Early comes late, late comes early, and the middle disappears

 Autumn is here. All through August we were warned, but could put off recognition. September makes it stick. The sun rises later, sets sooner, and slants in lower. The light goes from morning to afternoon with no long bask in noonday sun.

Very soon, dusk will fall too early for me to complete my full commute safely. Route shortening options all have drawbacks. I could start at the parking lot for Ocean State Job Lot ("The Blot"), but that only gets me a little over three miles. I save a little time, but loading and unloading the bike eats several minutes, nearly eliminating any time I saved by traveling at car speed rather than bike speed for those few miles. That leaves me with about 11 miles each way. Not bad for a week or two, before the darkness closes in while I'm still on Route 28. The highway isn't as bad as Elm Street, because there's a bit of a shoulder and  sight lines are better. But people get dopey in the fall twilight. It's a lot harder to judge peripheral clearance in the darkness, so even a well-lighted cyclist is more at risk, especially if a driver is half lit.

Any options that involve parking closer to town also include driving extra distance off of the direct line to get to them. Now I'm really not saving much gas or wear and tear on the car at all. Most of these options require driving on dirt roads that might be rough. All of them require left turns off of the highway in the morning, with impatient drivers behind me and coming toward me. I might get a quick, clean left turn or I might be hanging there, all tensed up, waiting for a gap so I can clear the pipeline. I know that other drivers are supposed to be responsible and alert, but I hate to depend on them.

Most of the parking options in the woods along the way are awkward in some way. I have arranged parking at the driveways of friends and acquaintances, but it was always a little weird. There's a little parking area at Bryant Road and the Cotton Valley Trail, but particularly since the pandemic it's more heavily used. I might find no space or only a tight squeeze, when I'm on a tight schedule. And I burned out on the trail about that time, too. Tired of getting the stink eye and passive aggressive overtures from pedestrians and dog walkers who insist on more groveling than I'm inclined to do. I'd rather be out on the road where people are just trying to kill me, but it's less personal. So I was taking trail parking, but then riding on the road. I felt guilty about that, on top of the time, hassle, and extra driving involved. It isn't transportation cycling anymore when it doesn't reduce car use.

I feel some fear as the darkness closes in, not for myself when riding so much as for what I will find when I try to get back into full-time riding next spring. Age takes its toll whether you're paying attention or not. It progresses gradually for a couple of decades in which you can grumble about being in your forties or fifties. You know you're losing a little bit all the time. But then you hit a point where you're losing noticeable amounts as soon as you let up. You can't take a few weeks off and hop back in. You need to find ways to stay consistently active, and even then you will need to feel your way back in to see where the new limits have been set. My average speed has been fairly consistent for a couple of years, but a wee bit slower each year, and definitely taking more out of me. "Peak form" is not a summit anymore, it's just a shallower hole.

Your riding area may differ. When I lived in Maryland, I was able to use the bike year-round with only a day here or there when snow or ice made the riding a foolish and selfish indulgence. I had the best lights I could get, which were a feeble glow compared to the lights of today, but even the motor vehicles had dimmer lights, so it averaged out. Also, I rode on city streets much of the time, so the municipal lighting illuminated the general area. When I lived outside the city for a while, the commute traversed a few miles of darker highway, but it worked out. I was younger, the terrain was much easier, and the winters were mild.

There were also about 100 million fewer people in the country overall. Much of the population growth has been concentrated in the eastern megalopolis. I lived in it then, but north of it now. Maryland's population has grown by roughly two million since I settled there after college in 1979. Most of its growth occurred after I left. By comparison, New Hampshire's population has only grown by about 350,000 people since I arrived. On some days it feels like all of them are on my route, smokin' dope and texting, but I know that's an illusion. For the most part, smoking or not, they pass without incident. Back in Maryland I was on the receiving end of honks, swerves, spitting, thrown objects, profanity... all the stuff of a crowded society. It was only the 1970s and early '80s, so weapons were not discharged, and only very rarely shown. Mostly the drivers just used the car or truck itself to express themselves. It happens here as well, but much less often in my immediate area. I hear bad stories from not far away. It only takes one to ruin or end your life, but that's part of how we conduct ourselves on the road in any vehicle.

