Challenges to transportation cycling

 Yesterday I had an appointment to drop my car off for service. The mechanic I'd been going to for more than 30 years has been facing the same challenges in his line of work that I face in mine: keeping up with the expense of buying tools makes his life harder and more expensive, even as he watches the overall quality of vehicles get worse and worse. Disposable transportation afflicts almost every mode. When he told me that he couldn't fix an air conditioning problem because of the newest refrigerant, he also scouted around his area to find someone whose ethics he respected, who could do it.

For a person of limited means, every choice is critical. I don't have money to waste on either a sleaze or a well-meaning fumbler. So Rich's endorsement carried a lot of weight. In about 34 years, he's never diagnosed my vehicle's problems incorrectly or wasted my money on a repair that didn't work. Hence my willingness to drag my aging body across 40 miles of New Hampshire hills to leave the car with him when it needs service.

On the plus side, the mechanic who could do the AC was in Alton, less than half the distance to Gilford. However, Alton's terrain is a challenge to a bicyclist, even fit and young. I am fairly fit, but only for someone who is no longer young. Route 28 goes over a series of large rolling hills south of where I usually leave it. Those features stood between me and my objective going either direction.

If I was going to Gilford, I would ride on Route 28A and Chestnut Cove Road to avoid as much of Route 28 as possible. But Google Maps showed the bike route from the mechanic in Alton should follow Old Wolfeboro Road to avoid Route 28 on the other side, away from the lake shore. Sometimes the old roads avoid terrain that the new route tackles. Sometimes they're worse.

Heading from Alton to Wolfeboro in the morning, after I had left the car, I faced more than a mile and a half of steady climbing, some of it rather steep for an old fart on a heavy bike, laden with lunch and water and the other items I carry on a routine ride to work. Almost no cars passed me, which was nice, but I climbed higher than I would have on the highway. I appreciated the quiet, and the fact that I held the elevation rather than plunging down and climbing again, the way Route 28 does. However, the quiet road dumped me back onto 28 about a mile sooner than Chestnut Cove Road does. The highway isn't bad from there, but it's more tedious on a wide road with flying motor vehicles to remind me of my plodding speed.

During the day at work I tweaked something in my right pectoral muscle that I had previously injured the week before. That escalated gradually through the day until I could not draw a deep breath without pain. This would be a problem when I had to ride back out of Wolfeboro to the south, up a notorious wall.

I kept looking at Google Maps recommendations for the route back to Alton. They mostly favored a very direct route, using even more highway than their recommended route in the morning. But I also saw, grayed out to the side, Chestnut Cove Road and Route 28A. The route was less than a mile longer and completely avoided the unnecessary climb and descent of those nasty rollers. It was by far the better route for a rider. The only possible problem was a sign I'd seen in the morning as I passed the intersection of 28 and 28A, that said "Road Closed September 20." I looked up the actual work on the Alton Public Works Facebook page and saw that it was just one culvert repair, way down near the end, about two miles from my destination. I wasn't leaving until 5 p.m. They would probably have knocked off by then. Even if motor traffic was barricaded, I could probably slip through with the bike.

The ride out of Wolfeboro was absolutely as painful as I expected, with rush hour drivers at my elbow, because South Main Street so completely sucks for road cyclists. Most of them were as kind as they know how to be, so of course there were a lot of close passes, but nothing malicious. Once I hit the wall climbing out of South Wolfeboro, a pickup truck that had been stuck behind me as I wailed through the corners and descent leading into it made a big time about revving noisily on the way past me, but the driver left plenty of room. I was too busy trying to get enough oxygen past the stabbing pain in my chest to worry about macho posturing.

Once at the top of the wall, I knew I faced no more serious climbs. That was nice, although the pain continued not only from breathing but from how I held myself. There seems to be nerve involvement. Something pops occasionally, and the pain fluctuates, sometimes going away completely for a few minutes before I piss it off again somehow. It gave me something to think about as the sun fed the metaphor by sinking toward the mountains to the west. 

Chestnut Cove Road had been chip sealed, but it had settled nicely. It starts with a ripping little descent, which is nice. Then it climbs and drops a little, basically descending all the way to 28A.

