Heavy traffic

Cyclists are used to being at or near the bottom of the food chain out on the road. Even so, I'm more comfortable there than in the confined space of a path with multiple user types and lots of slower riders.

I seldom see other riders on my commute. When I do, it's usually another lone rider or a very small group of athletic adults. We sort out by pace with little or no conversation unless it's someone I already know, or a particularly loquacious stranger. That is one weird thing about riding: you're not in a sealed capsule. I'm no more inclined to get chatty with someone on my bike commute than I would be in my car. Mind you, I have a lot to say, usually profane, about the other drivers I'm stuck with, but I consider it a good thing that they can't hear me. The reverse is probably true. On the bike I care more about keeping my breathing nice and steady while I focus on safe maneuvering around tons of steel piloted by idiots and psychopaths that I'm trusting with my life. We casually throw great masses around at speeds no human could achieve 200 years ago unless they fell off a cliff. And road cyclists go out there throwing elbows with them. It's just another normal day.

On my way home last Wednesday, a rider I hadn't seen in a while was coming southbound as I headed north on Route 28. We exchanged waves. A little further north, near the top of a climb, I passed two other riders stopped on the side of the road. A man and a woman, looked to be in their twenties, wearing please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests, stood astride flat-bar hybrids, talking about something. I grunted a greeting with what breath I could spare as I made the last few pedal strokes to the crest. On the flats beyond, I saw two more riders, similarly kitted and equipped. Once I passed them, I saw two more another couple hundred meters ahead. Okay, nice summer day, and there's a small surge in touring interest.

Past the height of land I geared up and bore down a comfortable amount, relishing the tailwind. For an old fart, I was hammering. I had to laugh, though, at my memory of Tom (Thomas) Prehn looking over and saying, "You've got a higher gear still" as I tried to hang with him during time trail training in 1980. He was kind enough to ride with us local dubs for his long easy rides and the kind of interval training where we would quickly regroup. This was the first -- and only -- time I tried to stick with him when he was putting on a serious burn for ten miles. I was able to stay on his wheel, but he never bothered to let me pull through again. Rising through the grades in bike racing, the steps are exponential, not incremental.

The descent from the peak of 28 to the circle at Route 171 is about two miles. It levels off for a while, but the trend continues helpfully downward. A tailwind makes it even better. Coming off of two rest days, I felt about as good as someone my age can feel. Decades of habit propelled me. Habit maintains momentum on the flat quarter-mile approach to the circle. I back off a little so that I have reserves to deal with any motorist hassles going through it. Intersections are very stressful for a road rider. The circle has four of them.

From a quarter mile back I saw a thick congregation of please-don't-kill-me-yellow vests and helmets on what looked like about twenty riders heading through the circle. They extended from the inrun all the way to the exit continuing on 28 north. I saw no motor vehicles. I entered the chute at about 22 mph. The tour group was hugging the right line. I stayed well to the left and coasted down to about 18. Even at that, I passed them like they were standing still. I greeted the first few as I caught them, and said hey to what looked like the leaders at the front, before accelerating gradually away. At my age, acceleration is always gradual. But from the exclamations I heard from some of the tourists I must have seemed fast.

I usually hammer through the circle as fast as I can. Get to it, get through it, get clear of any motorist conflicts. This may be more or less stressful depending on how many motorists are actually there. They can arrive abruptly, speeding in from any of four directions, sometimes multiple directions. Then they might travel around a quarter, half, or three quarters of the circle at the best speed they can manage, because no one likes to linger in it, no matter what their wheels and propulsion system are. I might even be holding one back because they caught up to me too late for me to send them ahead of me.

The first riders to see me expressed astonishment at my pace. I'm no top tier athlete, but normal people are slow. On a competitive scale I'm solidly mediocre at best, but normal people don't care about the competitive scale at all. I don't either, anymore. I just have the residual benefits of having cared about it in the past.

I wasn't trying to prove a point. I was just trying to escape from the embarrassment of socializing and the delay of being stuck in their clot. I'm very happy to see people claiming their space on the road. I still want to maintain my pace and get home. Or to work, depending on the time of day.

Almost every other time I've encountered other riders on my route, they have been competitive cyclists, even if they weren't in their active racing years, or experienced tourists. Their pace and bike handling reflect that. Even when I've passed casual riders they have not been in large groups.

This group had an advantage at the circle because their large group clearly held the territory. That could enhance their safety or it could inspire the kind of violence we hear about all too frequently, where a road-raging driver rams a group of riders with murderous intent. On Wednesday, however, the circle seemed miraculously deserted. I don't know if their luck held, because I resumed hammering and didn't look back. I generally figure the less people see of me the better.