I have noted that more people seem to give way to their hostility under the cover of darkness. I have also noted, and continue to note, that the self-centered lighting on motor vehicles puts forth a blaze of light for the operator to see down hundreds of feet of darkened roadway, but that same blinding glare is aimed at oncoming vehicles with their own blinding glare, so that no one can see. Stick a cyclist into that, even with the best lights you can mount, and we're all lucky if we get through it without someone getting tagged. Cyclists have their own aggressive lighting, which can do more harm than good if they're not aimed carefully. No point blinding a driver if you actually want them to maneuver safely past you.

Headlights on motor vehicles have gotten weird in general with the high-intensity LEDs that supposedly project plenty of usable light while also forming weird shapes unlike any headlights of the ancient past. Navigation lights on ships and planes are meant to provide instant recognition of size and direction of travel. Lights on road vehicles should be no different, given how we're expected to travel at high speeds in tight formations. We're either operating close to another lane or two full of other speeding vehicles or in a single lane, perhaps with bicyclists and moped riders alongside. We have to make quick, accurate decisions. People drive too fast. Some people drive erratically.

Bike lighting can't equal the options available to boxier vehicles with four or more wheels to define the shape of them. Look at tractor-trailer rigs and even smaller trucks. They have lights all over them that define their shape. Passenger vehicles, even the super modern ones with weird lights, still conform to a general headlight/tail light/parking light configuration. Motorcycles and bicycles just don't have enough surface area to offer a large and definitive array.

Mere brightness is not a virtue. Motorcycles with super bright headlights are actually hurting themselves by blinding motorists. No one needs to see you from half a mile away. They need to see you from a few yards away, and be able to see the clear path to avoid you. This is true whether you have a motor or not. Visibility from further away helps somewhat to allow the driver of a larger vehicle to plan ahead, but not if it's so blinding that the driver loses the line when it matters the most.

Motorcycles with dual headlights run a risk of an oncoming or crossing driver estimating their size and distance wrong, seeing them as a larger vehicle, farther away. And super loud pipes just make people want to kill you. Factor that into your safety calculation.

When the commute ends I have to fit riding into the days when I'm not working, or into the margins of the days when I do. Because the sun comes up later, and motorists are going to work in the mornings, a dawn patrol training ride carries many of the same stresses as a commute, while providing none of the economic benefits. It's easy enough to suit up and get on the bike, but maybe not the best use of the time, since other forms of exercise provide more benefits in overall fitness and bone density. I get a lot more core and upper body exercise when I'm not hurrying out in the morning to make the bike ride to work and arriving home already fried from the ride at that end of the day. The rider is part of the machine. It -- you -- need maintenance just as much.

Preparing for a 3,100-mile tour

 Some people really get out there and do it, and it is my privilege to do what I can to support them. I mean, I get paid, but the stakes seem higher when the rider is going for weeks, especially without a support vehicle.

Back in the 1990s I got to do some work for Roff Smith before he rode around -- and I do mean around -- Australia. We gave him shop water bottles with our logo, but I don't think they made it into any of the National Geographic photos.

Roff was experienced enough to be able to do a lot of his own work. And his bike had bar-end shifters, no index-only brifter nonsense. These are two helpful attributes for anyone who wants to experience the full freedom of bicycling.

Our current customer's Adventure Cycling Southern Tier Route of roughly 3,100 miles falls well short of Smith's 10,000 mile circuit around the smallest continent, but it's hardly trivial. Although the ride is a few months away, he wants some preventive work done on his Surly Disc Trucker. Chain. Cassette. Shift cables. Spare spokes. I suggested he have disc brake pads with him rather than hoping he finds them when or if he needs them. His brakes take a common shape, but you can't count on finding the exact jigsaw puzzle piece you need anywhere you stop.