The intersection with 28A had no signs forbidding passage. I turned right and continued to descend. Again there are climbs, but the trend is generally downward toward lake level. Eventually I came to the sign saying "Road Closed. Local Traffic Only." Cool, cool. I'm local. Don't mind me.

Next came a sign that just said "Closed." It adorned a more comprehensive barricade. Yeah, fine, but I'm on a bike here. I only need a few inches of space according to most highway planners. But then...

The crew was still at work after 6 p.m. A friendly workman said, "Not quite yet."

"I thought you guys might've knocked off at 5," I said.

"We would, but we're really trying to get this finished," he said. It was a cheerful exchange. I knew that they'd been working on this road since flash flooding ripped it to pieces in July. I said I totally understood, and settled in to wait. I could spend the time working on my breathing and trying to figure out what exactly was tangled up in the muscles and cartilage of my ribs there. The sun continued to sink. The excavators continued to dig and swing. The skill of the operators was impressive. Our machines become extensions of our bodies.

The light lost its last gold and turned silver. I dug out and put on my reflector ankle bands, preparing for the dusk. Finally, the work crew waved me through. I had just two miles left to cover. I put on the lights and pedaled away. It was still more light than dark out. I was still glad that I had chosen this route rather than the nasty climbs with the shorter mileage. Once I had committed to the route, I wasn't going to make the long detour to ride harder terrain in the dark anyway. You make your choice and you make it work.

What the Ruck?

 Scrolling through the teasers on my Google feed, I paused over the CNN headline, "Rucking is an easy way to fitness." I knew what I would find, but I had to see for myself.

Rucking is, as the name implies, the practice of walking for fitness with a pack on your back, containing an appropriate amount of weight for your current physical level and your training goals. The first expert cited in the article was at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, which lit warm fires of recollection because of how much time I spent propelling myself around that city under my own power. 

Annapolis at the end of the 1970s was a perfect car-free town. Two bike racing buddies and I lived and worked there without the expense and encumbrance of motor vehicles for several years. One guy was a naval architect, earning engineer money. His rental was the nicest, though still modest. The other guy was working as a painter, but moved over into carpentry before starting his own contracting business. Both of them gave up transportation cycling for the sake of financial success, but their time as non-motorized workers helped both of them to amass more money than they could hope to have done if they had been feeding and housing cars as well as paying Annapolis's exorbitant rents.

When we weren't riding to get around, we were walking. Even if we had been carousing on a weekend, we never drank and drove, because we never drove. I mean, we did drive, if we needed to bum a car to go to a race or use a company vehicle, but the rest of the time it was pedals or plain old shoes. And if you needed to carry something, it went in a pack.

See where I'm going here? A walkable community would make "rucking" a daily experience. If I couldn't ride my bike to work on a given day, I would walk, and I still needed to carry some things. A day pack was part of the ensemble no matter what. Because my bike distance was short for the first few years, I would ride in street clothes and carry items in a day pack. Only when the daily bike distance pushed solidly beyond 10 miles did I start wearing riding clothes and putting more of the gear onto the bike itself. Those distances also eliminated walking as an efficient mode, but I still walked by preference when operating within a compact area.

America is gradually "discovering" walkability as a means of addressing multiple issues that some of us started paying attention to decades ago, when the problems would have been much easier to head off. So now we move at a panicked crawl in the general direction of community design and redesign that support simpler and lower impact means of transportation.

I have to wonder how many people load their fitness pack with some sort of neutral weight and drive to a pleasant venue in which to ruck, while doing nothing to improve the infrastructure and societal norms to help walkers and riders use their exertions as part of their daily life, folding it into the necessary trips they would be making anyway. It does require more conscious planning and preparation to walk or ride to work. It takes more time and exposes the commuter to the weather, cold or hot, wet or desiccatingly dry, whereas an optional fitness activity can be skipped, squeezed out of the schedule. The article talks about people throwing canned food or dumbbells in their pack and suggests using "specially made fitness sandbags" instead. Ooh, and you can get packs specifically designed for rucking, rather than a readily available multi-use hiking pack. You're rucking kidding me...

The Navy rucking coach is dealing with a student population with very scheduled lives, a dress code, and rules of conduct when they're out and about. Their options are limited for free-range urban hiking. This illustrates that the people who defend freedom are some of the least free, and explains why so many of them lean conservative. They color inside the g-dd-mn lines, why can't you?

