Your Dream Bike Shop

 The invigorated mountain bike crowd around Wolfe City has been dreaming hard about the perfect shop, while, for the most part, driving out of town or ordering parts and watching videos to get their bikes worked on. We've seen very little of them since their renaissance began more than a decade ago. At the time, after not riding since the end of the 1990s, the returning enthusiasts came in one at a time at irregular intervals, expecting to see that we had somehow managed to maintain a state of the art department for their renewed interest, funded by a nonexistent customer base for more than a decade. That's not how business works.

Having rapidly decided that we couldn't possibly know our asses from a hole in the ground, the new in-crowd quickly turned to their own resources, like a shop owner in a neighboring town, who gave it a good long try, but ultimately succumbed to the fact that you don't stay in business by only selling to the people you identify with. Despite his considerable skill set in his own arena, he could not overcome the reality that the vast majority of bike shop income derives from recreational riders on unexciting bikes, with a smattering of other categories, and a few commuters. The balance will shift somewhat from one location to another, but you'll be hard pressed to find a shop in a rural area or a small town that supports itself mainly with the high end technical hardware lusted after by the most addicted consumers.

As of last year or the year before, I was telling people that a nice $500 bike costs more than a thousand dollars now. The quality of mid and low end componentry has plunged to shameful levels of sheet metal and plastic. Cheap suspension remains heavy, inefficient, and hardly worth servicing. The more complicated the ideal bike becomes, the more expensive, complicated, and vulnerable its low priced imitators become as well. I don't mean box-store bikes. I mean mid- and low-end name brands.

Because Wolfeboro has a little pocket of affluence, the enthusiast clientele comes pre-equipped with a sense of entitlement as they view the world around them through their bubble of financially insulated self interest. Self interest is often interpreted as economic activity that supports an individual and their chosen circle on a broad front, but in specialty retail and absorbing, expensive hobbies it is focused narrowly on creating a small world to their liking, and funneling resources to it, while they might participate in the general economy in a much more even-handed manner.

The supporters of the Dream Shop concept have focused on creating for themselves a new endeavor. They've made no positive moves so far, because a number of factors impede them. The pandemic and its shortages of bikes and parts are only the most recent impediment. Prior to that they were already having trouble finding anyone with shop experience who was enough of a sucker to be their human sacrifice and actually run the place. Once bitten, twice shy. They are further seriously hampered by the fact that most of the rest of them have no shop experience at all. And a few years as a wrench or a salesperson doesn't make you an expert.

In the 1990s, when riders would come in foaming at the mouth over something they'd just read about in a magazine (pre-Internet), my answer was, "Just because you know the latest thing doesn't mean you know everything." Because mountain bikes were still closer kin to bicycles than motorcycles, this assertion carried some weight. Now we have been through decades of "latest things," so some guy who did some wrenching five years ago will be dropping into a new and constantly changing landscape. Granted, if this former mechanic has remained an enthusiast, they will know about the newest stuff, and maybe even have dug into it a bit. But someone who has only been a consumer has no idea what circles of Hell await the owner and key staff of a bike shop in this age of throwaway products and rapid mutation.

Very recently, someone advanced a version of the Dream Shop concept that was centered on our existing business. It's all very nebulous at this point. No one is getting excited. But it acknowledges the extensive contributions that the shop has made to the community since it opened in the 1970s, and it acknowledges some of the realities of operating a completely independent, small shop on the fringes of the economy. Move our place ten miles from the big lake and it would have died in infancy, long forgotten. Even in its favored spot, the course has been mostly rough, negotiating changing fashions in outdoor recreation, and the contrast between the bustling summer scene and the small and notoriously frugal population of year-round residents.

What any dreamer needs to understand is that in order to meet the desires of the technolemmings, and still service the real clientele that actually pays the bills, the service department space will have to be large, well-ordered, fully equipped, and subsidized. I wrote years ago about how the many good sports with simple bikes, whose repairs don't eat up vast amounts of shop time and call for expensive tools, upgraded frequently, subsidize the tech weenies with their endless problems with temperamental, fashionable equipment. This is now hampered by the lack of good applicants to serve as mechanics, and commerce still restricted by the effects of the pandemic. We can't get a full selection of products in most of our departments, not just bike stuff. 

