casing or the rim, but she’s been riding the bike regularly, pumping up the offending tire before every ride. Residue could get rubbed or washed away in the course of events. Because I don’t have much control over what happens to the bike when it leaves here, and I don’t share the current enthusiasm for tubeless, I hesitate to tell her that we can clean it up, juice it up, and she’ll be fine. She might not be. She specifically said she didn't want to mess with it anymore, so I'm not about to suggest that she give it another shot. If she wants to go for it later we can do it. The rims are already taped. She already owns the stems. I would suggest starting with fresh tire casings. And I make no promises for the technology. I have no vested interest in it working or not.

The only time I’ve seen sealant work has been installing brand new tires on relatively new rims. Other than that, the stuff baffles me. It’s supposed to stop leaks from punctures up to the diameter of a pencil, but how many days are you supposed to sit there by the side of the road or trail? As far as I can tell, the shit takes forever to dry, and is seriously challenged by more than a couple of pinholes.

Highly respected brand Orange Seal recommends replacing their basic formula sealant every 30 to 45 days. How many of you are doing that? Are any of the mechanically disinterested going to do that? The longer the shelf life of the sealant, the slower it actually seals anything. The shorter the drying time, the more frequently it needs to be replaced.

You might think, “I’ll support my LBS and just hire them to replace my sealant at the requisite intervals.” Congratulations. You’ve just tied your bike up in the repair queue for however long their backlog is at the moment. Someone can just add sealant, whether it’s the rider or an overloaded technician, but eventually you have to clear out the blob and start over. Just buy new tires.

You're also not supposed to mix brands of sealant. If you can't get your regular stuff, you're supposed to flush out all of the previous fluid, let the inside of the casing dry, remount the tire and fill it with whatever you have enough of. A repair shop needs to have bottles of every brand ready to match whatever is in a customer's bike already.

Today's tubeless tire challenge overlapped with a multi-day tubeless installation on another customer's 29-er wheels. His tires were "tubeless ready" when they were new, but a few months of riding at low pressure had worked the sidewalls quite a bit. It wasn't obvious until we put in sealant and pumped them up. Sealant began weeping through the sidewalls. The front tire held up okay overnight, but the rear went pretty flat. I spent the next day topping up the pressure and flipping the wheels every few minutes to keep the sealant distributed over the sidewalls. The front tire kept getting steadily better. The rear improved much more gradually. I marveled at how ineffective the sealant was at closing the myriad tiny pores along the thread lines of the sidewalls. They're fully coated with black rubber. The thread  structure wasn't prominent until the lines of bubbles brought it out.

We're ordering him new tires. Meanwhile, he'll go for short rides on what he's got. If you're going to ride tubeless, plan to replace casings frequently, even if you don't think you are riding a lot. It doesn't take much to break down the airtightness of a tire casing. It may be structurally sound with decent tread left and still not seal well without a tube. Mo' money. Fork it out.

Another thing to remember is that sealant will clog valve cores. The mechanically inattentive rider will run into difficulties inflating the tire as a result.

In the off season -- if you know that it's the off season -- you're advised to take the tires off, clean out the sealant, rinse and dry the casings and leave them off until you're ready to take up riding again. No grab-and-go rides on a mild winter day for you! Tell me again how it's great to get away from inner tubes? If you don't do this you could end up with a lump of congealed sealant in one part of the tire. You're also wasting the life span of it with the bike just hanging on a hook.

There are lengthy forum threads devoted to proper use and care of tubeless tire setups. More entertaining reading for those who care. But if you remember when bikes were something that you didn't have to obsess about I suggest that you forego as much of the tweaky technical crap as possible.

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.

Murphy in the Workshop

Saturday was a busy day, by current standards. As we relish our last couple of Sundays with the shop closed, we also face the mounting pressure of repair work without that extra day to do it. I hate that part. When we go back to full weeks, my life goes on fast forward until I flop out into September with another summer torched to a cinder. Days shorten and chill. Winter's uncertainties, always seeming more dire than those under generous sunlight, gather their forces.

With that in mind, I was preparing to stay late to finish two jobs that customers had hoped to get back before the end of the weekend.

The first was a road bike that needed some straightforward things like shift cables and housings, straightening up the handlebar angle, and a set of front brake pads. Oh, and by the way, the cable adjusters on the down tube have gotten mangled, so please replace the damaged adjusters with new ones.

The mangled adjusters were broken off. This is not unusual. I cleared away the loose parts as I removed the cables I was replacing anyway. But the stubs proved to be so severely corroded into the mounts on the frame that I was unable to spin them out by any of my normal methods. I flooded them with penetrating oil and left a message on the customer's phone to let him know that this job was now a couple of days out.

