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.

It's "Rain its Ass Off Week."

 A League of American Bicyclists email arrived in my inbox, announcing that it's Bike to Work Week. Wolfeboro used to make a big deal out of it in the late 1990s, and maybe slopping over a bit into the 2000s, but they largely ignore it now.

My work week doesn't line up with normal people's weeks, so for me it begins tomorrow.  The forecast has gone from possibly showery in the afternoon to a washout. In fact, Wednesday through Friday look like they will all deliver badly needed rain to our drought-afflicted area.

Last Saturday I defied the weather  to ride the bike. The morning was dry, with bright sun in a blue sky until shortly before I set out. Clouds thickened as I rode to town.

The actual rain arrived near the middle of the day and increased. The temperature topped out in the 50s (F), prime hypothermia conditions for people who think that peril is reserved for the deep freeze of winter. With proper attire it's just grossly uncomfortable. And that was the theme for the ride home. I was wet within the first two miles, but warm enough from the exertion as I climbed to the height of land on Route 28. From there I faced a two-mile descent. In fact, the only climbs from there all the way home are short interruptions to the general downhill trend. On a warm, dry day it's a relief to have gravity on my side. Facing a wet, chilly easterly wind it's just another kind of grind.

The worst problem with rain riding is wet shoes. I have addressed this by using vapor barrier socks on the inside and bread bags over the shoes on the outside. The bags are about as effective as expensive commercial shoe covers, and sometimes more so. I don't ride with cleated shoes anymore, because I want to be able to walk easily if the need arises, without damaging expensive specialty footwear. And I eat a lot of bread.

As for the rest of me, I wear enough mid layers to preserve functional warmth even as the outer shell leaks and my own sweat wicks outward. It's time-limited, but the system has worked well enough to last as long as the duration of my ride. However, it's better when I arrive home with a bunch of wet clothing than when I arrive at work that way.

For many years, a natural food store in the unit below ours had refrigeration compressors running in the basement, creating a perfect space in which to dry wet bike clothes. Sadly, they have been gone for a long time now, and the basement is a dismal place of perpetual chill. Wet clothes in the morning would still be wet at the end of the day. This influences my willingness to launch into a wet forecast.

Rainy weather on Bike to Work Week is just another joke. How do we know when a powerful aurora borealis display is coming? The forecast calls for clouds. Same with meteor showers, planetary convergences, blood moons, eclipses... In the grand scheme of a commuting season, weather will interfere a few times. Bike to Work Week only matters because the publicity increases awareness. Non-riders might be looking to see who is out there. It's a chance to have a greater promotional impact. Hard to say whether that impact would be positive or negative when drivers peer through their rain-streaked windshields at some saturated idiot pedaling doggedly through the deluge. Come on out! It's fun!

"Look what riding a bike all the time does to your brain. That boy there doesn't even know to come in out of the rain!"

A lifetime of commitment to reducing fossil fuel use just looks like soft-headed lunacy, especially now that we have electric cars. And extolling the benefits of physical fitness is ableist and body shaming. Ya tone-deaf bastard! Read the room! The heroic defiance of the elements just looks stupid. Or it's admirable dedication, but not an inspiration.

Truly, you do have to choose your motivators. Our paths weave and blend in confusing ways. In the course of your life you might travel alongside someone for a year or two, only to have them veer away as their goals take them to more conventional measures of success.

This is a good time to mention that transportation cycling can actually cost you mileage. I often don't get to ride on my days off, because I'm doing essential things that I don't have time for in the margins of a work day. I hate to miss an opportunity, but a ride chews an hour or two out of a day when I might have other time-consuming tasks like stacking firewood or painting the deck. Or I have a packed schedule of numerous shorter activities. I know that thirty miles are waiting for me on the next workday, with roughly half bracketing each end of the hours at the shop.

The commute is not an easy ride. It requires a cumulative thousand feet of climbing for the day, and the stress of interacting with commuting motorists for the entire distance. As the season advances to peak summer, the number of motor vehicles increases. We generally get along, but it pushes my pace to claim my space.