At home, the cellist told me that she had seen a similar group headed north on Elm Street in the morning. She had hung back until they reached a straight enough stretch to allow her to drive past them safely. She thought one of the kids flipped her off. They seemed like camp groups.

She also asked me if I'd announced I was passing on their left or anything like that. It never occurred to me to do so. I don't talk to other road users in the course of a normal ride. The only talking that went on in road races was trash talk for the most part. Who had the breath to speak when launching an attack? I'm crap as a racer, but I'm in race/combat mode on the road, unless I happen to merge with one of the very few people I know, and our schedules and strengths allow for it. She said that the school where she works holds group ride training before their spring overnight tour, including communication. They also do much of their route on well-developed paths in the Wilmington, Delaware, area. They have to follow path protocols for courtesy and safety.

Courtesy and safety when riding among motorists is almost entirely nonverbal. I do my best to ride a smooth, controlled line that allows drivers to get by me and go bother somebody else. I figure the longer they have to stay behind me the more they'll hate me. Things go pretty smoothly on that basis. However, I can't control the drivers who for whatever reason feel obliged to hang back there for a ridiculous amount of time. It tickles the vanity to imagine they're admiring my power and expertise. How likely is that? Maybe they're just groping under the seat for the 9mm that slid inconveniently out of reach until they finally say "fuck it" and drive past me. I have no way of knowing.

I seem to have one secret admirer on Elm Street. Two or three times last year, a minivan hung back literally for miles, creating an unwilling audience of drivers caught behind them while they shadowed me through the dips and turns. I was feeling frisky on those evenings, doing a pretty good job, but hardly challenging motorist speeds for the entire distance that they stayed back. Then, last Friday, there they were again.

It started with a sense of presence. Their vehicle is not loud, and they don't follow closely. After a couple of minutes I heard someone laying on the horn, but it wasn't right behind me. I was riding fast, but hugging the right line, even in some rough sections. I didn't hammer any of the short climbs that interrupt what is basically a series of fast little downhills for three miles. I eased up on the sort of straight parts, hoping they would get the hint. Finally, they came through, followed by all of the unwilling participants. To their credit, none of them took it out on me. That has not always been the case.

Squeezers

 Dammit, I let them piss me off. Not bird-flipping pissed off, but spurred to foolish exertion.

Squeezers are always a problem. They squeeze past in narrow lanes. They squeeze through at intersections. One of the unwritten laws of driving is that a motorist gets to pass a cyclist wherever they want. Regardless of the real law, waiting behind a pedaler is completely optional. I'm used to it.

The law in many places, and traffic cycling methodology in general, supports riders who engage in traffic control measures to enforce safe passing clearances. Before these laws, I was already herding traffic. As the principles became more established, I experimented with its limits. For instance, cyclists may take a full lane to clear obstacles and prevent unsafe passing. For much of my route, passing is not technically safe. I tried shutting the gate in most or all of these sections. Motorists responded with annoyance, aggression, and more unsafe passing. Not all of them, of course, but the one or two willing subjects who would stay back inevitably corked up a flood of less happy drivers who would let me know how they felt when they finally got to pass. Most of the time, I only hold drivers back on the final approach to an intersection where I expect to roll through the stop sign ahead of them. They can then pass me on the next stretch with less stress to both of us.

Summer brings higher traffic volume. After 36 years riding the same route, I have all of the corners dialed in, not just for fun but to preserve my momentum. Summer traffic breaks the flow. So last Friday, as I pushed hard to make it to work on time, I felt the strain of matching my speed to the fluctuations of the crowded lane beside me on the way in Center Street to the right turn onto Lehner Street. Great corner, but you have to watch the drivers from all four directions, plus possibly turning into or out of the gas station on the corner. Then settle in for the long, gradual grind to Glendon Street with its three-way stop.

A lot of drivers who want to get onto Main Street take a left at Union Street rather than going all the way to Glendon. Not on Friday, though. The one driver close behind me passed cleanly heading for the stop sign. The next driver waffled until we had reached that critically awkward distance at which I swing left to cover the lane. I swung left. Waffly swung further to the left, but still hung there, edging up on me. They ended up in the left lane, alarming the oncoming driver in that lane who had every right to expect that it would be clear. Meanwhile, I slipped into pilot fish position on the first vehicle at the stop sign and flowed through the intersection onto Glendon Street. Waffly came through behind me, so I had to push a larger gear than I liked, to prevent him from doing something rude and dangerous before I could snap a right turn onto Depot Street and get onto Central Avenue. These are grand names for pieces of road that are anywhere from forty to 140 meters long. More or less, anyway.

