"Consult a professional bicycle mechanic"

 Another tubeless tire victim came through a while back. He said he'd had the tires mounted at a shop where he lived. The staff there assured him that the process is simple and reliable. A few days later, the rear tire was losing pressure within hours. Now he was away from home, trying to enjoy his trip.

With tubeless tires, the problem never seems to be the simple one you want it to be, like tightening the nut at the base of the valve stem. It's almost always the rim tape. Rim tape is the fatal weakness of the whole ridiculous system.

When I removed the tire, the rim tape was wrinkled and detaching. This had been professionally installed by a confident technolemming who fully believed in the technology. This was the A game of a committed disciple. It's nice to see that even the true believers can screw the pooch this badly.

Wrinkly

Floppy

And the sealant mess looks like the floor of a triple X adult theater at closing time.

I had estimated a price to throw a tube in there before I saw that the rim tape couldn't be saved. I knew it would be compromised. I didn't anticipate that it would have floated loose completely. It didn't make a huge difference to the price, but it added a bit, as well as requiring more comprehensive cleaning and drying to get new rim tape to adhere properly.

The only way to make a reliably airtight rim is with a fully sealed floor. This requires novel approaches to spoking. The majority of players in the tubeless sector rely on tape. The sealant in its fresh, liquid state actually attacks the adhesive of the rim tape, as seen here. Any flaw in the tape job provides a starting point for the sealant to start weakening it. In addition, rims seem to be coming with shallower center sections now, as well as really tight tire sizing. This means that anyone mounting a tire might take advantage of the absence of an inner tube to use tire levers to pry the casing onto the rim, only to cut the rim tape.

Tubeless makes everything worse, but the fad has not run its course. And like all diseases, it will never be fully eradicated. All we can do is treat it when it flares up and inoculate against it as much as possible.

Car culture chains the United States to dirty energy

 No other country on earth was as smitten with the automobile as the United States. The oil industry itself originated in Pennsylvania, but the love affair that has driven us to cling to oil addiction took a while to get rolling. Like the bicycle, the automobile began as a luxury item. Unlike the bicycle, rank and file consumers held off until Henry Ford devised a production method to bring costs down. The Ford Model T put the automobile in reach of ordinary workers. A thriving industry took American industrialization into the fast lane.

After the Second World War, the American hotrod drank deeply of cheap gas while forging an image of freedom and daring and mechanical creativity. American cars were big, with big engines. Speed limits crept higher and higher, allowing these beasts to gallop across the miles of wide open spaces in the American interior.

When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, it didn't serve as an early warning that we should try to detox from petroleum. Worldwide, economies just retooled to accommodate the rising price and manipulated supply. Fuel prices pushed upward ever harder on the cost of living, but people paid it. The United States instituted a 55 mile per hour speed limit, which brought the average cruising speed down around 65 on most highways for a while, but that has been rescinded in most places now. Good luck finding the road less traveled nowadays. If you do, it probably goes somewhere very obscure, or the stretch isn't very long.

Emission controls have improved the smell and cleared up the worst of the brown haze that hung over any populated area. Improved fuel economy standards help a little with the environment. Only steadily climbing wages and salaries keep up with relentlessly inflating prices. Consumers focus only on whether they can afford to fill the tank, not whether they should push hard on elected officials to shift to energy sources that don't carry the vast liabilities of petroleum.

Gasoline equals freedom of movement in the American mind. That means oil. Electricity means convenience and entertainment in the home and in rechargeable handheld devices. Who really cares what fuels the power plant? Coal seems so 19th Century, and yet it still fuels about 19 percent of electricity generation in this country. Natural gas fuels more than 40 percent. Straight-up oil fired power plants account for one to three percent of energy generated. Combined, that's more than 60 percent.

Renewables account for 21 percent of energy generation. Biomass is considered renewable, but it still involves combustion, requires energy in the machinery used to harvest and process whatever is being burned, and contributes to the environmental impacts of commercial forestry.

The most visible connection Americans have to petroleum use is their vehicles. For more than a hundred years, generation after generation has grown up with engine noise, clouds of exhaust, crashes, and increasing traffic congestion. We're obsessed with the price of their fuel.

Electric vehicles have become a common sight, but their drivers have to plan carefully to make sure that they can recharge as needed. Recharging takes a lot longer than a quick pit stop at a self-service gas station. An electric vehicle represents a conscious choice to accept inconvenience. The inconvenience may seem trivial if you live where you can charge at home and never venture far, or have access to charging at a place and time that coincides with work or another interval when you wouldn't need to go anywhere anyway. But what if you need to make an unexpected trip in the middle -- or near the beginning - of the time you had set aside for charging?

We live by the car. We may die by the car. Our dependence will continue to help politicians who enable it, and even glorify it as a defiant expression of liberty. It's really nice to be able to hop in a speedy vehicle, protected from the weather and relatively secure, to arrive fully rested wherever you're headed. I get that. As much as we all hate the downsides of their ownership and use, generations have accepted the costs in order to have the benefits. The majority has spoken over and over. A sizable chunk of them will throw in behind some nightmarish politicians rather than risk losing access or having to pay higher prices for their fuel. It's freedom juice.

E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.

Independence Day

Main Street was blocked off. Spectators already lined the road to watch the parade. I rode up to the police officers at the Central Avenue intersection. It's a grand name for less than a hundred yards of street.

"Can I get through to Nordic Skier" I asked, gesturing toward Main Street.

"On that?" one said, indicating my bike.  "Sure!"

I thanked them and excused my way through a thin spot in the spectator crowd. I hate being the entertainment, but I had no choice. Hundreds of people waited on either side of the car-free street. I threaded carefully through the random wanderers popping out to take pictures of their friends or searching for a place to squeeze in.

At Mill Street I negotiated passage back through the spectator wall to ride around into the back parking lot of the shop.

Once upstairs in the workshop I had time to look out from the elevated vantage of the backshop windows at the automobiles stuffed into every possible spot, and the bands of parade watchers still streaming in. I spared only occasional glances at the parade once it started. Most of the time, I worked on repairs and contemplated the absolute saturation of the parking facilities. You could not have stuffed another car anywhere, in any direction I could see.

Even on the ride in I had enjoyed the cyclist advantage. Motor vehicle traffic stopped on Center Street at least a quarter of a mile from Main Street. I don't know where people hoped they could go, or how many -- if any -- were just passing through and had lousy timing. Traffic wasn't stopped completely. I had to ride carefully, threading the Death Slot to the right of them at times, and flowing with them in the short breaks where they could move forward.

Usually at the end of the parade, traffic both wheeled and on foot streams the other way, a tide going back out with Fundian energy. The high water mark of humanity and their vehicles surges strongly on the ebb. Within an hour, parking areas in town can be nearly deserted as everyone disperses to whatever other fun they have planned. They'll be back for fireworks at dusk, but I'm long gone by then. This year, however, the parking eased up considerably, but a lot of foot traffic remained. We sold three bikes, did multiple quick repairs for riders only here for the day or the weekend, and had to stop repeatedly to host browsers among the clothing racks, or ring up sales.

This stands in contrast to the previous month or two in which we sold no bicycles at all, and had many ominously uninterrupted days. I don't know why this particular Fourth and its attendant weekend was so busy, but the fact that it lined up so neatly, with the Fourth on Friday, might explain a lot. We're not used to seeing heavy traffic anymore, so a day that would not have impressed us in the 1990s now seems like a big deal.