I had to keep from laughing the other day when a rider who lives in Wolfeboro complained about drivers towing trailers on the road that parallels the lake shore. "These guys go by and their trailer is only two feet from my handlebar!"

Two feet? Nice! Try a wall of tractor trailer tires six inches away as the rig takes forever to get by you on a rainy morning in traffic on Center Street. To be fair to the truck driver, I was trying to get him in front of me so I could get the draft. I try to avoid situations like that now...mostly. I do love a draft, though.

I haven't decided yet if the weather and I will be giving each other the finger as it spits on me and I defy it, or if I just can't work the logistics of a wet ride in. Most of that depends on whether the ride in will be wet.

Thousand-dollar water pumps and other consumer woes

 Back in January or thereabouts, I changed a headlight bulb in the Ford Escape. That proved to be as annoying as working on any modern machinery. I had to remove the coolant overflow reservoir to get at the back of the headlight housing, and still contort my hand to insert and twist the vulnerable halogen bulb into the socket. While I was there, I noticed that the coolant was below the "minimum" line. Okay, I'll just get some coolant at O'Reilly and top 'er up. Let's just check the owner's manual.

Yep, nope. You need a PhD in chemistry and some lab equipment to blend the coolant properly so that you don't scorch the delicate engine, engineered to perfection. Perfection for someone, anyway.

The car was running fine, temperature was mid range. I waited until I was getting some other service done to mention it. The mechanic informed me that he had discovered very slight residue indicating a water pump leak. He also said that it's a stupid design that calls for almost ten hours of labor and requires special tools most likely only found at a dealership. He guessed upwards of a thousand dollars for the job, because so much of the engine has to be disassembled to get at the water pump.

Back at my own job the next day, a long-time seasonal customer showed up with a brand new 3T Strada road bike in the box, needing assembly. We have assembled a number of high-end road bikes that get shipped to the customer directly. They generally require no more than the usual tools and procedures, although we did have a good bout of bullshit with a Canyon that a guy brought in, and an epic struggle with an extraordinarily stupid e-bike design from Specialized. Prophetically, that one involved hydraulic brake lines led through the handlebar.

The 3T routes the hydraulic brake lines through the handlebars, because of course they do. They provide little plastic tubes, like the ones we thread cables through, which are entirely inadequate to redirect a stiff brake line. The lines themselves are already filled with fluid and capped. The first thing you have to do is cut the cap off, because it makes the end of the brake line too stiff to make the ridiculously tight bend where it exits the bar to connect to the brifter. So now you're trying to wrangle drippy brake lines through two sharp bends, into and then back out of the bar. I'm ready to go into a bar after that.

This is just more of the thousand dollar water pump philosophy driving modern design. I'm through coddling customers who are certain they they need it. You need it? Fork out for it. This is bullshit. It was bullshit in the 1990s and it's bullshit on ketamine and steroids now.

Bikes sold directly to consumers usually come with either lots of printed instructions or some sort of link to a tedious video that might or might not cover the crucial detail that will hang you up for half a day. But at least there's something. Not with this Italian beauty, though. There's one manual for assembling the bar and stem setup and yes, it absolutely leaves out the crucial detail that will hang you up for half a day. I guess if you're really skilled, you know your way around without anyone telling you where things are and how hard to press. If you need instructions, we're not talking to you.

I ended up making a hook tool with an old spoke to catch the end of the brake line at exactly the right spot as it came into view in the dark interior of the bar under the exit hole. That was after trying six or eight other things to try to guide it. The Park Tool internal routing kit didn't work, because the end that would attach almost securely enough to the brake line was itself too long to make the turn.

This bike looks like it was packaged for sale through an authorized dealer who would have assembled it.

Even under ideal circumstances I would have had to bleed the brakes. So, after I managed to get the brake lines placed, I went to remove the rear wheel so that I could prepare the caliper.

The bike has Di2 shifting. The derailleurs were locked in position with the rear derailleur under the largest cog and the front derailleur holding the chain on the big ring. That wheel was not going to come out. I managed to get the rear derailleur to move a couple of cogs outward on the 12-speed cassette, which gained me just enough slack to get the wheel out. I had already tried pairing the wireless levers to the derailleurs, but it seemed that the battery didn't have enough charge.