This bike also has brifters. With only a 9-speed cassette, the shifting isn't as temperamental as with ten and higher, but it still depends on precise adjustment of cable tension and cable movement to line up with each gear. As I have stated tiresomely often, in a mechanical system operated by cables, the best option is to use 5mm housing and 1.1mm slick stainless cables. Shimano's stock cables are 1.2, and come with one of two types of coating: the brown stuff that turns into a lint clog, or the green stuff that breaks up into bits of sand. These are always fitted through 4mm cable housing, which is like deliberately constricting your tendons. Quite often, the ferrules on the ends of the housing have rubber seals or long nozzles on the end of them, ostensibly to eliminate dirt. These add even more friction than the fat cable in the undersized housing already provided. The return springs of the derailleurs have to overcome all the drag of those supposed advantages in order to arrive under the cog of your choice.

Because he was getting new handlebar tape, this was our opportunity to strip out the stock 4mm housing that runs under the tape. In checking the rest of the shifting system, I noticed that the stock derailleur had developed some slop. If he was only riding locally I would have let it go, but I questioned whether it would hold up through the rest of his training and then the tour itself. The Shimano Alivio RD-M3100 derailleur has a lot of plastic parts. The pivots in the main body look like aluminum rivets, but even the ostensibly softer metal wears quickly on the plastic, so the derailleur develops increasing play. The shifters have to pull all that together before the cable can move the derailleur to the next gear. Because the industry keeps trying to pull more money out of its addicts, they keep adding gears to the cassette and messing with compatibility, so that older systems, or systems that hang onto lower cog counts, get stuck with cheaper and cheaper parts. I don't mean affordable quality. I mean plastic junk that wears out rapidly. This is supposed to encourage consumers to buy the fabulously expensive, top of the line new junk, which also wears out rapidly, but is way more fashionable.

We had a different Alivio derailleur in stock that matched the parameters of his drivetrain and had more metal in it, but the specs say that it is compatible with Shimano mountain shifters, not road. It has also been discontinued since we brought it into inventory a couple of years ago. This led to some research and anxiety, because sometimes you can ignore the specs, and sometimes you can't. With ten speeds and up, more often you can't. With nine...maybe. The specs for the OEM derailleur said that it wasn't compatible with road shifters either, and yet there it was, on the other end of the cable from Sora brifters. Details matter: the OEM derailleur had the cable leading straight into it through a short piece of housing on the chainstay, whereas the new one led the cable around to the back of the derailleur. If the new derailleur turned out not to work with these shifters, do we order a new plastic crappy one that will wear out sooner but at least be starting fresh, or try to dig up a better one, leaving the rider either without his bike or cutting the housing to the old derailleur, meaning that we would have to replace both cable and housing as soon as a new, better derailleur came in?

Fortunately, the derailleur we had worked with his brifters. It didn't settle right in, though. I had to find the sweet zone for cable tension to get the full range. All index shifting needs to be dialed in, but some always seems to hover at the edge of neurotic collapse.

The answer as always is friction shifting. Learn the ancient ways, and you can stuff any wheel in there that fits. It demands more and more precision if you're trying to shift manually across a crowded cassette of 12 sheet metal cogs, but in friction you won't need to play any of their drive train games. Go back to ten, nine, eight. Get a chain with a little more metal in it, that lasts longer. Get a front derailleur again, and a double or triple crank. Rediscover why those were actually good. When you shift by feel rather than by click, you're less likely to cut your chain by jamming a front shift, which was a major complaint among ham-fisted and gimmick-dependent consumers nurtured by an industry high on its own cleverness.

Note: none of this freedom applies to the world of racing or to technical mountain biking, in which the very style of the activity demands that you buy and destroy whatever gear is necessary to stay in the game. But these are also not the highest and best uses of bicycle technology. 

While we're on this digression, remember that racers will race on whatever they have. If none of this current crap existed, racer personalities would push their limits on simpler gear. Powerful forces far from the bikes themselves drive the competition in more expensive directions. It's entertainment. It's corporate marketing. Big Race is big business, and it needs flash and excitement.