Summer brings more vehicles, many piloted by people who live where they have to drive more aggressively just to survive. This leads to some increase in close, fast passing, but also a more subtly dangerous tendency for drivers to stop suddenly to wave their fellow motorists out of side streets and driveways. Those drivers nurture the fantasy that we're all nice to each other in this theme park rendition of a country town. A rider needs to be ready to stop short as well as sprint, and read the body language of the larger vehicles. It's our little urban experience embedded in the months of small-town riding.

At the end of the day, I pedaled serenely out my usual route. Evening hazards dwindle rapidly as I pass the driveways of a couple of eating and drinking establishments on the way to the back route out to Route 28. On the Fourth, the evening commute fit into the lull before fireworks traffic.

Motors and mass: ebikes make crashing more expensive

 With ebikes rapidly becoming the vehicle of choice for workers who can't afford a car, these heavier, faster bikes attract riders who still think of them as just bikes: simple, unbounded by many rules, and relatively cheap. The bikes cost more up front, but the purchase price and the price of electricity are the big expenses. This isn't true, especially if you need someone else to work on it for you, but it's a popular perception of bikes in general.

Ebike riders ride them like they ride any bike. Some riders are more vehicular about it than others. Interacting with traffic, some ride at the edge of the lane. Some try to ride on the sidewalk when they can get away with it. Some take the lane and operate like a motorist.

The riders who stay to the right (in the US) expose themselves to the dangers of the Death Slot, stuck against the curb, the ditch, or a line of parked cars. On a pedal bike it's bad enough, but on an ebike the danger is magnified by the mass and speed of the bike.

A rider dragged the carcass of their massive ebike to us last week after a crash that destroyed the front wheel, damaged the fork, and dislodged the left crank arm. The bike has two-wheel drive: hub motors in both wheels. It has fat, 26-inch tires. It's from a company with a strange name written in a nearly undecipherable font.

We heard from the motorist who hit the bike, who described the accident in a way that minimized the motorist's responsibility. We heard from the rider, who described the accident as a pretty typical right hook by the driver. The motorist said that they would pay for repairs "out of the goodness of our hearts, even though the accident wasn't our fault." I didn't say what I was thinking right then, but I did not believe that they were blameless. However, the rider made a serious error at the time: They did not file a formal accident report. The rider and the driver just came to an oral agreement at the scene, when neither of them knew the full extent of the damage and potential costs.

Because so many little companies have jumped into the ebike market, there are dozens of brands with weird names, pumping out superficially similar products with sketchy customer support. Customer support is pretty shabby even from major brands in the bike industry. It's even worse from cheap ebike brands.

That ought to true right out, don't you think?

In addition to the obviously ruined rim, the brake tabs on the fork leg are bent, and so is the brake rotor. The more I looked at the bike, the more things I found. Unfortunately, I can't be sure how much is crash damage and what was simply poor quality control at the cheap ebike factory. For instance, the rear wheel seems to sit closer to the chainstays on the impact side, indicating that the frame got bent as well as the wheel and fork, but I never saw the bike before the crash. The wheel could have been that way to start.

The bike weighs about 80 pounds, so I can't exactly sling it around. With the front wheel smashed like that, I can't wheel it around, either.

As the potential cost of repairs mounted, it fell short of the supposed $900 price of the new bike, but still looked to surpass $400, maybe even $500, with shipping and labor. The driver will likely balk at that amount unless they're either super benevolent or secretly acknowledge that they're at fault. We as a shop don't want to take it on, because we've already gone through a couple of long, expensive slogs this season. Barely breaking even is a bad business model. I feel really bad, because the rider is a worker once again getting screwed by someone else's carelessness, but they did contribute some negligence by riding in the Death Slot. I recall my chess match with an insurance adjuster when I had a serious encounter with a motor vehicle years ago. We negotiated a settlement because I needed money and was willing to barter a little, but I only had the leverage I did because police came and everyone filed a formal report. I had 'em by the insurance, and by the officer's report that the occupants of the car were fundamentally at fault.

As I researched repair options, I also found companies that offer bike insurance, particularly ebike insurance. This rider got a lot of bike for their $900, but this accident may have wiped it all out. They have no safety net. If they can't get the bike fixed for an amount that the motorists will cover, they lost their shot to apply legal leverage because they didn't get a police report to create an official narrative. They're left with a pile of scrap metal that a single human can barely drag around.

So: if you have an ebike, especially if you use it for transportation, insure it. Otherwise, be prepared to lose everything, because drivers will always have the better story. If you ride any kind of bike in traffic, obey the rules as much as possible, so that you have a solid basis if you do get hit. Avoid the Death Slot. I ride to the far right a lot on stretches where I get along better if I let traffic flow past me, but in town I stay out of it. Especially with a powerful ebike, get out there and claim space. Otherwise, crap like this happens.

If you have an insurance company, you have a corporate entity with accountants and lawyers who will be looking for ways to take that money out of your antagonist. Granted, they'll take it out of you as well, if they have to. But at least you have a contract with someone who is supposedly on your side. Your ebike is much more of a vehicle than a pedal bike, even if it costs far less than a top of the line pedal bike. With power comes responsibility and expense.

Remember "House?"

 In the medical drama "House," caustic genius Dr. Gregory House diagnosed mysterious afflictions that suddenly struck down the patient of the week, for eight seasons of often nauseating entertainment. The nasty genius used his mega mind, extensive education, and long experience to slice through the confusion and bring us the answer.

After the previous medical drama ER made patient -- and even doctor -- survival far less likely, viewers were trained not to expect a happy ending. House delivered pretty often, but sometimes the patient died. Also, House would be wrong several times in the episode before delivering the right diagnosis within a few minutes of the end. After you watch a few, you realize that early certainties never pan out. "Do this!" House snaps at his team. We look at the clock and go, "Nah, that ain't it."

Without all of the good-looking actors, life and death stakes, and medical bills that would bankrupt a medium sized city, bike repair has become like episode after episode of House. A patient comes in with weird symptoms or what looks like a simple problem at first. We diagnose and treat. It fails. We try something else. Thing is, no one has bike medical insurance, so we the greasy healers are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money on these false starts.

Bike shops have no medical associations in which we share our experiences and publish papers in a journal. We don't know what other mechanics are doing. Online videos show either idealized versions of various procedures or selected experiences of individuals who may be amateurs and inexperienced. And if the video doesn't cover the exact model in the exact year that you're dealing with, the information might not help at all. On top of that, who has time to spend hours trolling through search results in hope of finding a tutorial that might not even be out there.

Forums may yield some useful knowledge, but are just as likely to attract experienced misinformation or loud, confident, and wrong newbies. You have to sift carefully to find cases that fit what's in front of you on your work stand.

The manufacturers really don't care if you can fix anything. They just want you to buy it. Ancestral sources like Sutherland's and Sheldon Brown can't keep up. We're thrown back on our experience and education -- such as it may be -- to analyze the problem.

With every added cog in the cassette, mechanical shifting gets more and more temperamental. As the manufacturers abandon what used to be the state of the art, replacement parts for that number of speeds are made more cheaply. This includes shifters and derailleurs. You had fancy ten-speed when it was the best? You're just part of the rabble now. Eleven speed is rapidly going the same way.