Some people might not feel safe walking in their neighborhoods, or venturing from their safe zones far enough to get all of their errands done. Annapolis from 1979 to 1987 was safe and compact, so that a single person could obtain anything they needed without making a major trip to a shopping destination. I don't know if it's still true. Development has pretty well mutilated the area outside of downtown. No one I know lives car-free there, and most have occupations that require motor vehicle use.

Ironically, living in a rural area where I am surrounded by hiking opportunities, I can't do a lot of walking for transportation. I could, but the motorized majority drives to suit themselves on roads with no accommodation for anyone on foot. Only a few people walk except in villages and towns. Outside of that, they're mostly on roads where they have at least a slim chance to stay off to the side. The choice in that slot is to stick an elbow into the lane or wade into the tick-infested grasses.

Gravel Riding

 Searching for the Promised Land, riders fleeing persecution on the pavement disperse to safer-seeming venues like mountain bike trails, separated paths, and gravel roads.

Along with people asking where to ride their mountain bikes around here, we also hear from riders lamenting that they can't find good gravel. 

 

When people ask for gravel, this is what they envision

This part of New Hampshire and nearby Maine has a lot of unpaved roads. Back before the bike industry had decreed that Gravel was a category, you could buy a Surly Cross-Check frame and build a go-anywhere bike, or just update the components on a classic 1970s to '80s touring bike and ride a wide variety of paved and unpaved public rights of way. I did it to increase my commuting options without beating up my trusty road bike. One might also do a drop bar conversion on a mountain bike, to skew the capability more toward rougher terrain at the expense of sluggish handling on pavement.

The Cross Check opened up almost any route depicted on your average road map. It was never meant to handle technical trails, large loose rocks, or deep mud. Routes on a road map -- and now Google Maps and other online sources -- take in Class 5 and 6 roads, which are still public. Class 6 around here is not maintained for winter travel, and may not be graded at all. If the route is popular enough with intrepid motorists, it gets some maintenance just from the passage of vehicles. Depending on the soil type and composition, it could be pretty smooth and firm, or it could degenerate into something that would beat the crap out of any bike and rider. Maybe you ride it once and know better than to ride it again.

 

Jeep-width snow machine trail

These are Class 6

From 1989 to the summer of 1995, a mile and a half of my daily commuting route was unpaved and heavily traveled. It illustrated perfectly the increased stress of riding gravel as opposed to pavement. When the road had not been graded in a while, the surface was generally packed hard in most places, but potholed and rutted. It was very damaging to motor vehicles, which still did nothing to discourage speeding. When it was freshly graded, the mix they used was all fluff and golf balls: fine sand mixed with awkward-size rocks. This also did nothing to discourage speeding, which rapidly transformed it to long sections of washboard. The awkward-size rocks became the dominant surface as long as the weather remained dry. Wheel tracks got packed down fairly firmly, but the edges of the road, where a cyclist would be shoved aside by hurtling rednecks, filled with treacherous loose sand and stones. It was the worst section of my commute, which I would traverse outbound when I was barely warmed up and inbound when I was tired at the end of the day.

A lot of the border country between Maine and New Hampshire north of the seacoast region is crisscrossed with dirt roads, but even there you'd have trouble putting together a route that was entirely gravel. And bear in mind that no one builds a road that they don't intend to use. If you go on Class 6 -- not maintained year round -- some of these are practically abandoned, and their condition reflects that. If it sees any regular use you may encounter a driver who considers it a familiar racetrack. Or you might get lucky and encounter no one. This is true of all back roads, paved or not.

All of the dirt roads I have ridden show the same patterns of use and maintenance. The unpaved sections vary depending on how recently they were graded and how they were used thereafter. A road gets graded regularly because it gets driven regularly. And motorists are absolutely no kinder or more indulgent to cyclists they meet on a dirt road as opposed to a paved one. If you're in their way, you're in the wrong. They won't consider that your traction and handling might suffer because you've been pushed into the loose stuff off to the side.