Oh yeah, and let's back up to installing the battery. It goes in the seatpost. I've had some hilarious times with these in the past, when the wires came undone, but the battery kept creeping further up inside the post every time I tried to plug them back in. Fortunately, this post doesn't allow the battery to creep out of reach, but that was the only thing that went reassuringly smoothly. There are three capped terminals on the battery, but only two wires to connect. Nothing on or with the battery indicates whether it matters which terminals you choose. I don't know if it didn't matter or I just got lucky with my selection.

Shimano makes a special tool to push the connectors onto the battery. Wait, no, now they make two special tools to fit multiple generations of mistakes they correct after dumping product on hapless consumers and mechanics.

The aero seatpost is basically rectangular. It has some taper to the leading edge, but it can only go one way. It fits very tightly in the seat tube. The seat tube itself is not a long, straight line. Instead it uses the illusion of a tight rear triangle, with a vertical section that merges into a curved lower part that follows the contour of the wheel. It looks ridiculously tight and steep, when the actual seat angle is pretty slack.

The wires dangling out of the seatpost have to go somewhere. In a normal seat tube, you can generally shove them down out of the way with only a bit of time and care, aided by the fact that you can rotate the seatpost back and forth to facilitate stacking the spare wire down in the depths. Not with this square thing, though. Not only can't you wiggle it in, the wires have to make an abrupt turn into a narrower space in the curved part of the tube.

The battery itself is held into the seatpost with a specially shaped rubber stopper. This item is slightly oversized, binding on the seat tube as you try to shove the post down. You hope that the wires are going where you tried to aim them, but you have no control and can't see. The seatpost goes in as far as the minimum line. I'm not sure how much farther it will go. The rider had better need the seat at or near full height.

I charged the shifting system through the charging port on the rear derailleur. I had to work around the cable as I set up the brake bleed. And before I did the bleed I had to cut the brake lines according to the instructions, with 55mm protruding from the exit holes in the bars. They were quite specific in the instructions. Fifty-five millimeters. I pulled the brake lines out to allow for enough adjustment to move the brifters down the handlebar if the customer wants that.

To connect the brake lines to the master cylinder ports on each lever body, the mechanic has to push the lever body firmly upward against the protruding 55mm of brake line, to hold it securely in the olive already fitted inside the handy-dandy "convenience" fitting provided by Shimano. The brake line retracts into the bar as you try to tighten the nut really quickly to stem the outpouring of brake fluid that begins as soon as you start to press the line into the fitting. The instructions say not to clamp the bars tight until everything is installed and the bike is on the floor. They're snug, but the bolts are recessed for "aerodynamics" and to make burnt-out veteran mechanics want to grab a sledge hammer. There's a good reason that we don't keep a fire ax on the premises.

I had already had to install a new barbed fitting in the brake lines, using only the 55mm of exposed line, restricted by the angle of the handlebar next to the exit hole. The line for the left brifter went in successfully, but the right one squirted brake fluid out the fitting because the olive had gotten dislodged and crimped. I had to yank that apart, insert a new olive, and finagle it back together.

The whole process took hours longer than a build on frame of a conventional bike from 20 years ago, because of the delicacy of carbon fiber and the challenges presented by routing everything inside as much of the bike's structure as possible. A video popped up on my YouTube feed presenting the pros and cons of disc versus rim brakes with surprisingly good balance. It stated that the weight and aerodynamic drag of disc brake setups requires that the lines be run inside the handlebar and frame. If you want to be racy, and bomb down alpine passes in the rain -- and don't we all? -- you simply must have disc brakes and internal everything. However, the video did acknowledge that rim brakes have many advantages, particularly for the self-supported cyclist. They're lighter, much easier to maintain, and proven over more than a century of use. The video admitted that the industry has simply declared war on rim brakes and forced riders to adapt. For high-end roadies, this means expensive replacement of entire bikes to get the current top of the line.