Any repair could turn into a frustrating mystery these days. I like a challenge, but most of this crap is just an affront. Parts are disappearing for the old, reliable, simple bikes, while tech support barely exists for the new, throwaway bikes. I get it: to a racer, the entire bike is as consumable as chains, tires, and tubes used to be. As long ago as the 1980s, racing was already turning into a massive science experiment. It has only gotten more so. Rider and machine need a complex support system to eke out those hundredths of a second per kilometer.

Advancements in racing technology through the 1970s improved quality for all riders, because we all used similar mechanisms, shaped slightly differently for variations like racing versus touring, and, later mountain biking. As disciplines diverged, particularly off-road, there was a lot less cross-pollination.

People here used to complain from time to time about the level of detail I would go into, but less time was wasted diving right in as opposed to dithering around trying to figure out how to avoid it. Lately, though, it seems that diving in doesn't assure solid results. Too many things have to work too perfectly together.

The road bike that's giving me fits right now was built on a bare frame in 2017. The owner rides hard. He raced a couple of short seasons, mostly just a nearby training series, but it's a competitive series. He rides with people who never go easy. Over the years, we have replaced gear cables and housings as necessary to restore precise shifting, along with chains and cassettes. This time, though, I can't get it to behave.

The brifter seemed to be worn out. It needed too much lever travel to engage, which meant that it didn't have enough left to climb to the low gear cog. I changed the brifter. It was crisper, but still did not have the reach. The chain gauged pretty new. We'd already changed all cables and housings with tried and true 5mm. The bottom bracket cable guide can't be removed because the bolt that threads into an insert in the BB is rusted in, and the insert itself is broken loose from the bottom bracket shell. It's been that way for years. It shouldn't matter as long as the guide stays in position. Cable tension should hold it.

I rigged a brifter in parallel, using full-length housing, to test the derailleur itself. It shifts the full range. So something in the cable system is eating lever travel. I can see motion where the cable housing enters the upper end of the downtube. There's a bit more waggle where the housing exits the chainstay near the derailleur. Is that enough to cause the problem? Parts are all original, and very simple. But the hole in the downtube could be worn. After all this, is the answer something simultaneously stupid and difficult?

Possibilities on the whiteboard: Maybe I should drill out the frame and run full-length housing. That's a one-way trip, though. How about using carbon-compatible epoxy to shim up the frame hole? But I don't want to glue the cable stop into the frame. That might make future cable changes even more time consuming.

I tried every combination of cable housing, including 4mm, 5mm, and mixing widths in case the flex characteristics of the 4mm handled the bends better than the 5mm we can get now. I'm happy to say that 4mm did nothing to help. Eventually, I put on a new brifter, new cassette, and the 5mm housing we had installed first when we thought it would be the routine repair we had completed successfully several times over the bike's life. I got it to hit every gear from the 39, and every gear but the Ned -- the full cross 53-28 -- from the big ring.

Given the option of taking the bike with the gears we could get or making permanent modifications to install full-length housing, the rider opted to take the bike as it is. He even said that it hadn't been getting the Ned for a while, and he was fine with that. We'll see how things go.

Nothing is a sure cure anymore. Every fix is temporary. Who needs another metaphor for life when we just want reliable machinery? I hop on my primitive bike, day after day, and just go. I can change a cable on the side of the road in about 15 leisurely minutes. If I get a flat, I put in a new inner tube, pump it up, and ride on.

What seems dangerous

 An 80-year-old woman driving a small SUV was obliterated by a drunk driver in a dump truck on Route 28 a couple of weeks ago. She was southbound. The truck driver was northbound. He crossed the centerline.

The skid marks, crumpled guard rail, and churned-up road shoulder gave mute witness to the horror that had unfolded in a few long seconds. The dump truck careened on its way to overturning, leaving broad, curved swaths of black. The SUV left straighter, fainter marks. The road had been closed for about six hours, but had reopened in time for me to ride through on my way home. Few but the investigators had seen the crash site at that point.

Over the ensuing days, the investigation continued, leaving more and more marks. There's a countdown to impact from each direction, and a mark where the vehicles collided. Cryptic notations on the pavement. Motorists seemed subdued for a day or two. It's hard to be impressed for long, when your own flow and schedule dominate your continuing life.

As a cyclist, I'm not only aware of my exposure to danger, I'm reminded of it regularly by people who remark on my own persistence as a road rider or tell me about how they decided to give it up. It's true: bicyclists don't have fender benders. If we get tagged, it leaves a mark, at the very least.

(Cartoon from 1984)

In your motor vehicle, you are not only required to stay out there in the lane and maintain speed, you have few options for a quick escape. Peer pressure generally enforces faster travel than the speed limit, although dedicated road blockers will ooze along. Even at annoyingly slow motorized speeds, the vehicles they're in have considerable mass and limited maneuverability. Most of the time, traffic rips along at the posted limit or higher. On a two-lane highway, you can easily race toward each other at 120 miles per hour. A motorcyclist might combine skill and luck to shoot a gap to survival, but skill is vital and luck is indispensable. A regular car, SUV, or light truck is just stuck there. If the antagonist is a dump truck, you know how it's going to end. In the recent crash on 28, the dump truck driver survived with minor enough injuries that he was able to go straight to jail. He laid the truck down and dumped its load, but got no more than banged up.

One message is clear: If you bought a large vehicle because you wanted greater crash safety, it better have been a dump truck.

As common as highway fatalities are, millions more people complete their trips each day than die or are injured in the attempt. It's not because all of those millions of drivers have perfect safety habits. It's because they get away with their foolish risks. If nothing goes wrong, was it really dangerous? 

A few nights ago, I heard a motorcycle blaze past my house at a speed that guaranteed that the rider's body would haunt the first responders for the rest of their lives. At that kind of speed, you don't even need to hit a deer. A porcupine, raccoon, or possum will do the trick. But the deer is highly likely, especially along that stretch. The idiot held his speed all the way out of earshot. The roar of the bike Dopplered away without ending abruptly.

Right now, raw milk has been getting a lot of press, because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a big proponent of it. Scientific consensus agrees that you're better off drinking pasteurized milk, but no one is forcing you to take this precaution. Occasional explosive diarrhea keeps you cleaned out. Extended periods of it can be a big help with weight loss. Just be sure to stay hydrated with refreshing water from Rock Creek.

Our entire country is living through the risks ignored or welcomed by the small percentage of voters who embraced it and the other percentage who didn't care enough to come out and vote against it. We're roaring down a highway full of blind curves and hills, with occasional fog, and impaired drivers at the wheel.

I've said it before: risky behavior persists because most people get away with it. You could say the same thing about the few persistent road cyclists. We're fine until we're not. Our small size and relatively slow speed can be advantages as well as disadvantages. I'm constantly scanning for escape routes and mentally rehearsing situations suggested by conditions. When things get hectic, I have to trust the motorists. For the most part, they come through.

We hear from quitters all the time. El Queso Grande told someone out in the shop about yet another one who simply assumes that the majority of drivers are impaired in some way. Could be. I smell a lot of the wake-and-bake crowd on my morning commute. Major drawback to stinky weed, y'all. It advertises your choice to the world. The worst booze breath can't match that.

Then there's electronics. Our helpful devices feed us mostly useful navigation information, but also draw a glance or a lingering look for what seems like no time at all until you snap back and straighten out. Hopefully you do it before going completely into the ditch, down a ravine, through a crosswalk full of people, or into oncoming vehicles.