On the flip side, sometimes you will be making better headway than the motorists. This happened to me one time in April, when I was riding in the Pine River State Forest and came upon a Jeep club having a hard time in the mud. I could stay up on the firm ridges where they were bottoming out because the width of their vehicles kept them in the ruts and bogs. I had to be careful passing these unfortunates, because they were still concerned only with their own progress. Once ahead of them, I had to make sure that I stayed ahead of them. That turned out to be easy, but it isn't always. It happened again more recently on Elm Street, because the town is finally repaving it, starting by unpaving multiple sections. I had a car hovering annoyingly behind me as I negotiated these. Finally, I pulled aside to force them to pass. It was a low-slung little sporty car that didn't want to go fast through the dirt and gravel. I had to be careful not to run up on them after I let them get in front. However, as soon as they got clear of the last rough patch, they jetted away.

When I first started exploring the dirt roads in and around Effingham (NH), I was using my mountain bike. If a driver came up behind me while I was laboring up a hard climb, I could easily fade to the side, even bushwhacking a bit in the places that offer a bailout. At the very least, the bike was well configured in case I had to dismount. On a descent, I could let it rip, because its geometry and tire size made it quite secure. But on pavement it was a slug. Now, with mountain bike geometry, gearing, and suspension optimized to handle super rough surfaces, the slug factor on pavement is astronomical.

You have to decide what you want your bike to be best at, and what you'll put up with in the passages between those best places. The gravel bike -- like my Cross-Check -- represented a moderate approach that accepts its limitations for the sake of a generally good average for the mix of surfaces a rider will encounter on readily accessible routes of all lengths around here. The old steel bike does it cheaper and is easier to maintain and repair, but that's a separate issue. There is no car-free Utopia for cyclists, because you're either driving to your trails with your bike of choice on your vehicle, or riding on publicly accessible roads that you will end up having to share with your fellow taxpayers. Eventually we will have to address the underlying problems of culture and education that will make cycling better for all riders, instead of trying to invent new pedal powered vehicles on which to make our escape to a mythical place in another dimension.

Ignorance is Economical

 When I returned to the bike business in 1989, the mountain bike boom was still billowing upward into the mushroom cloud that peaked in the 1990s before collapsing on itself to leave the toxic landscape of mutants in which we live today. My scavenging style of low-budget problem solving was a perfect fit for the mechanical challenges of the day. I thought about this during a repair this summer as I pieced together a couple of ferrules and some cable housing to fix a cheap pod shifter on a bike, rather than throw away a mechanism that still had some life in it.

Years ago I developed the method of salvaging shifters that had broken housings, but functioning inner workings. It started with one goofy kid who would beat the absolute crap out of his bike about once a week. We tried to keep a full selection of replacement parts on hand, but the industry was shifting rapidly to the dispos-a-bike concept, starting with the continuous mutation of things like shifting systems. Also, I could slap together one of these improvised cable nozzles in a few minutes, saving the customer a welcome couple of bucks on a bill that regularly exceeded $100.

Replacement shifters are now more available, but my reflex to fix what can be fixed kicks in first. Changing the shifter pod completely might take a little less time, but it wastes the life left in the old shifter, sending it to the landfill. Some other customer might really need that complete replacement shifter later.

In a shop more devoted to serving obsolescence than resisting it, the well trained technician will spec the new shifter. A shop like that might also turn away a lot of the ancient and weird things that we take in. 

Because time is money, and some old shifters never quite come back, even after a deep cleaning, we keep pods on hand. The industry is pulling up the lifeline, however. They're steadily reducing the options for index shifters for six and seven speeds. The key to future proofing lies in the past: switch to friction shifting and you can keep a bike going indefinitely.

We're rapidly running out of mechanics who remember any portion of the bike world in the 1970s and '80s. Most people who work in the business only do so for a few years at most before they have the sense to move on to something that actually pays a living wage. I hear that some technicians can command princely sums to work on the latest technological marvels, but each of those marvels only exists for a couple of years at most before it is tossed aside for the more and more marvelous offerings desperately pimped by an industry still wondering how to bring back the feeding frenzy of the 1990s at the price points of the maturing 21st Century.