One of our excellent part-time and drop-in helpers got to experience the joys of tubeless tire problems last week. A rider came in with a broken valve stem. He was about to go riding with the kiddies, so we did a pit-crew stem change for him and sent him on his way. The next day he was back with the tire dead flat. Neither the tech who fixed it, nor I, were there, so El Queso Grande checked it in as "just worked on here, tire went flat." It looks more accusatory when it's written out than it might be when the rider returns with his tale of woe. But sometimes it's exactly that accusatory. More joys of being on the front lines of service for an expensive, complicated recreational toy.

Helper dropped in soon thereafter, and dove in willingly to figure out what went wrong. We ran the diagnostic process from what you hope it is to what you knew it would be and really don't look forward to. Tighten the stem nut? Nope. Change out the stem again? Nope. We can hear it leaking into the rim. I say it's the rim tape, which will require completely dismounting the tire, cleaning and thoroughly drying the rim, and applying new tape. We also spotted where the rider had dented the rim. I theorized that the impact could have damaged the rim floor and compromised the tape there. That turned out to be the case. So, strip the tire, peel the tape, clean and dry the rim, apply new tape. Note that the rim floor is now permanently deviated at the dent, so tape may be unreliable. Remount, reseat the beads, reinflate. We don't hear hissing. Soap water produces no bubbles. We could be good. Helper leaves to get on with one of his many other endeavors in a busy and admirably productive life.

By the end of the day, the tire was flat again. Odds are, the wheel will have to be rebuilt with a new rim, or replaced entirely with another factory built wheel. The latter option wastes more material but occupies less time. And then the tubeless setup will have to be installed. 

"Tubeless lets you run lower pressures without the fear of pinch flats," say the technolemmings. Yep. But you can still ding your rim and make tubeless operation impossible. You can also pinch flat the actual tire casing. 

This is the reality of the enthusiast shop. Helper, who is working off his debt for a Specialized e-mountain bike, put in probably three hours not curing the problem. I say this not to indict his lack of skill. He did nothing that any of the rest of us would not have done as well. It's an indictment of the technology and a warning to the dreamers. I'm sure it will fall on deaf ears.

I closed out my week with a "simple pad replacement and brake bleed" on a Trech road bike with Dura Ace hydraulic brakes. Following Shimano's own recommended procedure for that brake, I dismounted the caliper from the frame. Because the brake lines run internally, that still didn't let me get a perfect rising line to the master cylinder in the brifter body. The brifter itself had to be partially disassembled to expose the bleed port. And the handlebar stem clamp had to be undone for part of the late stages of the bleed, which meant that I had to undo the rider's GPS mount, which was blocking the four stem bolts. This is after the standard removal of the brake pads, resetting the caliper pistons, and inserting the bleed block.

They make it easy to get a wrench on the mounting bolts for that caliper, don't they?

Neatly tucked into the crook of the rear stays, the caliper also sits only a few inches from where the brake line emerges from the interior of the frame. The bleed port is on the front end of the caliper, aiming down.

I made the Bleed Board years ago for the many cases similar to this one, in which the brake needs to be dismounted from the frame to do the bleed.

After the bleed, everything has to be completely reassembled in order to find out if what felt good on the bleed block will actually feel right on the brake rotor. In this case, not so much. But by then it was long after closing time, and I still had to ride home. Another 10 p.m. supper. When I get back in the shop after the bike has been hanging for a while I have an idea for a shortcut to chase the last little air ninjas out of it.

We haven't even gotten into tooling up seriously for the smokeless moped market. Smokeless mopeds appear to be unavoidable, at least for now. When a category of technology comes to dominate your industry, regardless of whether it's a good idea, well executed, you have to deal with it.

All the time that someone spends on the delicate needs of sophisticated, expensive machinery is time that we don't have for the high volume of simpler repairs that keep the real majority of America's bike fleet rolling. This will remain the reality, no matter what the dreamers envision. You remember the sappy saying, "If you can dream it you can do it?" Yeah, that's crap. How often have you dreamed that you could fly? Then you wake up.