Surly touring bikes used to come with an XT derailleur, when you could get a 9-speed XT derailleur. That was solid stuff, with little or no plastic in it. Now your choices in index-compatible 9-speed are very limited, and none are as nicely made as the old XT. However, shifting in friction, you can use an older derailleur for 8-speed or a newer derailleur intended for ten, and just shift it to where you need it, clickless. Fewer than 8 speeds might not have the total swing to cover an eight-speed cassette. You might as well have eight, since all the freehub bodies are wide enough to accommodate it, and the rear wheel is dished for it. When 8-speed first came out, there was debate about whether the wheel being dished more would make it less stable. Rims with offset spoke holes came out to address this, but there was no massive epidemic of collapsing rear wheels whether offset rims were used or not.

Disc brakes add a new twist to wheel building. Formerly, front wheels generally had the same spoke length on both sides of the hub, while rear wheels had slightly shorter spokes on the drive side. Sizing spare spokes for this customer, I discovered that the rear wheel has the same spoke length on both sides, because the flanges of the hub are set inward to fit the freehub body on one side and the brake rotor on the other. The front wheel has two different spoke lengths, because the brake rotor on the left takes up space. The flanges on both wheels are set much closer together than on wheels from the last century, or early parts of this one. To minimize the effect, rear axle widths have gone from 130 road and 135 mountain to 142, 148, and up. Through-axles dominate the hub market, fixing the rear wheel position where they tell you is best. Another piece of freedom lost to their claimed efficiency.

Any off-the-rack bike you buy now will have parts from what is currently available OEM new. Thus, Surly had to settle for a plastic facsimile of the solid old XT in order to retain the reliable, durable 9-speed chain and conventional drivetrain they wanted on a reliable, durable touring bike.

Microshift offers some 9-speed derailleur options with more metal in them, but I don't fully trust their quality and function. I would rather find some old Shimano or Suntour, or even Campy, and adapt it. As derailleurs in general get really weird to match the current obsession with huge gear ranges in the back, it's hard to find any new, well made options for someone who wants to refuse that technology. Front derailleurs also become more weird and scarce as an industry dealing with declining revenues weds itself to a particular style that they hope will bait in at least a few new users as well as enticing the old ones.

I'm wicked old, and they haven't enticed me with a damn thing in about 20 years.

Just as in the 1970s people rode across the country on their clunky Schwinns and entry-level ten-speeds from Britain, Europe, and Japan, so do riders today make their journeys on the tailored offerings of the modern industry, with all of its shortcomings. Bike categories are more defined -- I hesitate to say  better defined -- than they were in the 1970s, so "touring" bikes are automatically a step up from the true entry level. Their problems are more intentional than the mere quality control and weight problems that afflicted mass-produced affordable bikes back then.

I'd say you can make up your own mind about any and all of what is marketed to you these days, except that the realities of mass production mean that a lot of it is forced down your throat if you don't choose quickly enough and stock up on things you like while the industry still finds it economical to make them. It's hard to get an industry to back up and start over, resuming large-scale production of things it has grown bored with, and trained consumers to reject.

Every generation looks for improvement in the things that appeal to it. Every generation bases its sense of progress on what it noticed when it first started paying attention. A baby born today won't automatically come with a full understanding of what went before. That's highly inefficient for progress as a species, but it's the reality of our limited perception. We need people to fully understand history at the same time that we keep hyperactively making more of it. 

Citizen Mechanic vs. Commercial Bike Shop

Have you ever heard someone disparage a mechanic by saying they were "just a parts replacer?" Have you ever wondered why your local bike shop replaced something that you saw in a YouTube video could be fixed by what appeared to be a simple and effective procedure? Do you mistakenly assume that a "real professional" always has a speedy and economical solution to problems that you yourself found too intimidating or difficult?

Much of the time, bike repair is a matter of replacing parts. Worn chain? Replace it. Maybe the freewheel or cassette is toast, too. Broken spoke? Replace it. Bent rim? Replace it. Whether you replace just the rim or go for a pre-built replacement wheel depends on the quality of the original and the willingness of the customer to pay for the time and skill of the wheelbuilder.