The elders of the younger generation came in with index-only shifting and ubiquitous suspension as the baseline norm. Fortunately, an archive is being created for mechanics who witnessed little or nothing of simple bikes firsthand, in places like Sheldon Brown's website and elsewhere, and in early editions of bike repair manuals floating around. Still, it's not the same as living with it all as the state of the art and standard model. I will assess an innovation compared to its simple ancestor, and decide whether it really meets the need better, or just more expensively. I also disagreed with Sheldon on some points, which a student might not know how to do without their own life experience.

Speaking of need, the bike industry begs the consumer to accept that something is a need, like disc brakes, inset headsets, and press fit bottom brackets. And don't even get me started on tubeless tires. I need to scrape up the coin to stockpile non-tubeless rims while I can still get them, so that when the industry finally discontinues them I can at least keep building and rebuilding my wheels until I am too old to use them.

Everything that the bike industry has done during the last 20 years has only made bikes more expensive to buy and maintain. The price hides within the general inflation that has afflicted the capitalist consumer economy throughout my lifetime. Inflation is built into the business model in the form of profit. There's overhead, and there's a little something extra to cover unexpected challenges or to fund genuine innovation that leads to better products. But there's always an extra gouge, and that gouge drives inflation. Also, a steadily increasing population makes a dollar smaller so that a specific number of them can be given to new players joining the game, masking the fact that the finite pie really is being cut into smaller and smaller pieces. We have no handy messiah making five loaves and two fishes feed the assembled multitude. We have only economic sleight of hand, and theft of resources from future generations. It's way bigger than the bike industry, although the bike industry embraced it in a big way when easy money poured in during the 1990s.

Bikes made since the early 2000s defy attempts to improvise repairs and modifications as freely as we did as the 20th Century drew to a close. You can do it, but it either takes tools and facilities well beyond the average home mechanic or it exposes the rider to considerable risk of catastrophic failures.

When things get better, they only get relatively less worse and it feels like a relief. Bikes really could be part of the solution, but only if they're durable and fixable, simple to work on. Future prosperity can't be based on anything close to the current level of consumer spending, let alone ramping it up. And the industry had better get busy promoting that while there are still a few fools left with hands-on knowledge to share with a rising generation finally interested in learning it.

E-bikes aren't bikes

 What has two wheels, handlebars, a crankset with pedals, and weighs fifty pounds? The answer could have been one of the first "safety bicycles," but these days it's a smokeless moped, aka an electric bicycle.

The first e-bikes we saw in our shop had throttles. I don't recall that they had pedal assist. Pedal assist required more sophisticated electronics than anyone had been bothered to design. Just as with a gas powered moped, the pedals were a technicality, and largely decorative. On the original moped, you needed them to spin up the engine to start it. On the smokeless version, you didn't even need to do that. Theoretically, a rider might pedal the hefty beast on the flats and down hill, using the throttle for quick acceleration and hill climbing. In reality, the pedals were used as foot rests as the riders buzzed around on battery power alone. 

The machine evolved. Now all of the classes have pedal assist, and the lowest category has no throttle override.

The first e-bikes we saw did not look like conventional bikes. The designers made no attempt to mask its difference. Later, Tidal Force came out with a line that was much more based on standard bike configuration, using a lot of available parts. If nothing else, it proved that most of those parts were completely inadequate on a vehicle that weighed about twice as much as a meat-powered bike. Brakes and suspension forks in particular flexed alarmingly. Engineers learn through failure. Tidal Force soon sank.

Motorized bicycles have a place in the transportation mix. But for bike shops they represent a trap. A big shop, perhaps controlled by a big company, can support that company's offerings as well as the parent corporation is willing to provide, but that is only a tiny fraction of the wide selection seeking to attract consumers. The different brands use a lot of parts in common, but a bike shop will need to gear up with a complete electrical department to be able to service them. In the meantime, all of the different shapes and sizes of e-bike demand a huge investment and vast floor space to present them to potential customers. 

Two smokeless mopeds I worked on yesterday had stickers from Electric Bikes of New England on them. I have not been there, but I've known about them for years. Places like that represent the best retail channel for consumers who want to buy in person, rather than roll the dice to buy online and have the bike shipped to them. These things arrive now almost fully assembled, along with instructions that have the words "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover. Well, maybe not those exact words, but written to coax the reader through the remaining simple processes to put their vehicle on the road. We get to assemble a lot of those for people who still could not be convinced to take up the tools provided and follow the steps in the manual or the assembly video that a QR code links to.