I'd already been squeezed by a dump truck towing a slightly oversized flatbed trailer with a piece of heavy equipment on it, out in the bendy part of Route 28 where it narrows passing the old boat museum. That guy was whizzing along at 45-50, and not too concerned with passing clearance. I was a little fired up. Then I had to manage speeders on Center Street coming down to 190A and the rail trail crosswalk. Now I merged into the stop and go traffic on Main Street, still chasing the clock.

I learned the hard way years ago not to blaze through slow or stopped motor traffic as fast as I can possibly go. It doesn't impress anyone or turn them into cycling advocates, and it can put you in the hospital, or worse. But I do flow through when the motorists jam each other up completely. With all the crosswalks, unpredictable pedestrians, and on-street parking in downtown Wolfeboro, the Death Slot to the right of the travel lane can be a perilous venture. I moved forward a couple of slots at one crosswalk, getting onto a new shark for a few yards to the next full stop. Just ahead I saw a dump truck (no trailer) with that nice tall tailgate offering a draft for the rest of the way to my turn at Mill Street. We might not reach drafting speeds, but that big shark would control the lane nicely. The vehicles right in front of me were sitting at the crosswalk long after it was clear, so I slid past to sprint after the truck.

Unfortunately, the truck must have been empty. It accelerated away from me as I stomped impotently on slightly too big a gear, with my front derailleur cage rubbing on the chain, grind grind grind, a pathetic old fart on a heavy bike, losing a sprint in front of the sidewalk cafe audience. The cars I had passed queued up behind me as I tried to make it look as good as possible going into the Mill Street corner. It wasn't good.

One of the tricks to survival out there among the fire-breathing beasts is to ride within your limits. Good cadence, a little reserve acceleration, relaxed climbing, all present an image of control. Absolute speed is not as important as smoothness. If you let yourself get ragged, drivers will sense that you are at your limit. They'll react as any predator or competitor will when they sense weakness. As long as you seem like you have something in reserve, they have no idea how much. By blowing up in a failed sprint, I threw away all of that. It bugged me for the rest of the day and all night.

Representation matters. Every rider on the road represents all riders. The idiots, the hotheads, the weavers and wobblers and whiners, each one is all of us to the motoring public, who simply see someone on a two-wheeled vehicle with pedals and think, "there's another one." Maybe they differentiate between the kitted-out racer types who need to get a different hobby, and the chaotic grungy ones who just need to get a better job, but I imagine that admiration is the last thing they feel. Nor should that be a goal, when all we really want is the modicum of respect that lets us use the road for our own purposes. I really prefer to go unremarked, insofar as that is possible. See me enough to avoid collision. That's good enough. You can ride slowly with dignity. Not too slowly... at some point, traffic riding as we allow it here and now is too risky for a rider who can't put out a little heat when needed. But you don't need to give up and run away as soon as you no longer have a 35 mph sprint on tap.

Can you afford to have fun?

 A few years ago, as the local mountain bike organization -- to use the term loosely -- was getting more aggressive about building engineered trails, one of their spokespeople would say that developing the trails would attract "people with more disposable income." This spokesperson does competent work with a tractor and a chainsaw, but doesn't depend on them for his very survival. He has always seemed like someone who doesn't have to worry about his personal finances, if you know what I mean.

"Disposable income" is another way to sort people and sift out the undesirables. Whoever they are, they have failed to measure up as potential customers. That's the only yardstick that matters in the US economy.

Bicycles started out as luxury goods way back in the 19th century. Manufacturers were surprised at the volume of sales driven by working class customers who scraped together the coin to have a mode of transportation that extended their shoe-leather cruising range and didn't require oats, hay, water, and shelter, not to mention veterinary care and eventual body disposal. Someone who lived in a boarding house could probably find a place to shoehorn in a bicycle. And bikes were built to last back then, because manufacturers mostly didn't know any better than to make something as solid as they could, and build their reputation on quality rather than marketing. Disposable income wasn't an automatic weeding system.