All the way back in the first decade of the 21st century, industry observers had noted that the industry had burned off the casual enthusiast by making things so complicated and expensive, so had shifted to sucking more and more money out of their remaining pool of addicted users.

In automobiles and bikes we had long been told that racing was the proving ground for technologies that made their way into our own vehicles to make them safer and more efficient. That might have been true for a while, but it was mostly gone by the end of the 1990s. Now it just makes our vehicles more expensive, complicated, and disposable. That afflicts the entire price range. You can't "buy quality" anymore. If you want something built to last, find something in good shape that has already lasted since the end of the era of durability, and keep fixing it.

New bikes suck. And it's damn sad. I can fix an old bike and release it with full confidence. I never feel confident about any of this new shit. You're always going to be waiting for it to sprout some mysterious ailment. And the industry will be desperate to sell you a new one.

Wet riders in a drought

 The car needs a new windshield. I came out of work on Friday to find a long, sinuous crack that rose from the lower right edge, snaked across toward the middle, and turned upward. It had not been visible when I drove to work that morning.

Assuming I couldn't get it fixed on the weekend, I called first thing on Monday to make an appointment for Wednesday at the glass place I pass every day on the way to work. I've had to do this with previous cars. I leave the vehicle and continue by bike.

As of Monday, the forecast for Wednesday was for a mild day, partly sunny in the morning, with a chance of sprinkles encroaching on the time I would be riding back out to the glass place to get the car on my way home. As of today, that forecast has become darker and wetter. The amount won't do anything to replenish depleted ground water, but it could be more than enough to saturate a rider.

There have been many days like this through the late winter and early spring. At least one has hit every week on the days when I have tried to accumulate base miles before dragging my tired ass out on the full commute. If you get one brief downpour that yields a scant quarter-inch of rain, it's only a problem if it coincides with your ride time. Or maybe it's one of those gray days of constant heavy mist verging on drizzle. Nature is suffering, wells are failing, the ground less than an inch down is still parched powder, but you, the rider, are covered with wet grit.

The Wednesday ride, now firmly scheduled, will mark my first arrival by bike at work since last October. After that I was planning to try the full route on Friday, with a nicer forecast than Wednesday's. Only now it isn't. The entire seven-day forecast has filled in with showers on most days. Saturday still just says "mostly cloudy," but that can develop into more showers, considering what's lining up for Sunday. And next Monday says partly sunny, but reverts to temperatures more like March.

Before I felt remotely ready to send a well-worn body nearly 70 years old onto a hilly, 30-mile commitment, we had some beautiful days. Maybe we'll have more. Last year, May and June turned quite wet before the rain basically snapped off with the arrival of July. And beautiful riding days don't alleviate the drought. We need some perfectly timed overnight saturating rains followed by sunny days with light breezes that turn into tailwinds.

Selfish motorist vindictiveness

 Still stuck in the car while I lay down some base miles, my time in transit still depends on other drivers more than anything I do myself. I can't just bear down and pedal harder.

Mere traffic congestion can account for a lot. Maybe a driver at the head of the line on a snowy day isn't handling conditions as well as I would. Not everyone can afford good tires. In dry weather, drivers slow down for good reasons or bad ones. You can tell when someone is on their phone or receiving a series of text messages by how they slow down and weave. They shouldn't be on their phone, but they're only being selfish and oblivious.

Vindictiveness takes it to another level. This morning, I pulled onto Route 16 behind a line of maybe a dozen cars. Of those, two or three pulled onto Route 28 ahead of me. When it all got sorted, I was behind three vehicles: a small red sedan at the front, a silver pickup -- looked like a Toyota Tacoma -- and a compact SUV. The pickup truck surged up behind the red car in the lead. I could tell by the way that the red car's driver reacted that we were in for a long trip.

Maybe you have done this yourself: a tailgater comes barreling up and fills your rear view mirror with his grille. So you take your foot off the gas. Think it was too slow before, pal? Check this out.