EQG's outlook could be soured by the fact that he developed medical conditions that severely limited his ability to ride. He may take comfort in the idea that it's a bad idea anyway. Who likes to see other people having fun when you can't? Especially when it defined so much of his personality. When he delivers these reports of the steady decline of road cycling, it reminds me a little bit of my ex-mother-in-law who loved to tell me about the latest cyclist fatality on the roads around her home. "They hate bike riders around here!" she would declare.

If you stay home in bed, you might get bitten by a Brown Recluse spider. They love beds. And they hate people. I've heard that.

Specialized did us a favor

 

A customer ordered this bike online from Specialized. It was one of two. He tried to assemble his own. When he hit a snag, he decided to bring this one -- his wife's -- to us without trying to do anything himself.

Because he said he managed to do everything except size the shifter cable correctly on his own bike, I expected to find the usual online bike in a box, pretty close to complete. Instead I found a project akin to doing a colonoscopy on C3PO.

This bike, a Specialized Como SL 4.0, was designed to look like a picture of a bike drawn by someone who has never looked closely at a bike. The hydraulic brake lines and shift cable are routed into the handlebar within inches of their requisite levers. The brake lines and cable housing are not seen again until they emerge near the brake calipers and rear hub respectively.

Whoever assembles this bike is expected to feed the brake lines and shifter cable from the top of the head tube into the base of the handlebar stem and out through the proper side of the bar to the correct exit. These are not sinuous cords that curl easily into the contortions necessary. The assembly video (there is no printed manual) shows the Park Tool internal cable threading tool, which is a clever and effective device. But even that is not sufficient to ease the whole trip. I don't know if the customer bought himself one or just winged it. We'll find out when he brings his flubbed effort to us.

There is absolutely no margin for error in sizing the brake lines, and nearly none with the shift cable. In the picture you can see that I tried to get away with leaving the front brake line the length that it came. This is because the line already had the barbed fitting in the end of it, and no spare fitting was provided. The TRP brake appears to be a special makeup just for Specialized. You can salvage a barbed fitting from the end of a brake line, but you can't count on being able to. I'm guessing that the remaining Specialized dealers after they downsized a few years ago have the requisite parts on hand. We have an assortment of fittings, but not these specific ones.

The front brake has a problem I still have to diagnose. The lever feel was rock hard, then suddenly went "sploot" (picture a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine). It went totally squishy, but there was no splurge of escaping brake fluid. A few pumps of the lever brought it back to a reasonable travel and resistance, but the pads are now clamped against the rotor. It's even worse than an overfilled SRAM brake, and those are pretty bad. But those are easily cured, and consistently too tight. The "sploot" indicates a mysterious ailment.

At least the fluid is mineral oil, so when it goes all over the place while I'm doing the bleed with so little room to operate it won't eat the paint off this piece of crap.

The assembly video lists the TRP bleed kit as one of the required tools, but never shows the brake lines being trimmed or the system being bled. It just shows the technician/spokesmodel uncapping the lines and connecting them to the levers. Ta daaa! Turbo: It's you only better... or some bullshit like that.

I'm happier than ever that the Big S tossed us in the dumpster after our decades supporting their brand. Their disloyalty to us saves us from having to put a good face on utter crap like this. The owner of this bike would have to work on it themselves or pay a shop to do it. I don't know what sort of loss a Specialized dealer would be expected to eat for the time consuming mess of this needless puzzle, or what an independent shop would charge for the time consuming annoyance. It's apparently supposed to be so easy even a consumer could do it. Maybe not knowing any better is an advantage. If you have no basis for comparison, it just becomes another comedy bit, like assembling flat-pack furniture. You do it once, and when the bike craps out you just replace it.

Correcting a long held misconception

 Conservatism in its best sense means a cautious acceptance of change. Changes have to represent actual improvement. Things get murky from there, as various factions debate what is an improvement.

Science is conservative in its insistence on peer review and repeatable results. The method is methodical in the strictest sense.

Evolution of technology throws ideas into the world to fend for themselves, often with very little testing beforehand. Get something so it sorta kinda works and throw it out there for eager early adopters to risk their lives on. That approach dominated the 1990s mountain bike tech boom. Companies competed not only to invent and refine parts and systems that actually worked, but to market whatever they made to an eager and largely uneducated public, to make customers pay for the R&D. Let riders in the field break stuff on their own dime rather than pay for exhaustive testing before unleashing the next latest and greatest transitory offering from the firehose of obsolescence.

During this time, I judged each new thing on the totality of its merits: initial function, longevity, and serviceability. Some was good. A lot was bad.

Drive train manufacturers each defended their proprietary shifting systems, which meant that we had three or four different freehub spline patterns duking it out in the marketplace for a couple of years. While I agreed that the freehub concept put the rear axle bearings in a better position to support the axle, I recalled that freewheel threads had seemed like a pretty universal standard. And that is the misconception that got corrected last week.

I'd been fortunate in my time as a rider and novice mechanic never to encounter a freewheel thread disparity. In the 1970s, anyone who tried to do their own bike work learned about nationalistic thread pitches and other variations, like Italian bottom bracket shells, weird tire sizes, things like that. Because I didn't read myself to sleep with Sutherland's every night, I missed a lot. One or two of my bikier friends had copies, but I only looked into them when I needed specific information, like spoke lengths for a wheel I was building.

So: last week I started in on a complete overhaul for a customer's 1980s Panasonic road bike. I was told that he had done a lot of his own work, but wanted to have the bike gone over professionally before a big trip he was planning this summer. The bike was old enough actually to be serviceable, so I had no misgivings. It looked well used, but not too weird.

At some point, someone had installed a sealed bottom bracket, so I wouldn't be opening that up. The pedals didn't look serviceable, either. The BB is central, often the first place I'll start. Pedals that do have serviceable bearings are the pickiest components to work on because the ball bearings themselves are tiny, and adjustment can be hard to secure. I chose to start with the rear hub.

The wheels don't match. The front has a Joy Tech hub and Araya rim, probably original. The rear wheel had a Campagnolo Record hub and a Mavic rim. The freewheel looked like a Suntour two-notch Winner 7-speed. But no brand name was visible, and the notches looked slightly atypical.

Suntour freewheels can present problems, especially the four-notch models. The tool has to be very carefully secured. The two-notch models are generally more robust, but you can't rush them.

I secured the tool in the deep recess presented by the seventh cog, so I couldn't see what was going on in there. The tool slipped when I applied leverage with the big Park wrench. I examined the damage and determined that the tool couldn't seat fully. I dug in a bin of other old freewheel tools for one that looked like it would engage more fully. No luck. It didn't mar things, but it didn't budge the freewheel, either. I started examining the various elements of the puzzle more closely.

I'd had to remove the locknut, spacers, and hub cone from the drive side to get the tool to seat. Markings on the cone indicated that it might not be English thread. That sent me to Sutherland's to look for all possible variants of the Campy hub, and freewheel threading. And there it was: French threads don't play nicely with any other type of threads. This rider had an English thread hub and had graunched a French thread freewheel onto it. It can't have gone on smoothly. That thing is never coming off.

Best guess from internet image searching, it's a Maillard.

You can overhaul a hub without removing the freewheel...sometimes. This is one of those times. It won't be as clean or quick as a complete disassembly, but it will be better than the loose and crunchy mess he had.

