A mechanic who had been with us for eight years decided that he didn't want to put up with our winter ski business any longer, so he quit. What was interesting about his career here was that he was not a rider when he arrived, and never became one. He had ridden his ten-speed as a kid, but his real interest was climbing. Where winter mountaineering had led me to embrace cross-country skiing, reinforced by the fact that racing cyclists were using cross-country skiing for off-season conditioning, Sam never warmed up to skiing and the needs of skiers. And, although he expressed passing interest in getting a bike, he never followed up on it.
Despite what would seem like complete disinterest in the activity itself, he mastered a number of procedures on the latest and most annoying aspects of the modern machine. He successfully set up a few tubeless tires, and competently bled brakes. The things I found irksome did not bother him, because he had no stake in them. They were just procedures to learn and complete. He grasped the necessary skills to cope with a wide range of routine service.
I have successfully done both tubeless and hydraulic brake work. They still piss me off because of the added and utterly unnecessary expense and complication of the essential bicycle, and the way that they warp and modify offerings to those of us who want to refuse the technology. There is little about the modern marvel that I find attractive or even efficient. But Sam was not encumbered in that way.
One of the best mechanics I ever learned from had a lot of trouble staying on his bike. In the eight months that I worked in his shop, I saw him crash at least three times. But you give him a pile of tubing and he could make you a frame, then spec the rims, hubs, and spokes and build you a wheel that would last for years. My other longtime mentor rode a lot, very skillfully, but wasn't a top finisher for the most part. She and her husband were immensely creative and resourceful machinists and fabricators. She still is, although she has far fewer projects going these days. I know that her tastes run to the retro, both the era in which we both started riding, and historically. She started a company that made accurate replica Ordinaries, and owns a draisine. The first fixed gear I rode was one she knocked together in her family's machine shop in 1975. She would have been a strong contender in stage races back when riders were forbidden to accept outside support.
A regular rider will develop tastes and preferences beyond what's harder or easier to work on. I know from talking to my car mechanic that he had nothing good to say about cars after about 2015, and preferably older than that. The techno doodads we get now are fun and convenient, but they're not built to last, or engineered to be easy to work on. Just buy a new one! The phrase applies to just about every consumer product.
I know what I like, not only to ride but to maintain. Someone more devoted to the profession might be satisfied to serve the new while riding the old. I can't be that detached about the degeneration. Through the eons of human existence there must have been millions like me, witnessing in helpless horror the cumulative results of highly popular bad decisions.
Someone who measures their self-worth by their skills with the machinery as it evolves will have more time and energy to master the delicate procedures it demands of them. I do what I have to do. But I got into bikes in the first place because they were simply efficient and easy to maintain, while I focused on the myriad of other things that interested me at least as much. It was his other interests that got Sam to finally bug out and leave this craziness behind.
Know anybody looking for some part-time work as a bike mechanic? The pay's for shit, but the employee discounts can't be beat. It helps if you actually like bikes.
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