In the days of mostly cup and cone bearings, purists would replace the loose ball bearings every time they overhauled a hub. If cones were pitted, you might have access to replacements for those as well. In high end hubs like Campagnolo, you could even pop out the cups from the hub shell and put in new ones. Short of all that, you would just clean up all the parts and reassemble with fresh grease.

Bottom brackets and headsets also used the cup and cone format and could be overhauled in the same way.

Steel frames and forks could be repaired by someone skilled with the torch. My old Eisentraut only has five original frame tubes out of eight. The chainstays were replaced in 1985. The seat tube was replaced in 1996. The road frame I use now was salvaged by my torch-wizard friends after an untimely roof rack accident struck it down when it was new. This is parts replacement to a high standard.

Through the 1990s, wily mechanics could often contrive solutions that didn't succumb to the plug-in concept that the major component companies were trying so desperately to establish. The industry has won that war now. The technological enslavement of the consumer is nearly complete. Everything has to match or your gears won't work. You can make some minor substitutions in hydraulic brake systems, but you need to know what you can get away with before you commit yourself to a gnarly downhill on whatever you cobbled together.

Shocks and suspension forks may be serviceable by a qualified technician or a foolhardy amateur. You need tools, and a clean place to work. You will be replacing parts inside there.

Some hydraulic brakes and cheaper shocks are not meant to be serviced. They have to be replaced outright when they fail.

The precision demanded by riders today puts them at the mercy of the industry. The reliable mediocrity of friction shifting and rim brakes was easy to perfect, because it wasn't perfect to begin with. The best of it was beautifully made. Tolerances were precise, but the functional stakes were low. Rider skill mattered much more than perfect integration of the drivetrain. It was like, "Here's your violin! It's up to you to learn to make it sound good."

Service was straightforward. Shops could perform many repairs in a day, because procedures were simple. Services that went deeper, like custom wheelbuilding, rim replacement, framebuilding and repair, or painting would command higher prices and require more time. It all had an artistic quality, right down to the way you could mix all of your componentry to personalize your bike or fit your budget.

Our shop has a reputation as the place to bring your older bike. That's my fault, because I will always try to keep one going. However, our overhead keeps going up, cutting into our ability to provide economical service. For instance: back in April, a customer brought in his old Panasonic road bike for a complete overhaul. Another customer, who lives near him, had recommended us because we had done a lot of work to prepare that rider's old steel road  bike for a tour through Canada a couple of years ago.

The Panasonic turned out to have a lot of problems, including a stem rusted into the fork. I managed to gain access to the headset bearings to do sort of an overhaul, but I couldn't secure the bearing very well because he was using an old reflector bracket as a spacer, and the bracket obscured the wrench flats on the top cup. This was a common flaw in bikes of the era attempting to comply with the pointless and ineffective reflector mandate in the industry. I couldn't remove the stem to replace the bracket with a simple spacer. 

The rider made his tour, but had to stop at a shop en route to get the headset tightened again. As soon as he returned from his trip he contacted us to take drastic action on the stem.

A machinist who helped me with the remnants of a cold-welded seatpost had used sodium hydroxide to dissolve the aluminum. I was going to do that, but before I dove in I consulted my mentor, Diane. She sent me alternative procedures that were less scary than building a science project volcano with lye.

Diane's procedure used PB B'laster, leverage, patience, a hammer, and, potentially, open flames. Still less scary than the bucket of lye. I used a slightly modified version. I also did it at my home lair, rather than tie up the shop and stick the customer with our standard hourly rate. The job would have cost him more than $500 and stood in the way of everything else in the repair queue.

Hard to say if everything I did contributed to eventual success. B'laster alone wasn't doing it, so I aimed a torch up the inside of the steerer tube from the bottom of the fork crown. Still nothing, but it was emotionally satisfying. The next day I went the opposite way and blasted it with Finish Line Chill Zone. On that day I finally felt and heard progress. With a pry bar on the handlebar and the fork crown clamped in a vise, I finally heard a CRACK. Reversing the pry bar I got another CRACK. 