Most of us would prefer not to ride an ordinary, with its tall wheel -- usually the front -- and tricky handling. Nor would we gravitate to an early model of safety bicycle, with its single fixed gear and substantial weight. But the vehicles evolved rapidly into lighter, more nimble machines still built to withstand the challenges of rough roads and long distances. From their beginning, they evolved from the simplest form, without even pedals, adding each level of complexity a bit at a time to preserve the durability of simplicity while improving comfort and handling. The best of them were relatively expensive, but standards changed slowly enough that a hobbyist or someone who merely appreciated the craftsmanship and ride quality could buy a high-end bike and ride it for decades.

As Wolfeboro shifts to summer mode, I scan the vehicles using our parking lot and the people getting out of them. The vast majority of cars parking in our lot at any time of year are not there for us, and seldom for any other business in the complex. They're poaching to go downtown. With the coming of the second home crowd and their guests, the value of some vehicles can exceed the value of my house.

Disposable income is here to visit. Biking draws a fraction of the participants it did in the 1990s. The seasonal residents and visitors bring with them fashionable bikes in road, gravel, and mountain categories. Sometimes they even bring them in. Overall I see fewer people than in the 1990s to the very early 2000s. When people come in and say the town is busy I want to ask them if they were in a coma from the mid 1980s through 1999. The crowds have definitely shrunk.

Mountain biking thrived because people wanted to ride away from the roads. It died because the industry pandered to the tech-obsessed stunt performer demographic and let prices get out of control. Riders might have had other reasons to cut back on their bike use as well. The transition was blurred by the surge in road riding that bridged the transition from the end of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st. The industry had to re-learn how to make enticing entry-level road bikes and fill in the mid range. But then riders discovered everything that had intimidated and discouraged them about riding on the roads, and the numbers flaked away.

Various forms of road bike hinted at the possibility of the gravel category. But once cycling broke up into very specific categories, prices had to creep higher because no one was making it up in volume.

A cyclist in any category will be disposing of a lot of income to play at all, multiplied by the number of different category bikes that rider chooses to use. Tubeless tires and DOT fluid hydraulic disc brakes use highly perishable fluids that can damage the systems in which they are supposed to work. Regular maintenance draws a certain amount of money. Or you could wait for the tires or brakes to fail completely and then pay to clean up the mess they've turned into. Or quit cycling at that point, or just buy a new bike. Hard to say where you'll get it or who will work on it by that time.

I asked AI whether working in a bike shop was a good job. It basically said "no." It mentioned the chronic low pay, seasonal work load, and the suicidally thin margins that shops have to live on. I asked it how much the tools would cost for a rider to work on their own bike and it gave me a range of $30 to $1,000. It had more details about specific options, if you want to get into fixing your specific suspension system for instance. You will also have to hope that you can get parts when you need them.

The disposable income crowd is a competitive club. You're welcome to try to keep up. If you can't, they won't miss you.

Ridley conversion update

 The new, mountain 12-speed barcon arrived for the Ridley cross bike conversion. The differences between it and the road shifter were obvious.

The light wasn't great, but the picture does show what I mean if you squint at it. The road shifter, silver, has a smaller cam and the stops defined by the shape of the shifter mount restrict its travel. The 12-speed shifter, black, has a larger cam and a wider angle between the stops. It handled the gear range easily.

Now that I know this, the barcon shifters I keep on hand for friction conversions will be 12-speed mountain just to assure that I have ample cable for whatever industry-defying drive trains I want to assemble. Once indexing becomes irrelevant, the possibilities proliferate.

The rear derailleur exhibited a quirk I had already seen on other bikes. If you throw the lever to dump the chain across more than half of the cassette, the chain hops out on top of the arm to which the cable attaches.

This is less likely to happen with index-only shifting, because you have to push the shifter multiple times to move the derailleur. You could do it if you fired a bunch of clicks and then took your first pedal stroke, but not if you were continuously pedaling as you operated the shifter. With a progressive lever like the barcon, you can move the derailleur much more quickly than the chain can respond, increasing the chance that you could strand the chain out there. This problem is purely a product of the weird derailleur geometry and monstrous low-gear cogs used in currently fashionable wide-range gearing.

Once the shifting issue was squared away, I could finish taping the bars and release this beast into the wild. There may be follow up tweaks, since it remains the most ambitious gear range I've attempted.

New Shop vs Old Shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplifying things gets more complicated every day

 Friction shifting is the key to simple versatility. As long as the derailleurs will handle the chain wrap and the largest cog* you can put any wheel in there that will fit.

*If your frame has long dropouts, you can even push the limits of the largest cog. Just pull the wheel back to make more room for the upper derailleur pulley to clear it. Good luck finding a modern frame with long dropouts unless they're track dropouts, but the concept is sound. However, there are limits. And the industry pushes them closer and closer every day.