I don't usually do that if I know there's a good corner coming up. It's way more fun to suck a tailgater into a corner they're not ready for, because they've been pumping the brakes and cursing because I'm not speeding enough for them. I mean, just because an annoying flame-brain is plastered to my rear bumper doesn't mean I want to arrive any later than I was going to already. I'll hold my preferred speed and set up for the sudden change of direction. Most of the time I can lead into my favorite bends without hitting the brakes at all. The next thing Asshole back there knows, he's squealing around some 90 with no idea how he got there.

Lacking a good corner, I just have to endure. But I don't slow down. However, I do know people who will commit punctuality suicide for the satisfaction of dragging a tailgater to hell with them.

Road rage is a hot, active expression. Road passive aggression is a long, slow buildup of frustration.

When I saw what was developing, I slowed to maintain ten or more car lengths from the vehicle right in front of me. With steady traffic oncoming, I would have had little chance to pass if I was the first car behind the red slowpoke. Being three cars back I had no chance at all. I was stuck for the duration.

Before long, we had accumulated another four or five cars behind us.

The pickup truck and the car right behind it kept having to pump the brakes as the red car ambled along. At times the slowdown was so sudden and sustained that I rolled up closer than I wanted, and had to brake as well. At the good passing zone, oncoming traffic held the silver pickup back until past the half. Then he went for it anyway, almost clipping a northbound car as he snatched it back into our lane and rocketed away. Now I was only two down. For what it's worth.

Closer to town, the intermediate vehicle turned aside, leaving me right behind the red leader. In typical fashion, the meandering tourist from out on the highway blazed in through the first curves of the narrowing road like they were leading the Grand Prix de Wolfeboro. But then they suddenly dropped to below 30 miles per hour, and it wasn't because I was drafting them. They just did it. Okay. We swung lazily along in the spring sunshine while they enjoyed their leisurely morning.

When I had left home, I was well placed to arrive at work five minutes early. Tree work on Elm Street and utility work on 28 delayed me, but the red car's long game baiting the silver pickup really killed me. I arrived about five minutes late.

Every time crap like this happens I think about how it would never hinder me on a bike. I have ridden along and glanced over at motorists getting on each other's nerves. I'm grateful every time that I am able to get out of that for at least a few months.

The Color of April

 The color of April is brown. It's a dusty brown, the tan of sand on the roadway, the brown of dry, dead leaves in the woods. Grass pressed down by the snow lies flat. Naked tree trunks and branches reach up into a sky that's never really clear. Even a sunny day is dulled by April's distinctive haze.

Fire danger is high when the snow is gone, because none of the vegetation has juiced up yet, while residual moisture in the dead straw can actually start a fire from the heat of fermentation. Light rain makes it worse.

The color of April arrived early this year, because of the drought. Wolfeboro supposedly recorded 80 inches of snow, but inches of snow do not reflect an absolute value of actual water. Most of the snowfalls after early December measured maybe four to eight inches, but packed down to one. The winter was cold and mostly dry. Getting through the cold and darkness feels good, but it feels less like emerging from the ice age when the snow was barely ever there.

March is usually the brightest month, as strong sun shines down through a leafless canopy onto the white snow surface. Blue skies are really blue. Once the snow is gone, the dusty residue of salted and sanded roads, combined with the dust and sand of the glacial soil seem to sublimate into the atmosphere. The air you look through may be clear, but the sky itself looks like it needs spring cleaning.

April Fool's Day usually brings us a practical joke from the weather. It may not be on the exact day, but a snowstorm at the beginning of April is common. Two or three systems are forming up now to usher in the month. A couple of years ago, it was a devastating dump of wet cement that did worse damage at lower elevations than either of the last two catastrophic ice storms. In other years, the April prank just includes snow in a wet mix of rain, freezing rain, and sleet.

On a day of heavy clouds and cold rain, April and November are hard to tell apart, until the fringe of buds and tree flowers becomes obvious later in the month.

Despite what might seem like a dismal aspect, the rides during this part of the season bring joyous anticipation of brighter, warmer days full of life. A dry winter robs us not only of needed water, but of the pleasure of meltwater streams glistening as the land greens up. Frogs start calling. Turtles bask. The hawks return. Every pedal stroke brings you closer to that.