We work on just about anything vaguely resembling a bike that someone brings us. This has included pedal-powered outboard motors, scooters, and actual bikes covering a span of more than 70 years. But we can no longer sell a decent representation of everything that falls under the general heading of bicycles. The categorization of purely pedal powered bikes already exceeded the capacity of any small shop. E-bikes represent another whole division, not just a category. They have to be designed around their motorized nature, not just modified from the roughly 150-year-old pattern of the evolved bike frame. All that remains is the basic premise of a two-wheeled vehicle straddled by a rider. The parts are connected in the same orientation as on a conventional bicycle, but the frame they're hung on is more of a fuselage. The form has evolved to the needs of the actual vehicle.

Poodles, canaries, and cows

 A few years back, a local farmer referred to a local veterinarian as, "a poodle and canary vet." He needed someone who was trained, equipped, and inclined to put her arm into the back end of a cow up to the shoulder, and otherwise take on the heavy lifting and industrial-size details of large animal practice.

In a similar vein, the expanding popularity of smokeless mopeds has turned us into large animal vets in our line of work. We're not real mechanics in the eyes of the internally combusted, particularly four-wheeled and up, but the gross vehicle weight and motors of the new favorite "bike" have pushed us to grapple with larger beasts with more complex anatomy.

In predictable irony, we were asked almost daily if we carried ebikes and now that the answer is "yes," the comeback is "Oh, not those ebikes!" However, we did have one for a local man who had decided that he wasn't satisfied with the support for the ebike he had bought online. He wanted to buy locally. He made a point to ask whether we would service the bike, unlike the online source that wanted him to send things back and pay upwards of $100 just to have it diagnosed, because they have no dealer or service network. Incidentally, no ebike specialist in our region would work on his bike either, so apparently the owners of these vehicles are being abandoned in the wilderness. I've seen online forums in which tinkerers and whiz kids are getting right into the deep details of their sparky steeds, but it's only simple to the adept. 

I told him that we would open up the hub motor on his bike and learn as we go, but it wouldn't be quick, it probably wouldn't be cheap, and it might not work at all. We're still buried in repairs to conventional bikes, and the electric motor would take up a lot of bench space while we dissected it.

This particular customer elicits a higher level of concern from us because of a gruesome family tragedy a few years ago. It has long since dropped from the news cycle, but I doubt if it's ever far from his mind. Therefore, we can't let it slip ours when we deal with him. He's always easygoing and pleasant, but his nightmares must be brutal. For him I will make an extra effort to learn about something that in most other respects doesn't interest me that much.

On the plus side, I don't think that the evolution of the ebike has spawned as much variety in tools as the suspension sector, as much ridiculous speciation as bottom brackets, or the tweaky sensitivities of drivetrains. Fingers crossed, but I think that when we tool up we won't have to turn right around and tool up again in a year or two and every couple of years thereafter. We can concentrate on concepts instead of hardware. In the end, it will probably come in handy to know.

The Overhead Paradox

Customers will say that a high repair estimate is more than they paid for their bike. This implies that the bike is not worth fixing. But if you bought a good bike and took good care of it, it should last you fifteen, twenty years or more. If you have been paying someone else to work on it, of course you will end up paying more in service than you paid for the bike originally. But, given the general deterioration in quality and a rate of price inflation that has been romping merrily past the general consumer inflation rate since long before it was fashionable to bitch about it, the bike you buy for the same number of now-inflated dollars will be absolute trash compared to your old bike.

The exception, of course, is if your old bike was trash in the first place. The real trash tends to take itself out of the running just by wearing out completely, or dying of exposure as it's dumped out in the weather. But even a modest bike is worth fixing if you like it and it meets your needs.

Our first impulse at the shop is to figure out how to fix whatever anyone brings in. We've learned over the years to identify the few that can't be made good because they never were good, but anything with a shred of quality triggers the impulse to bring it back. Unfortunately, the shop itself costs a certain amount to run. I guarantee you that I see a tiny fraction of our hourly labor charge, but the rest of it goes to the keep the whole business solvent. More or less solvent, anyway. We have overhead. This leads to the paradox. A well established bike shop provides a meager living to a technician smart enough to do the work and stupid enough to keep doing it for a long time. Experience lives here. We've accumulated tools and parts so that we can work on anything back to about the 1950s, but we're still in the game, so we have co-evolved to deal with the whole time line through the decades to the ridiculously over-engineered bullshit of today. 