As I removed cones from the axle, I felt that they presented continuous resistance. This could have been from crud in the threads. But no, I noticed a tiny curl of metal coming off as I painstakingly unscrewed the cones and fought them off over the slightly buggered threads that had held in the dropouts. Once I had the axle out I could see that someone had ham-fisted the Campy cones onto a generic Asian axle. Yeah, you could do it, with steady force, as long as you don't care about the damage to the threads. The axle was also too long for the 126mm spacing of the rear triangle. I dug up a new axle with appropriate threading. 

Replacement axles used to be very reasonably priced. Now, however, very few people must be buying them, because they're stunningly expensive. Like, they were between ten and twenty bucks retail all through the 1990s and early 21st Century. Now they're more than $40. You could buy a functional Shimano RS400 rear hub for about the same money. Now, if you were fixing up something that was really good in its day, a $40 axle might make sense, especially if you enjoy thumbing your nose at the industry. The cost of a good time just keeps going up. Inflation.

The bike may originally have had only six speeds in the rear. I can't tell from shifter clicks, because the right-side downtube shifter is permanently jammed between the index and friction settings. It makes a scraping, rasping sound when you shift it. I would recommend friction shifting anyway, because it allows you to use any freewheel or cassette that will fit in there. Number of speeds doesn't matter. All of my road bikes have personalized 9-speed cassettes running with 8-speed chains.

The controlling factor on chain width, aside from whether you get interference on the cassette, is whether the front derailleur cage fits closely enough to shift efficiently between chainrings.

My acceptance of a technology reflects a constant cost-benefit analysis. The new crap might offer some specific advantages, but are they worth it for the average rider compared to the added expense and pain in the ass that they bring? The stone age simplicity of nice bike componentry from the 1970s into the 1990s provides reliability and durability to general purpose riders of all types. Racers and technical specialists, regardless of competency, will need the more temperamental, expensive tools and weapons at the cutting edge. The rest of us can have a sporty good time on the old-fashioned stuff, or a facsimile made from the remaining offerings still on the market.

In conclusion, any time you thread things together, don't keep going if they don't go smoothly. Find a copy of Sutherland's. Check out Sheldon Brown's old site. If you have multiple options in your parts stash, feel around for a combination that works easily. 

Is bike commuting "ableist?"

 46 years ago, when I started my life as a full time member of the workforce, rather than a student, I did it as a bike commuter. I have used the bike for transportation to work at least some of every year since then.

At the start, the motives were economic and physical. I knew I couldn't count on a high income, or necessarily a steady one. I also knew that I like to eat tasty food, and that my family had a tendency to run to fat. Throughout my childhood I listened to my parents complain about their need to diet. Exercise wasn't part of any adult's normal life in the white-collar middle class. Every one of them faced a physical decline considered inevitable. Might as well joke about it, and keep buying bigger pants.

As the 1960s rolled on into the 1970s, exercise for adults became a mainstream thing. Jogging and running emerged as respectable, even cool, pastimes. By the 1980s, fitness centers had become an industry. Rolling parallel to that rode the ten-speed boom, which merged into the mountain bike boom.

During the ten-speed boom, bike touring and transportation cycling offered ways to beat the shocking rise of gasoline prices as they rocketed toward a whole dollar a gallon. We'd flip a U-turn in the middle of a busy six-lane arterial roadway now to get into a gas station selling for a dollar a gallon, but after decades of regular gas at 30 cents a gallon or less, a dollar a gallon seemed like onrushing doom. Even so, biking to work was always a fringe activity.

I'm sure that the petroleum industry has not noticed my absence, despite a lifetime commitment to limit my consumption. I can attest that it has saved me thousands of dollars, but admit that it has limited my returns from the economy that every other human voted to pursue instead.

The stubbornness of motor vehicle culture used to arouse my annoyance and contempt. These are not helpful emotions for advocacy. They're a response to the annoyance and contempt directed at me as a cyclist. They're mostly dulled now, worn out from overstimulation, but also tempered by a broader understanding of the complexity of people's transportation needs. Yes, a vast number of people could use something other than a full-size motor vehicle to move themselves and their stuff around, but that leaves many more whose lives would be much more complicated if they tried to rely entirely on walking, biking, and public transportation.

I love the simplicity of using my car when I need the load capacity, speed, and effortless range that it provides. I just dump my crap in the back and head out, in normal clothes, to zip around 80 or a hundred miles of accumulated errands in a few hours. The same circuit on a bike would take a couple of days. And there is no public transportation where I live.

I still roll my eyes at the pickup truck craze. "Gas is sooo expensive! I need a bigger truck!" I don't want to hear the bitching. Plus I have to fit in the lane with these behemoths. But they do pull a nice draft when they go by.

I don't even know what the proper term is for the disabled now. In my lifetime I have seen their emergence from shut-in and shunned to just another category in the workforce. Lots still to be done, but the debate has now taken the dark turn of almost officially discussing euthanasia. Just kill the wounded and put them out of their misery. Pretty dark. Leaning instead toward accommodation, what's the balance between meatheads like me who are willing to live at least part of the year like it's an extended bike tour or stage race, and people who physically can't?

We debate how to spend public money in a rich country that pretends to be a poor one. 

You can't plan for every detail. Some things just have to evolve and adapt as experience accumulates. For the most part, around here, drivers seem to be willing to make the minimal effort to go around rather than over me. Other riders tell me about being hit by a car. I have no answer for that. Riders can make mistakes that put themselves more at risk, but drivers can also either space it or make a malicious choice. As riders, we count on drivers making the choice to steer around us as they overtake. Coming from any other direction than behind us, drivers will be in our field of view. We have tactical options.

Fear of collision has driven many riders to quit using the public roads. There are roads I avoid because of traffic speed and density. Any built up area will have greater traffic density and potentially dangerous speeds. In those circumstances, drivers have less attention and patience for pedalers. Pedalers have less acceleration and speed to work within the traffic flow. Maybe they have route alternatives. Maybe not.

Mountain bikers have to worry about losing access to trails because land owners don't want them around anymore. Road riders don't have to worry about losing access to the public right of way. We just have to worry about encountering the wrong nut job who doesn't want us around anymore.

Road riding has weathered legal challenges, like a Maryland legislative push in the early 1980s that would have cut us off from anything with a speed limit above 30 miles per hour, as I recall. Something crazy like that. These are bound to crop up again. But for the most part the laws seem pretty permissive. They leave it to natural predation to keep our numbers in check. "You don't pay road taxes! I'm going to kill you!"

Transportation cycling can be a beneficial element in the traffic mix. I'm a lot easier to pass when I'm riding my bike than when I'm in my car, stuck in the lane in front of you. Drivers have contempt for cyclists, but real hatred for each other. So, because I am able to ride a bike, I actually help lower the emotional temperature out there. This does change with the number of cyclists and their behavior. Lots of riders give us a bad name with antics that either just look bad to motorists or are outright dangerous. 

The "looks bad but is actually good" category presents a challenge, because it includes running stop signs. This doesn't apply to all stop signs all the time. But it's generally better for a rider to be passed on a flowing stretch of road than to have a motorist decide on their own that they can and should squeeze past at an intersection.