I continued this for half an hour, reversing the direction of the pry bar over and over, while gaining a degree or two of movement. After a few hours I could see a tide line beginning to rise. The whole time, I was hosing the area with alternating B'laster and Chill Zone. I had also put the bike inverted in the workstand and whacked downward on the stem with a sledge hammer hitting a piece of wood.

The stem began to emerge, but still only with continuous effort. There was no sudden release of the grip of rust and friction.

Notice here that even after days of emptying penetrating solvents into the area, some of the rust was still dry. 

The stem came out minus its expander wedge. I had tried earlier to devise an extractor with another stem bolt threaded in from below, through two old crank arms and a stack of washers, to draw the wedge downward. It didn't move at all. And look at the length of that thing. It wasn't quite as long as a Nitto Technomic, but it was nowhere near its minimum insertion. Buried! 

I expected the wedge to look a lot gnarlier than it did when I finally got it to come out.

Here are all the tools used in this multi-day process.

Back at work the next week, a mountain bike with weak rear brakes waited for me. El Queso Grande said "clean the pads and rotor." That's one you can find on the Internet in many versions, including the fun ones that involve fire. Here's the thing, though. Pads cost roughly $20 and up. It takes the better part of an hour to pull the old pads out, solvent clean, sand, solvent clean again, light them on fire (heh heh heh!), and put it all back together so you can test ride it and find out that it didn't cure anything. Repeat a couple of times with some minor variations. Get interrupted for various things like bike rentals or walk-in urgent care. Next thing you know, half the day (or more) is shot. Put in new pads. Still get noise. Replace the rotor, finally everything is working quietly. Coulda gone straight to that in that first hour and been done with it. Sometimes the cleaning thing works, but in my experience it's usually just a way to play with fire a bit before actually fixing the damn thing.

A consumer might have time and inclination to fool with stuff for hours, and maybe settle for a half-assed result for the satisfaction of DIY. But in the commercial shop, time is money, and other riders are impatient for their machines.

In the 1990s we did a lot of improvising because we could and we had to. It paid for itself because we got the reputation as the place that could fix anything. But the industry had already declared war on being able to fix anything. And riders were demanding performance at any cost. They weren't satisfied with an old-fashioned bike, no matter how beautifully crafted. They needed vehicles for the ego, to showcase their risk tolerance and ability to heal.

The thing is, durability really is obsolete. How many riders want to own their bike for decades and ride long distances unsupported? How many are going to do their own work, buying all the tools necessary to do it right? Mountain bikes have evolved to withstand heavy impact forces and to stop more or less quickly on steep, rough descents, but the machinery that does this has lots of moving parts, pressurized gases, and fluids that need to be contained. Suspension linkages have lots of bearings, and bolts to check for torque. Tubeless sealant has a very limited lifespan compared to inner tubes. The bikes that seem so indestructible actually need much more attention than the machines they replaced.

Car dealerships have a sales floor and a service department. In virtually all cases, these have separate staff. This is also true in larger bike shops, but in smaller shops the guy turning wrenches might have to stop that and work the sales floor or set up rental bikes. The service area itself which sufficed for decades is now way too small as we need a hydraulics department, an e-bike department, and an ever-growing parts department.

Some jobs that we've done in the past, like rebuilding a three-speed hub are time-consuming, which makes them costly. As far back as 1980, shops could -- and did -- buy complete replacement three-speed rear wheels for less than it would have cost to have someone open up the old one and replace what was worn. Last time I priced Sturmey Archer parts they weren't all that cheap. And there are a lot of variations, not all of which are supported even if you wanted to tackle it.

Independent mechanics can adjust their overhead and cultivate the patience to dig into mechanisms that the public and the industry have left behind. I keep hearing about people who live right in my own patch of woods who "fix up bikes for people." I have no idea about their tools, work standards, or capability, but they're out there. I also know of two amateur frame builders within a 40-mile radius. One has done a repair or two for us on steel frames. In a sufficiently populated area you might even be able to eke out a living at it.

As service gets more technical, a rider has less and less assurance that they will be able to find it anywhere they need it. Even if you learn how to do a lot of it yourself, what tools are you willing and able to lug around with you? I keep recommending a return to elegant simplicity.