The next job was a wheel rebuild for a guy's fat bike. He brought it in because the alloy spoke nipples were all crumbling.

I hate alloy spoke nipples. I will tell you this plainly and repeat it as often as anyone brings the subject up: Do not use alloy spoke nipples. Do not let anyone try to convince you that they are an upgrade. They are a disposable item of crap componentry providing a dubious advantage of minuscule weight savings. And this was a fat bike! It was built for rough use in abusive conditions.

Here's where everything that could go wrong really started to pile up. Removing the cassette, I got the lock ring and the detached cogs off, but the block of riveted cogs had burrowed deeply in the aluminum freehub body. I've encountered this a lot. I can usually jostle the cogs loose with a couple of chain whips or a well-aimed tap here or there. So I tried one thing and another, finally snaking a long screwdriver through from the other side so I could give it a little nudge with the rubber hammer. Boink! The whole freehub body popped off, cogs still firmly embedded in it. Well, no harm, really. The axle cap just presses on anyway, and the pawls came out intact. The axle itself remained in the hub, so it would provide the correct spacing in the truing stand. I removed the brake rotor from the other side, so I could install the new spokes to go with the full set of brass nipples.

Back when the Surly Pugsley first came out, we got some adapters for our truing stand, to accommodate the unusual wheels that bike required. The original Pug was designed to use existing componentry in a non-standard way, specifically to allow a rider to use a rear hub on the front wheel. This was so that a rider on an unsupported expedition, far from tech support, could have a spare rear wheel. It was a limited use, esoteric option that made perfect sense in many ways: pure Surly.

As the industry has tried to make fat bikes a rage, the original practicality has disappeared under megatons of image. If fat is good, fatter is better. A mere 135mm rear hub long ago ceased to be good enough.

Because fat bikes really aren't a rage, shouldn't be, and probably won't be, we looked away for a bit, and failed to catch the truly ridiculous dimensions of things like...rear hubs, for instance.

There was absolutely no way that the hub on this wheel -- which was also filthy, by the way -- was going to fit into our truing stand.

I forgot to mention that this poor slave to modernity is also running a tubeless tire, which, of course, had to be removed to get all the way down to the spoke bed of the rim. So this wheel is in just about as many pieces as it can possibly be, and there's no way I can put it back together right away.

We priced the new truing stand that will accommodate hubs up to 215mm. It seems to list pretty consistently around $372 retail. Our price would be less, of course, but it's still another poke in the eye from the bike industry to small shops everywhere.

It's getting to the point where the bike biz is perhaps like the airplane biz. The guy who can do an annual on your Piper Cherokee might not be set up to work on F-18s or an Airbus. Hey, they're all aircraft, what's your problem? There was a brief period when the universe of available bikes could conceivably find succor under the roof of a small shop with a good staff and decent basic tools. And I ask you: is per capita bike use significantly higher now that we have all these increasingly sophisticated and disparate options? Or are we just collectively the victims of technological masturbation?

In the very beginning of the bicycle era, each brand was the product of a different shop, exploring uncharted areas in design and manufacturing with their own proprietary approaches. Standardization across brand lines occurred gradually. Bicycles paved the way, quite literally, for the mass-produced wheeled vehicles that followed. As those other technologies took over to drive innovation to greater complexity, bicycles languished, perfecting the artistry of the machine rather than breaking a whole lot of new ground in the use and processing of materials. Then, in the late 1970s, technological backfill began with test pieces like the Teledyne Titan and the Graftek. Those were merely modest precursors to the avalanche of engineering getting ready to thunder down on us when mountain biking exploded.

After mountain biking established the standard of having few standards, and adopted the shifting sands/seething lava pool technological landscape of virtually every other technology popular at the time, every form of biking felt the full brunt of technological attention, as a desperate industry continued to try to throw equipment at social problems.

A cutting edge is an instrument of pain. It is a surgical tool, amputating riders whose commitment is not strong enough to make them want to fork out the dinero to fund their addiction. If your needs and wants are modest, the industry has decreed that you don't deserve their best. With every cog they add, your old stuff drops a whole step lower when you go looking for replacement bits and pieces.

None of this will matter once civilization collapses to the point where the road system degenerates once more into wagon ruts, and we're lucky if we can rebuild the rail network for rapid transportation between major hubs. Sure, the bicycle was born in that environment, but it served a human race that had never known anything better. Riding a tall wheel with solid tires down a muddy track between farms was a new and desirable experience, face plants and all. But there's a good reason that the next phase of two-wheeled evolution was called "the safety bicycle." Who knows where we'll be able to land, once our obstinacy and superstition have assured that we can no longer maintain what we have. Maybe we'll all be walking, and eating "paleo."