A customer received a Ridley cyclocross bike, looks to be about a 2014, and wanted to convert it from its racy gearing to something more comfortable for a "more seasoned" rider negotiating New England gravel roads. New England doesn't do switchbacks. By the Puritan ideal, if the Good Lord placed a hill in front of you, you go straight up it and sing a hymn at the top.

The tight gearing on the bike was as low as it could go with the short cage Dura Ace derailleur. Any derailleur compatible with his index-only brifters wouldn't handle as large a rear cog as he was hoping to employ. But he's been at this for enough decades to have lots of experience with downtube friction shifters. He used them for multiple recent long distance tours where he essentially section-hiked a transcon over two or three seasons. That was on a much older steel bike which he has now replaced with a Surly Disc Trucker. But the Ridley was a gift from one of his kids who was finished with it as a race bike, and he couldn't let go of the idea that he could make it suit his needs for day rides around here.

After crunching a bunch of numbers I concluded that there was no way to make his desired setup work with those brifters. I assured him confidently that he could do anything he wanted with friction barcons. I based this on all of my own bikes, and numerous conversions for other customers. But none of them were very recent, and none of them had pushed for as much gear range as this rider wanted. The friction barcon option seemed to bypass most of the obstacles, but a new trap lay in wait.

He figured that a 42-tooth low gear cog would suffice with the 34-tooth inner chainring on the existing crankset. He would pull down the outer ring from 50 to 44. I researched rear derailleurs to find one that could handle the chain wrap and large cog. Using friction shifting, we didn't have to worry about index compatibility. It just had to haul the chain from one side of the cassette to the other.

Cable routing was complicated because they run inside the down tube. Routing on the handlebar was also complicated because the 3t bars run the cables inside the top section. While slightly less messy than running hydraulic lines through both the bars and the stem, it's still virtually impossible to feed a piece of cable housing through the holes they give you after you remove the one that used to be in there because it's too short to reach the new shifter position. So screw that, I ran the housing outside the bars, but only after wasting a couple of hours trying to feed housing through the route that 3t intended. I could have fed a cable through the old piece of housing before I yanked it, but I needed to be able to fiddle and fit the new housing to get the length just right, which would mean multiple insertions and removals. That would have gouged up the sheathing of the housing before I made the final connections.

Although the rider was not going to try to index, I used index housing in case by some miracle the indexing worked. It's also stiffer in general, which should help when hauling the chain up onto that ridiculous low cog. However, routing it under the tape takes a lot of hand strength to hold the bends in place while I secure them with white tape.

Note: Electrical tape has no place on a bike, especially on your handlebars. It gets disgusting.

To keep the route clear inside the frame, I had to place feeder sleeves so I could install and remove the cables multiple times while establishing the proper length for the housing, including the inline adjusters. Inline adjusters aren't needed for friction shifting, but I wanted them in case I got the indexing to work. They're also nice to snug up the cables to make sure that you can hork that chain up onto the lowest cog, even if the lowest cog isn't freakishly large. Your average technolemming has no appreciation for the stress placed on the parts that give them their fashionable gears on demand.

With the cable finally secured enough for a test shift, I hauled up on the right shifter. The derailleur made it to about three cogs from the lowest gear and stopped. Okay, the cable housings probably needed to settle in. Snug the cable, try again. Same result. The cable was tight. The shifter itself had reached the end of its travel well before it moved the derailleur enough to make the full spread.

The term "actuation ratio" entered the biking vernacular way back in the 1990s, when SRAM was trying to establish technical credibility after their lawsuit pried Shimano's fist slightly loose from OEM spec on every brand. It had been a factor ever since Shimano forced index-only shifting on us in 1990, but other factors obscured its importance. Even after SRAM started clucking about how their actuation ratio was more efficient, it mattered so little compared to other factors that no one considered it more than a piece of marketing hype.

It matters now, buddy. For much of the 1990s, owners of road and mountain bikes could do a fair amount of mixing and matching. Shimano and the technofascist industry hate mixing, matching, and independent mechanics. We're bad for the bottom line. Perfectly matching parts groups offer the kind of precision that the average rider craves until it doesn't work. Tell the consumer that they have to buy a complete purpose built bike for every application and the ones who can afford it will do so. However, the bike business -- as separate from the bike industry -- was a very early canary casualty in the crumbling middle class economy. That and the consumer thirst for entertainment that requires no exertion and little independent thought. Fewer people overall had disposable income and fewer of them were disposing of it on bike stuff.