The ideal bike mechanic is also a highly skilled machinist, like my friend and mentor in Florida. She grew up in a machine shop and did time in retail bike shops in the Orlando area. She and her late husband set up a machine shop at their own home and withdrew from the retail scene. This meant that they could offer all kinds of specialty services without the overhead of a store front. Shops in the area still use her as a resource for the jobs that would tie up a work stand for too long and call for skills that the average transitory young bike mechanic will never even have known about.

I am not a skilled machinist. I grew up moving constantly, reading books and wondering what it would be like to live in one place long enough to have roots. We were not going to have a Bridgeport, a band saw, lathes, and other heavy, stationary tools in the garage. And my father was an officer, the military equivalent of white collar management. We were herded toward careers with cleaner fingernails. I was not a tinkerer. We engaged in some tool use, but only to repair or refurbish something we owned, not just for the sake of working on it. This mostly meant paint and planking on a wooden sailing dinghy more than working with metal and grease and oil. My gateway to mechanics was the used 10-speed I bought in 1975. It held no secrets, wearing its drive train on the outside.

I like classic bikes because they don't require a lot of work. The type evolved through the 1990s, gaining some actual improvements even as the technofascist complexities came to dominate. If I think about it long enough I can pinpoint the last change that really was an improvement. Probably interrupter brake levers. Just about everything since the early years of the 21st Century has been mostly either to make a previous bad decision work a little less badly or a classic example of "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

The overhead paradox mostly affects owners of older bikes and cheaper bikes. I've had customers go ahead with an expensive repair even after I told them it was a poor investment, because they had some attachment to the bike. I've had customers abandon a decent candidate for repair because they didn't want to spend the money on it, preferring in some cases to buy a new bike of lower quality just because it was new.

Most new bikes today have some form of the same features at every price point. Cheap bikes have flimsy derailleurs, stamped sheet metal chain rings, way off brand cable disc brakes, and heavy, floppy suspension. Bikes that still have rim brakes might have stamped sheet metal brake arms that shouldn't even be legal. To get reasonably robust examples of the modern idea of componentry, count on spending more than $1,000.00. If you're really going to try to ride like you see in the videos, spend more than twice that. Working on any of that will take time and require treasure hunts for parts, but less of the old-school skills that will die with my generation. And how much does it really matter when civilization itself may coincidentally die about the time my generation does anyway? The Baby Boomers lived as if they would be the last generation to need the Earth's resources, and it's looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, other generations have followed and reproduced copiously, while guzzling a large share of what's left, but the Boomers set the tone in the 1980s. The values have been passed down long after they should have been replaced with more thoughtful progress.

Meanwhile, we're still here, and riders are bringing in beloved old steeds in need. One rider brought in his old Puch road bike from the 1970s.

                                                     It was 100 years 50 years ago
He's been riding it more or less like a "gravel bike." It will do it, because the roadier end of gravel bike geometry is basically like a general purpose touring bike from the 1970s: a little slack, a little long, with room for a somewhat plump tire. Of course the modern form has evolved into more specific geometry suited to loose surfaces, allowing for wider tires, and designed around the current ridiculous 1X drivetrains. But his old rod would do what he wanted for far, far less than a new bike with modern problems. I put on interrupter brake levers and aero primary levers, along with 27X1 3/8 knobby tires. Off he went, happy with the improvements.

On Sunday, I volunteered at the Makers Mill, a community "makerspace" that hopes eventually to offer a work space for community members to make and repair things. They offer classes in various skills ranging from textiles to woodworking to welding to jewelry making, as well as art classes. I helped them a little with their initial planning for the bike work area. With all of the YouTube experts in town who smugly avoid our shop, I figured that there was a deep pool of expertise waiting to bury them in helpful mechanics. Turns out that those people are apparently too busy elsewhere.