Red lights are a different story. Rarely will I run one because I can't be sure that I won't overlook a hazard in my push to flow through. Also, it sets you up to be passed by the same motorists over and over. They get more and more steamed at having not only to stop and go and stop and go, but to accommodate the rider block after block. Cycling fundamentalists will say fuck 'em for being motorists, but fundamentalists at anything only make life worse. You need empathy and flexibility, even if you don't feel like you're getting it in return most of the time. I'll actually fall back a bit at a red light, to get more vehicles past me when they're stopped or moving slowly. At the very least I hold my place so that the ones who have "beaten" me get to keep their medals.

So: If you're able to use a bike some or most of the time, try it. If you're not sure, try it a few times in different contexts to see if you can start to fit it in. If you can't, you can't. 

Waste is not just a personal choice

 I'm cleaning up e-bikes for a very wealthy customer. They need parts replaced because of careless maintenance and poor storage. I was told by their property caretaker that the bikes are fairly new. The parts aren't worn. They're corroded. Brake rotors deeply pitted. Aluminum parts beginning to bubble their paint as white blisters of oxide form underneath it. Chains rusted to rebar.

As the bike industry has suffered shrinkage that was largely self-induced, merging with economic setbacks related to the pandemic, and end-stage capitalism in general, I have less and less patience for the rich and feckless who don't have respect and care for their toys. I compare these bikes to that of a worker who literally rode his ebike to pieces, using it as transportation through the New England winter. I resent the grimy task of trying to remedy rich people's neglect. I will charge them. They will pay. They always have. But, while we wait for parts, their 50-pound pigs are cluttering up the shop's limited storage space.

They waste equipment because they can: a trivial write-off that they excuse because they can afford it. They're creating jobs. But they're also wasting manufactured objects that may be in short supply. They're spitting on the labor that went into making their bikes in the first place -- labor that they wasted by taking crappy care of machines that someone else might have wanted and been able to put to good use.

The brake rotors they need are not in stock right now at our supplier. I will piece together something out of our stock, just to get the bikes out of our way, but that means that anyone who shows up right afterward, while we're still waiting for replacement stock, will not get a quick turnaround, even if they depend on their bike to get them to their subsistence job.

Two of the mounting bolts of the rear brake rotor on one of the bikes are rusted into the hub. The hub is the motor housing. The rotor is heavily rusted. Worst case, they have to buy a whole wheel because the bolts won't come out, but can't be trusted to stay in after all of the efforts to remove them. Drilling them out would require perfect precision to remove only the old bolt without damaging the bolt hole. If threads needed to be repaired, it would require a skilled machine shop, not just a hand tap, because the holes are shallow and blind.

This isn't a metaphor for the destructiveness of wealth. It's a flat-out demonstration of it. The attitude became prevalent in the 1980s, as we accelerated away from the early surge of the environmental movement and our flirtation with social consciousness based around the gains of the civil rights and women's movements, and the anti-war sentiments stimulated by the Vietnam War. The pursuit of personal wealth became the main focus of society. The sole measure of whether you should do something was whether you could pay for it. You didn't even need the money, as long as you could get the credit approved. That, incidentally, is why the economy collapsed at the end of the decade, ushering in the 1990s on a recession. Eventually you run out of places to transfer your balance, and actually have to pay something.

Economy is hard. We have unemployment when more people need jobs than jobs need people. We make poor provisions for the players on the bench, because we tend not to think of them as such. We just hope they're still alive and functional when we need to put them in the game. An actual pro team pays those reserves. Not the free market, though. Social safety nets are stigmatized. Employers know that people are busily manufacturing more people, so someone will be around for the next call-up. Industrialization views people as interchangeable parts. Life is cheap and individuals are common.

The winners in the economy take what they want of land, possessions, experiences, and delegate as much as possible of the grubby chores. Their contribution to the economy consists of the money they didn't pay to some laborers, redirected to as little as they can get away with paying to selected other laborers. What are their actual job skills, and why are they worth that much to the rest of us? It's an honest question.

I value real services provided by people who might not have to exert much or get physically dirty in the course of a work day. I can still ask what's fair on a basis other than "whatever the market will bear." The market is driven by marketing. What if things we've been conditioned to condone as lucrative are complete bullshit? I'll bet you can think of a few. I know I can. But only an impossibly detailed audit could disclose all of them and devise a genuinely fair pay scale.

Down here in the middle and lower reaches of the current income scale, we tend to hire each other to do things for which we personally don't have the tools and knowledge. Pure self sufficiency is a myth. It doesn't even exist at the level of photosynthesis. All of life depends on some kind of external input. The higher you go on the income scale, the more you find people who can delegate everything, providing only money and demanding satisfaction.

The level of demand varies widely. People with only one billion dollars look up the steep face of the mountain above them to the lofty heights where the multi-billionaires live and feel like they're one of us little people. Billionaires are people too. They're just as capable of expressing appreciation, even as some scrabbling dubs can be real jerks about paying for services rendered. I could tell you stories... But even as I recall a few, I realize that they're based on a sense of economic asymmetry. We were the richie rich bike shop in the richie rich lakeside town, and the customer was a hardworking dirt digger from that place between the luxury of the lakeshore and the tourist dollars of the mountains: a no-man's land where even the glaciers just dropped their junk and left all life to fend as best it could on scraped rock, gravel, and sand.

This particular time presents a new level of challenge, with the economic policies of the current regime and the unrest associated with the threat posed by their authoritarian governing style. The bike business already suffered from a number of ongoing forces bent on squeezing us into a smaller and smaller social and economic space. Biking in general suffered from the industry's attempts to create consumer dependency. Now all of those struggles wiggle through the obstacles presented by a drop in tourism, and reduced spending by consumers in general.

We still see people who seem oblivious to the instability. Consumer confidence is supposedly low, but some of the individual consumers who show up to spend seem almost dangerously manic. By and large, people buying things ask the same questions that they always have. Buying a bike, they ask about its features and benefits. Getting a bike repaired, they ask if it's worth fixing, and how much it will cost. They're little islands of normality scattered through days where hours pass without a phone call or a customer coming in. It's in those hours and silences that we see the effects of uncertainty.

Repairs are trickling in. Usually they flood as soon as the weather gets warm. The warmth has not come on in a steady rise, but the waves of chill are shorter and more above freezing. It's been years since we had a "normal" bike season. Those years depended on circumstances that will never be repeated. So we feel our way. We try to be ready for customer needs...and wants...

And on to the next dream...

 After finishing the e-bike stretch cruiser it was time to replace the shifters and crank on a beautiful late-1990s Dean. The bike might actually date from right after the turn of the century. We've been seeing it in the workshop nearly every spring or summer for a long time. I built those wheels more than ten years ago. Maybe so long ago that we looked up parts in a printed catalog and placed orders by phone.

The picture above shows the bike after its recent changes. Originally, it had a Campagnolo Chorus crank, Record 10-speed brifters, and Centaur derailleurs. I vaguely recall that we had already upgraded it from 9-speed to ten-speed by the turn of the century, but we did work on a number of Campy-equipped bikes. Campagnolo actually provided instructions for changing some internal parts in a brifter to change the number of speeds. And, of course, the internals were completely repairable. But the shifter bodies and so many internal parts on this bike were now so worn that repair would have cost a lot more than a new set of brifters.

A lot of years had passed, but Campagnolo had always been the leader in backwards compatibility. You can buy quite a few parts for a 25-year-old shifter, although some of them are being phased out. During that 25 years, the parts fit models that spanned more than eight years, which is phenomenal in the post-Shimano era of technological hyperactivity.