The bike industry offers a plethora of categories, and models within those categories, so that the well-funded consumer can have the exact bike they crave for a given riding style. If you don't have enough money, they ain't talkin' to you.

With everything index-only and engineered to perfection, actuation ratio not only controls precision within a category, it also can now impede the friction shifting outlaw. I have to see if I can find the right combination of a shifter and derailleur to make the full span. For instance, a 12-speed barcon intended to match Shimano mountain actuation ratio pulls more cable than the 10-speed road shifter I spec'd originally.

Total cable pull is not a statistic that ever mattered. With a downtube shifter with no hard stop, just keep pulling until the chain goes where you want it. The angle could get awkward, so there's a functional limit, but not a solid curb. A barcon, on the other hand, has to work within the angle set by the bracket inserted into the end of the handlebar. The amount of cable pull is set by the radius of the cam through which the cable is inserted. No one keeps track of that specific dimension, because the "number of clicks" is the determining factor for the riders who depend on that crutch. Total cable pull just comes along for the ride.

When I chose parts for the conversion, I looked past the 12-speed shifters. I shy away from the high numbers by reflex, because I avoid the sheet metal cogs and tinfoil chains of high-count cassette systems. I've used nine-speed cogs to build custom cassettes, but nothing thinner if I can avoid it. Cog farming becomes increasingly difficult, so I have had to slip the occasional ten-speed cog into the mix if it's the only one available with the right tooth count.

Personally, I would never own anything with ten or more cogs in the back. New bike purchasers can't escape them, though. Some bikes have come through with nine-speed cassettes, but the available derailleurs for nine-speed index-only are getting cheesier and cheesier. Derailleurs in general are getting cheesier and cheesier, but the amount of metal in them drops off sharply at the lower price points where nine-speed lives now.

We had other options. Originally I had found a crank with 46-30 chainrings that would work with his brifters, but then the compatible rear derailleurs still didn't get him the low gear he was looking for. Once we ditched the brifters, we seemed to have a clear path to the giant cassette, but that led to the current complications. I looked at using the 46-30 crank again and noticed that the one I had marked didn't work with the BB30 bottom bracket on this bike. There is a BB30 model, but you have to look for it. Even then we have no assurance that it will function smoothly, because all compatibility info is geared toward making the indexing work, and nothing else.

"Screw your indexing," I say, but they're making that difficult. So what's next for the simple rider? A fleet of fixed gears each with a different pair of cogs on the two-sided rear hubs? Choose your pair of gears for the day? Or have your caddy follow you with a rack of bikes, each geared differently for the various sections of the route. Or go with the old way of hand-lifting the chain between chainrings and rear cogs, but you definitely need long dropouts for that.

Refusal of technology is getting to be as hard as keeping up with it.

The current project remains incomplete while we wait for the 12-speed shifter to arrive. If that solves the problem, along with off-label use of an 11-speed Deore derailleur, that'll be that. If not, we try the crank. Each option comes at a cost. We warned him at the outset that it would be expensive. Advised him to hand the bike off in its original form to someone who wanted to ride it the way it was. Your odds are much better converting a classic steel frame to various other purposes than they are if you start from anything later than 2010. Little by little the industry walls off whole sections of the bike -- literally in the case of internal cables and hydraulic lines. Figuratively in the case of proprietary shifting systems. You even have to worry about the shape of your chain now, because the really cool ones are directional. SRAM's even have a flat top that's apparently crucial to proper operation.

Fuuuuuuuck that shit. I feel deeply sorry for the young riders who never lived in an era of true mechanical freedom. I feel almost as sorry for the riders who did have a taste of that era who have bought the line they they need to "upgrade" to the modern ephemeral crap. I suppose the ephemeral crap serves as a memento mori, a reminder to live to the limit of your resources because neither you nor any of your works will live forever. But who can really forget that after the age of about 12, and that's if you lived an extraordinarily sheltered life. We spend most of our lives with an awareness of fragility and death. We don't need another reminder, fed to us through predatory capitalism.

I suppose that the industry might actually be operating with its old naivete, desperately trying to engineer its way out of the craphole that it engineered itself into. Manufacturers have earnestly tried to improve the machines all along. It's just that cycling has split into such divergent styles that the different species can no longer crossbreed. The original mountain bikes were descended from bikes. The modern mountain bike is descended from motorcycles. The genres have nothing to offer each other anymore. They share some characteristics like pedals and a sort of general configuration, but that's all.