The problem with something that inexperienced people think is really simple is that they meet someone who knows a little about it and they assume that's all there is to know. Thus the person who knows a little must know more than enough. Volunteer organizations are staffed by whoever is willing to show up on a regular basis. Who has the time and the desire? That's who will be there. I am not the one with the most time. But I have been there enough to rip the lid off of the crypt of horrors that is the true depth of arcane bike knowledge. And they have hardly seen any of the really demonic new crap.

Late in the afternoon on Sunday, the owner of the Puch arrived at the Mill, hoping that we could snug up his brakes (I had had to fabricate cable knarps to make new bridge wires for his vintage Weinmann center-pulls)

The brake adjustment was simple enough. And oh, by the way, his seatpost seemed to be kind of stuck.

I had not messed with his seat position when I worked on the bike before. I clamped it in the work stand around the seat tube of the frame itself, suspecting that the OEM seatpost was probably too short to extend far enough to hold the work stand clamp anyway. I had not determined that the post was rusted into the frame, but the news did not surprise me. I might even have dripped a little penetrating oil down along it so that he could try to dislodge it later. 

Later had now arrived. I had advised him to go after the seatpost with a pipe wrench and not worry about destroying it. He'd chewed into it, but had not moved it. These struggles don't usually end well for the seatpost. We crushed this one in a big vise as we tried to twist it loose. Then we sawed off the protruding part before attacking what remained in the seat tube.

Stuck seatpost removal is always like trying to dig your way out of a jail cell with the handle of a spoon you stole from the dining hall. It's a grim, long process of scraping. We enlisted the Mill's machinist, but he's not a bike guy. I provided some guardrails to protect vulnerable parts of the bike while he addressed the generic problem of an aluminum tube stuck inside a steel tube, cemented by rust. We were hampered by the fact that the machine shop there has mostly a motley assortment of donated tools with lots of duplications of things that were not the right size for the job at hand. We managed to cut down and chisel away some of it, but more remained beyond the reach of the tools we had. The machinist took the frame to his home lair where he will work on it with his more extensive resources.

Because the Sunday event was free, the owner of the bike was not paying for the two or three people working for almost two hours on his soluble but time-consuming problem. Thus we sidestepped the overhead paradox. The cost was borne by the volunteers working for free. I did get some food and social credit for it, and I was happy to help keep a worthy old bike on the road, but I would starve to death if I did it all the time.

Used bikes can be great if you know what you're looking at. Prices fluctuate depending on demand. A seller who knows what they have, dealing with a buyer who accurately assesses the bike's value, are liable to settle on a higher price than if a generic scavenger just sells it as "a bike" to some random rube. But even then, the buyer might be a hard chiseler who doesn't know the value, but is determined to hold down the price, or a knowledgeable enthusiast who is also determined to hold down the price. Or the generic scavenger might have an inflated idea of the price, aided by a time in which used bike prices are running high, like in the demand surge of 2020.

The overhead paradox affects modern stuff as well. We had a jammed 11-speed pod shifter that I might have unjammed, given enough time, but a new pod cost less than my time. New shifter pods for seven speeds and up cost about as much as we charge to open up an old pod and clean out the congealed grease, which is usually all that is wrong with them. But the procedure takes longer than yanking the old pod off and slapping in a new one, so when the shop is buried it's a better option if we have the part in stock. The unfortunate consequence is that a fixable shifter pod goes to the landfill. The small businesses at the bottom of the economy end up bearing the major responsibility for stemming the avalanche of waste getting dumped into the environment. The bicycle industry doesn't support the activity of bicycling, it supports itself. Bicycling is just a side effect.

For the moment, we're too dumb to quit trying to fix things that people want fixed, but upper management can no longer ignore the mounting costs. We have no handy off-site magician like my friend in Orlando, but we can't afford to be that magician as much as we used to. I have a lot of tools at my own secret headquarters, but the shop still has a few more tricks that I haven't invested in, and I don't want to burn too many of my days off doing what I do on my days on. I would much rather teach skills (and a jaundiced attitude toward tech-weenie bullshit) than be a servant to the willfully ignorant. The owner of the bike should make at least part of the journey with me. At the end of it, they should come out more independent than when they started. If I can learn this crap, anyone can, but knowing it does make you more valuable. No, any idiot can't just do it, but any regular person can learn it if they can bring themselves to focus on it. The citizen rider becomes the citizen mechanic and a freer person as a result.