The rider wanted lower gearing than the 53-42 chainrings on his existing crankset. Campy's 135mm bolt circle limits how small a ring you can fit, and they have to match that proprietary bolt pattern. Back when Campy's BCD was 144, other manufacturers copied it. Then Shimano and the Japanese makers brought in the 130 bolt circle diameter, and the industry shifted to that. This meant that you could put on the 53-39 combination that became the de facto standard for road cranks for years. You could even get a 38 for the inner ring, but few did.

When compact road cranks came in, they used the 110mm BCD that mountain bike chainrings were using. Mountain bikes still used triple chainrings. Road compact cranks were designed for just two rings up front. While the young and strong would combine the new little 50-tooth big ring with an 11-tooth cog for the hardest one on the cassette, the 50-34 combination that was most common served as sort of a secret granny gear for riders who were starting to feel a little faded as age took its toll.

So many years had passed before the owner of the Dean felt the need to gear down that a nice compact double for ten-speed was tricky to find. I also recommended trying to match the aesthetic of the old steel frame rather than sticking some aerospace monstrosity on there. I suggested, and he agreed, to get a Velo Orange Grand Cru Drillium crankset. It was actually a little more retro than the bike, but it's also fairly affordable and distinctive compared to the monotonous hellscape of soulless modern componentry.

It's actually made by IRD. But Velo Orange has their Grand Cru badge applied to it, and they deserve support for being such a friend to the retro rider.

The owner dropped the bike off in late March, 2024. I was able to get the brifters and bottom bracket right away. The crank was shown as out of stock for a month or so. The customer was willing to wait. That ETA got kicked down the road a month or two at a time, all the way to the end of the year. We nearly lost the job entirely, but I had contacted Velo Orange directly by that time, to confirm that they were still going to have the cranks at all. We got the customer to hang on. The crank finally arrived a week or two ago. We were still in ski mode, so I didn't start the job right away. We were also buried in the stretch cruiser project, which had been plagued with its own spec problems, but those had resolved more quickly.

As I dug into the Dean, I discovered that the slop in the shifters had been masking slop in the derailleurs. They were very floppy. That led me to look at what we could get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs.

Nothing. That's what we can get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs. Not a zippin' thing. Zippity doodah. Zilch. Nada. Campagnolo has abandoned their faithful long-term customers actually worse than Shimano. Shimano at least still makes some 10-speed road derailleurs for mechanical shifting, with brifters to match, for those who are addicted. For the friction shifters, the truly free, we can buy whatever derailleur we like the looks of and can afford. But for the brifter-dependent, the company that launched the industry into technofascism still has a little lifeline hanging out for the laggards still nursing their older stuff.

Funny: fascism was actually invented in Italy, and the Italian company was the slowest to adopt technofascism. But they're racing to catch up now. Be sure to shell out massive bucks for their 12-speed electronic stuff. It's kind of nice to see them back to duking it out for pro team spec, but the game has no soul anymore, so what are we really winning?

Way way back, in the 1970s and early 1980s, you could actually get every part of a Campagnolo derailleur, separately, to replace what might have gotten bent or cracked in a crash or a workshop mishap. It was treacherously easy to strip the threads on a front derailleur swing arm when tightening the cable anchor bolt. Good thing you could buy just the arm, install it, and pledge to use a lighter touch after that. You could also crack the clamp band, tightening the derailleur on the seat tube. Again: press the rivet out, replace the band, put on the new one and be more sensitive, you clod. Do you caress your lover with those awkward, loutish hands?

Well yes, yes I did, which explains my long spells of monkish solitude, but anyway... You can't get parts to rebuild a derailleur anymore. Long gone, though I do recall seeing them as late as the early 21st Century. I'll have to dig into my archive of Quality catalogs. QBP's print catalogs used to provide such complete tech information that we could figure out a lot of repairs and compatibility puzzles just from what they included about each product.

I had recommended that the customer stick with Campy because of their legendary durability and product support. Seems like I should have investigated them a little more deeply before charging ahead with this job. The customer and I were both trying to extend the life of existing parts rather than junk stuff and start over. Now, if he isn't satisfied with how this thing shifts, we have no option that doesn't cost him a chunk of change to take a different tack.

These shifters seem less substantial than they used to be, and the upshift thumb lever impedes removing the rubber hood to mount the brifter or run cables.

They also only fit 4mm shift cable housing, which means that we can't fit them with the easier-running 5mm which cures so many shifting problems.

Just like Shimano, Campy declares that their shifting systems and drive trains have to be completely matched, 11-speed with 11-speed, 12-speed with 12-speed, end to end. While I would be inclined to test them, trying to graft in 11-speed derailleurs with these 10-speed brifters, the lowest priced front derailleur retails for about $60, and they don't even list an 11-speed rear derailleur. So then we're experimenting with a 12-speed rear derailleur costing more than $200. Or we go on the hunt for good used, and new old stock.

If we talk him into friction barcons, he either eats the cost of the 10-speed brifters and buys some nice brake levers on top of the barcon price, or he uses the brifters as brake levers only, which looks kind of weird and accentuates our defeat at the hands of the technofascists. And all of this is just so that we can graft in whatever derailleurs he wants to try. Whatever derailleurs he wants to try includes pretty much anything on the market if he shifts in friction. They just have to have the gear range and chain capacity to match what he has. And friction shifters will be much more forgiving of the slop in the old derailleurs. He could just keep running those until they totally flop off.

I'm insanely loyal to old machines that I've grown to love. Aided by my own mechanical knowledge, friction shifters, and access to parts, I will keep my own stuff going for decades. I provide the same service to any customers or friends who want to cultivate and maintain the ancestral riding skills. It bums me out deeply when a customer decides to euthanize an old bike because they fall for the lure of the new and exotic, or just decide that something old isn't worth spending money on. I can't afford to rescue any of them, let alone all of them. And I always feel guilty if my enthusiasm for bike immortality and persistence in the face of a challenge leaves them with a result that they're not delighted with.

The industry makes it increasingly hard. Any of us interested in the deathless bike need to pay constant attention to keep track of something that might have been replaceable that has now turned into a vital organ to be preserved. Friction shifting can cover a lot of situations, but it can't work around systems that the industry completely abandons, like certain chainring sizes, or cassettes for proprietary freehub bodies. I'm looking at you again, Campy. While it's contemptible on one level that the entire rest of the industry adopted Shimano's Hyperglide spline pattern, it does create a de facto cassette standard that makes mix and match a lot easier.

I do have a Campy-equipped carcass in the shop basement that might yield donor organs, but it might be 9- or even 8-speed. It's that old. I have defended it against many a clutter purge over the years. Vindication would be sweet. I'm not into losing to the industry and the throwaway mentality.

We build dreams...

 The owner of this bike has liked distinctive designs for years. I wrote notes on the service tickets on some of the stuff he tried to put together himself that instructed the mechanic "do NOT try to ride this bike." We let the customer know that we would do what he asked us to do on those early death traps, but that no one would put their own safety at risk to see if it actually worked.

One home-made chopper he brought in didn't even have a headset. The fork was just stuffed through the head tube. Foreshadowing of a sort.

