Some dildo on a road bike, and other workshop trivia

 I had not yet had occasion to unwrap a set of these bars. Be the "envy" of your ride group. This manufacturer has an eccentric way of securing the bar tape at the end of the drops.

The mushroom cap is permanently affixed. After you make the first wrap at the end of the bar on your way to spiral up to the tops, the flexible cap flips down into the position you see here. Below shows the cap in the open position as I prepared to remove the old bar wrap.

 

 

In no particular order, here are other observations and problems solved:

Short rider with small frame complained about her basket dragging on the tire. I remembered that we'd salvaged this little front rack that attaches to the cantilever brake bosses. It actually fit without interference from some other component. Always nice when something works as intended. Advantage to rim brakes.

Here's a rarity: Back when Shimano first entered the rotating shifter market, they actually made changing a cable easy. They soon spotted their error, and the later models are almost impossible to open at all. They love to make puzzle boxes out of their shifters.

And now a reminder of why I hated crank arm dust caps. They almost invariably ended up bonded to the crank arm so thoroughly that they needed to be chiseled out. Or, if you were lucky, one or both of them fell out and disappeared. Good riddance. Especially in the early mountain bike era, anything that stood between you and checking your crank arm bolts was a bad idea. From the late 1980s through much of the 1990s, we replaced an uncounted multitude of left crank arms for riders who hadn't kept up with that vital bit of regular maintenance. The coming of socket-head crank bolts with no dust cap significantly reduced the problem, which freed up the bike industry to devote more attention to creating many other problems for their addicts loyal customers.

While we're in the neighborhood of the crank, this Shimano replacement crank displays a copious application of the pus-like grease that congeals into earwax in early versions of their under-bar pod shifters for mountain bikes.

A little grease on the threads of a crank bolt and under the flange of the head of it is a good idea to help torque it down. But this much grease is way too much. It will get onto the flats of the square tapered bottom bracket axle, compromising the security of the crank arm. Shimano started advising techs to grease the drive side flats of their cartridge BBs in the 1990s during The Great Cheapening, because over-tightening the crank arm against the face of the BB bearings  -- while bad for the crank arm and less secure overall -- helped hold the basically defective design of the bearings in place. While the design of the cartridge BBs has been quietly improved without acknowledging fault, the practice of over-greasing right crank arms remains. Left crank arms -- the ones that fall off more often if bolts aren't properly torqued -- remain completely neglected by them. It falls to individual mechanics to clean up after them and install things correctly to survive for as long as possible in a throwaway society. Do not grease the flats of square tapered bottom bracket axles. Do grease the threads of crank arm bolts. That is all.

A customer attempting to keep a used bike in service brought in his $25 great thrift store find. It was a Schwein mountain bike from the last few moments when Schwinn almost pulled back from the brink of collapse with some decent and well-reviewed machines. The bike he bought was one of the lower-end models, but still a decent platform to fix up and use for a bit of fun cruising and retro trail riding. There was just this mysterious bit of duct tape wrapped around one fork leg...

You may have spotted the guilty secret concealed in a sliver-gray wrapper, but below it is shown fully revealed:

 The fork leg was completely broken. All that held things together was the tape around the outside and the internal parts of the cheap suspension. Silver tape. What can't it do? 

Specialized was kind enough to send us one of the three ebikes we had ordered prepaid back in January. 

What do you think? Do they want me to update the firmware? They have a groovy website where we're supposed to connect with all of the electronic brain stuff. After we updated that interface as directed, the screens we got in the firmware updating process didn't look like the examples in their help and guidance area, and it was never clear whether we had actually succeeded, or if the bike didn't really need it after the hysterical admonitions of the included printed material. 

To compound the annoyance, this expensive machine came in a smudge-attracting matte mint green. Matte finishes are stupid. Light-colored matte finishes are downright sadistic.

The workshop continues to be buried in repairs. El Queso Grande declares that he's never seen anything like it in his almost 50 years in the business. I still wonder if it only seems worse because we can't fill our staffing needs. Leafing through a journal from 2005, when we still had Ralph, I found an entry referring to how buried the workshop was during the early summer rush. EQG likes to go on short conservative rants about the corrosive effects of government generosity and the shabby work ethic of teenagers, but the reason that we can't hire people right now is that they think the work is dirty, complicated, and boring. And they're right. Any youngster thrilled by the new stuff will have no patience for the old stuff. Anyone not thrilled by some aspects of bikes or the bike business won't be lured in by the awesome salary, high prestige, and sex appeal.

 REMEMBER: THIS NEVER HAPPENS

EQG is undefinably agitated by the incentives some employers are offering to entice people to sign on with them. He mentions seeing reports on the news of college tuition incentives, bonuses, and prizes. He rightly asserts that a little place like ours can't compete with inducements like that. But once the novelty of the perqs wears off, you're still left having to do the actual job. And I don't think anyone in our immediate area is offering anything like that anyway.

The young whiz kids are great and all, but a fully functioning bike shop still needs some poor old gray-haired bastard who's pissed away his life at this, and has simply seen a lot of stuff. Or the bike business in general has to cut its ties to its past and leave the maintenance of the derelict hulks still in service to the back street and home garage outfits where someone has the tools and knowledge and can be bothered to use them.

The good news, if you could call it that, is that the pandemic bike boom is already winding down. The lack of bikes to buy has now become widely known, so anyone whose interest was marginal already will be looking for something else to do. Anyone who remains interested still faces a treasure hunt that could yield nothing. No bike means no new participant. It may not be the bike industry's fault exactly, but it's still their loss. Also, with the reopening of many activities and venues that had been unavailable during the height of pandemic restrictions, people are returning to their established preferences as much as possible. Those preferences had verifiably not included biking. With the exception of ebikes, which are really a low level of motor vehicle, the bike industry was not growing, regardless of what the evangelists of mountain biking will tell you.

A low-end ebike will provide more satisfactory performance to a budget-minded customer than a low-end mountain bike will. Neither is a particularly good investment, but the low-end mountain bike is pretty well guaranteed to be beaten into junk within a couple of months of vigorous trail riding. A cheap ebike, with care, might last for years. Thus the two categories belong pretty exclusively to the higher income brackets. It remains to be seen how long higher income brackets will remain viable in the face of all the balancing factors that are increasingly hard to hold back. These include both natural and social forces.

An article I read recently about the social, economic, and environmental impact of mountain biking referred to riders coming not only from the traditional high earning professions, but also from workers in occupations like construction and landscaping. Participation in an expensive activity lasts as long as you are willing to devote your funds to it. The fact that no one disses you for being a dirt worker as long as you can hold your own on the trail does not make the activity egalitarian. Anything with a buy-in of thousands of dollars up front, followed by ongoing consumption costs is not open to all. One section referred to a study that showed that 2/3 of mountain biking tourists in a particular area had annual incomes of $70,000 or greater. Another reference listed average household income as $100,000. You gotta bang a lot of nails and mow a lot of lawns to play in that league. You also can't afford it if you make your living fixing bikes. Not for long, anyway.