Years later, he still likes outlandish-looking (and scary handling) bikes. A year or two ago we assembled a stretch cruiser chopper for him that he had spec'd himself from internet sources. Late last year, on the day after Christmas, he brought us the pieces he had collected for his next dream bike: an e-bike stretch cruiser with a springer fork.

He bought everything separately: frame from one source, fork from another, motor kit somewhere else... It was the start of ski season, so we didn't have a chance to dig into it all right away. More than a month later we finally had a quiet spell where I could start to fit a few parts together.

Aiming for easy stuff first, I installed the bottom bracket and crank. Stuck the rear wheel in the dropouts. Test fitted the front wheel to the fork. He bought a motorized front wheel, which he said would fit the dropouts. I was able to confirm this.

Ski season picked up again, so I pushed the bike aside. When I got to it again, I set up to install the headset. He'd brought the bike with the fork stuck through the head tube, but without the headset cups installed. The springer fork has a heavy aluminum bracket that overhangs the head tube to hold the top end of the springs. This obscured the head tube itself. When I removed it, I discovered that the head tube had been crushed. 

The whole front of the head tube had been flattened. But this is steel. We may not be dead yet.

First of all, I contacted him to let him know. "Oh, yeah," he said. "I forgot to tell you about that." Apparently, it was shipping damage.

"You should have gotten warranty!" I said.

"That's what my dad said," he answered.

Too late now. And he would probably have had to box up the oversize frame and ship it back. Whatever. I told him we would see what we could do.

I started experimenting with different items to use as a drift mounted to the headset press. I also contacted my friend Diane in Orlando. She is an ingenious machinist who has been working on bikes for more than half a century. She has built frames and fabricated some form of just about every part. She had already made a drift that fits the headset press, and shipped it to me on loan.

Many hours of work later, the head tube was round enough to accept the headset cups. I fit the fork.

The steerer tube was too short. It's a one-inch threaded steerer. I went online to see if anyone sold a springer fork with a one-inch, threaded steerer that was longer than what we had. It was nearly impossible to find anyone listing the measurement at all. Most of the forks were 1 1/8-inch threadless. It looked like we had the longest fork of its type. If we couldn't get a fork to fit the head tube, we were going to have to make the head tube fit the fork.

A tool called a head tube facer uses cutters on a rod threaded through the head tube to cut down a small amount from either end, to assure that the ends are parallel. This allows the bearings to turn smoothly. Cut a little, cut a lot. I spent hours, shaving down that head tube like I was digging my way out of prison with a spoon handle. Eventually I had removed about 12 millimeters altogether, to get enough steerer to protrude to fit not only the headset parts but that chunky aluminum bracket for the springs.

Once we could complete the routine assembly tasks, I had to figure out how to install the components of the motor system. Because the frame uses mostly curved tubes, there were no flat, straight areas for the battery bracket that didn't lead to other problems, like interfering with the cranks, or rubbing on the chain. The bracket supplied by the battery manufacturer was drilled for water bottle bolts, but the receivers in the battery box itself left half of its length unsupported. I had to devise a support bracket to allow me to mount the battery in the only usable location on the bike.

Fabricating the bracket required buying some hardened drill bits so that I could drill the plates to match up with the hole in the back of the battery box.

The pedal assist sensor the customer bought was designed for a small bottom bracket shell, not the big, one-piece crank type that the frame had. We had to hunt down a sensor for the larger shell. Then the sensor ring that goes on the crank itself isn't a great fit, but that was better than no fit at all.

The sensor itself came with a different style of plug than the original sensor intended for use with the motor kit he had. I couldn't find an adapter cable to bridge the difference, so I had to snip the end off of the new cable and graft on the plug from the original one. This included salvaging contacts that were not meant to be undone and refastened. Somehow, this actually worked.

Next I had to figure out the cable runs. I only had specific lengths to work with, and no second chance if I broke anything. The harness on the control box had plugs we wouldn't be using, so I had to separate those and bundle them safely in case they get used in the future. The customer had gotten brake levers with his kit, but he was only going to run a coaster brake on the rear wheel. The front wheel -- the one with the motor -- has disc mounts on the left side, as is normal, but the stupid fork has its caliper mounting tabs on the right fork blade. It also has posts for a rim brake, but the customer didn't want to bother with that. This means that he won't have a brake cutout on the motor. Fortunately, his intended route with the bike is entirely flat, using the local rail trail for his commute. 

The motor kit includes a throttle, so he won't really have to pedal at all, but I got the pedal assist to work anyway. He had wanted it enough to order the new sensor kit.

The control box presented another challenge. It needed to be close enough for all the wires to reach, mounted solidly, in a protected location if possible.

My colleague George sketched up a simple and effective concept. I made a day-off visit to the hardware store for the U-bolts and other bits. The bolts are cushioned with shrink tubing. The box stands off slightly from the seat tube so that airflow over the cooling fins is unrestricted. Because the chain line runs right next to the box, I fabricated a bracket to deflect the chain when it bounces over that way. The customer did not get the chain guard usually included with these frames. He might want to track one down. The chain is very long, so it has a lot of latitude to waggle around. It not only comes within a couple of millimeters of the control box, it also almost rubs on the rear tire.

No notes on the seat. It's perfectly on brand.

Even the handlebar wasn't simple. The apehangers he ordered don't fit the stem. I shimmed them in. It's a perfectly legitimate procedure for which nice shims are machined in a number of sizes representing the standard increments. Of course this setup didn't span the standard increments, but I found something. He can order larger-diameter bars, but the bike is usable in the meantime. He won't be driving fast or cornering hard on it. Not more than once, anyway.

The biggest worry is that the customer will be severely shocked by the final price. Figuring straight time at our posted hourly rate, he's into us for more than $1,700 in labor alone. Then there's 50-some-odd in parts. We may end up eating this thing.

"Why didn't you warn him?" you might say. Our only choice was to pull the plug when we saw the head tube, and just send him out to buy a new frame. So he'd be out whatever he paid for the first one, plus several hundred for another one, plus shipping, plus the labor to fit the head tube to the fork of his choice, plus all of the design and fabrication time that went into fitting the motor kit. Yes, he could buy a pre-made e-bike stretch cruiser for $2,000-$3,000, but none of the ones I saw looked very close to what he chose for himself.

Building a bike on a frame is always more expensive than buying a bike already factory spec'd and assembled, especially if you have to pay for someone else's skilled labor. When you really depart from any kind of plan or standard, you need to have your own ingenuity or pay for someone else's.

You might quibble that everything is just stuck on the outside of this frame. If you're lucky enough to know someone like my friend Diane, or any other mad genius tool user, you might get some sweet custom work for the same price or lower -- Diane does not have the same shop overhead that a retail business has -- but you need to live near her, or travel to her, or ship all of your stuff to her, in a time when shipping prices themselves are staggering. If we had drilled the frame to put battery mounts directly on the top tube, for instance, we would have either had to use rivet nuts (lame) or properly brazed them in, requiring repainting afterward. $$$. The same goes for drilling in for cable guides or brazing something on outside without installing a threaded receiver into the frame.

I don't know anyone locally with the same collection of skills and career bikiness that Diane has.

Anyway, we accomplished the desired task: it's a complete bike, as rideable as its awkward design will allow.

On some level, we do want to give our services away. But we can't. The entire resources of the business contributed to successful completion of the task he requested. All of the knowledge, and all of the collected miscellany hung and piled around the place represent years of experience and a warehouse of potentially useful elements.