The crackle of death

 Seasons change. You dig out an item you haven't needed in months, like a favorite pair of tights, or wind briefs. You tug gently on the elastic waistband and hear the dreaded crackle of death. This morning it was Craft wind briefs I urgently wanted for the morning commute at 27 degrees F. Come spring it will be the better pairs of bike shorts that have sat idle in the drawer awaiting the return of longer days. Will they still be the better pairs?

I do not remember elastic dying so rapidly in my youth, but maybe that's because I outgrew or wore out garments too quickly. Still, it seems to happen a lot sooner these days.

When a garment has a drawcord as well as elastic I simply replace the drawcord with shock cord and a cord lock. If the waistband doesn't have a clear path for a drawcord, sometimes I can use a seam ripper to open the blockage. If the elastic is completely sewn down or perhaps is the entire waistband, it's probably game over, no matter whether the rest of the fabric is still in fine shape.

Somewhat blown out bike shorts will still serve under tights or Sport Hill 3SP pants, because the outer garment will hold them up. Worn by themselves they would be a quick trip to indecent exposure charges.

I have salvaged waistbands from garments that wore out before the elastic dried out, and grafted these onto pieces that have suffered the crackle of death. Sometimes they last so long that the grafted elastic also dies of the crackle. My sewing machine died, so I can't mend anything requiring long stretches of tight, even stitching until I replace it. It was probably more than 50 years old. Hand seaming is possible, but very time consuming.

Stretch fabric itself dies of the crackle. Earlier this century, the old college fencing team was getting together for a reunion. I dug out my old uniform, which had been state of the art in 1976. A mere thirty years later it hung in droopy folds. That's what I get for getting the trendy knit one. If I'd gotten canvas it would still have been fine. Canvas didn't have the sleek fit that all the hot dogs were sporting.

Wool bike shorts and jerseys would get a little baggy, but generally did not depend heavily on the structural integrity of purely elastic fibers. Okay, they would get a lot baggy eventually. But the shorts would generally succumb to saddle friction in riding season and moths in storage, conveniently perishing as a complete unit. Properly blocking and drying any wool garments flat would help them shrink back to size. Wool shorts with natural chamois were also entirely biodegradable. They weren't vegan, however. Wool is just a short haircut for a sheep, but chamois requires a sacrifice.

Many a beautiful day shall pass...

 Many a beautiful day shall pass, witnessed from behind the glass of workplace windows. This is especially true in fall and spring.

In the autumn, riders have to deal with whatever the weather throws at them, plus the shortening days, plus the increasing glare of low-angled sun. Coming off of the bountiful daylight of summer, we have to get used to the encroaching night on both ends of the day.

Drivers seem more frantic, too. I attribute this to the slow arrival of morning light. In summer, the light arrives before most of us need it, signaling our bodies and minds to wake up and get busy. In the growing light coming out of winter, we're naturally energized and sense the lengthening days moving sunset comfortably away from us. The opposite end of that process runs smack into the imposed schedule of rigid hours. We unconsciously speed up to catch up with where we need to be. Morning light drags in after we've already had to wake ourselves, while the sun slouches past us to fall below the horizon. Come late, leave early, and don't help much while you're here. Thanks a lot. The only drivers who aren't rushing around are the foliage tourists.

Right now, the foliage is just passing peak in my area. The interplay of light and color on hillsides, mountains, and water is a visual feast. The middle of many days still offers mild air and the least glary sun. It looks lovely through the shop windows. People come in and remark on how nice it is.

Yeah, well the morning ride might have been just above freezing, with areas of fog. By the time I get to ride home, the sun will be almost gone, the warmth will be fading rapidly, and any clouds will bring the dusk that much sooner. In fact, for my route, the full commute is no longer safe. Shorter options all involve more handling time, saving me no time at all if I do a park 'n' ride, and exposing my car to whatever might happen to it unattended. I can ride the full route on Sundays because the shop closes an hour earlier. Then, on November 1, sunset moves an hour earlier, so my ride opportunity on work days shifts to dawn patrols.

At dawn, the roads may be icy. The closer we get to winter, the more likely this is. The lower the sun gets, the more areas remain shaded throughout the day, preserving ice along the margins of roads that are otherwise clear for motorists. Sure, the law gives me the right to claim the clear part of the lane, but anyone who has really tried that knows that you can end up dead right. Studded tires help with the ice but make cornering on dry pavement less fun.

If you're on your bike you're not doing anything else. You might indulge in various mental games or exercises, but you're not doing the laundry, cleaning the chimney and wood stove, cooking, vacuuming, dusting, tidying up the yard, writing, drawing, whatever else you want or need to do. When daylight sprawls across fifteen hours or more, twelve of those hours are still twelve hours, but they seem to hold more. Darkness feels like night even if the same time of day was mid to late afternoon just six weeks ago.

Fall and winter have their own beauty. Starlight seems sharper in a clear, frigid sky. The northern lights seem more appropriate with arctic air in place. Before we get there, though, we have to get through the darkest, spookiest time, while the leaves are still hanging on and night's emissaries linger through the day in the long shadows.

 I do have lighted bikes with which to explore the roads and trails less traveled after dark. That's all fine and dandy until you have a flat tire or other mishap, miles from home on a woods road in the dark. Also, illumination makes you visible. Visibility makes you vulnerable. I don't make a big thing about being camouflaged, but I do prefer to go relatively unseen through the forest. A companion might seem to make the darkness less spooky until you think about how scary movies are all the scarier as a group gets picked off one by one. It's just a movie, right? Ha ha ha ha...hehhhhh... What's moving through the woods over there?

When the light drains away, it doesn't just seep. The sun doesn't just set sooner, it sets faster. Functional early twilight gives way to deeper, headlight-swallowing murk in a few minutes. You know what I mean: too dark to see, but somehow the powerful lights on your vehicle can't penetrate it yet. Drivers go to full glare before the sun has even disappeared. As dusk deepens, they blind each other. A rider in summer twilight can cruise in the light monochrome for half an hour. Now the silver lasts a few minutes.

On a bike commuting day, I might miss the most beautiful conditions, but when a rider comes into the shop and asks if I'm going to get out there I know that I did and I will. On a roasting hot summer day, the commuting hours are the better ones anyway. With the coming of driving season all I have is an empty space where my bike would be hanging. Not only do I lose the built-in daily ride, I lose a great teaching aid when someone asks what I think of the latest technology. "Check out this 26-year-old frame with parts that go back even further." They don't all go back that far, but they're all part of the simple, versatile approach to a machine that is seldom perfect, but reliably perfect enough. I'll be out on it when I can.

Electronic shifting possibility

 With the widespread adoption of electronic shifting, the industry could offer riders something that disappeared when index-only mechanical shifting took over in the 1990s.

Prior to the coming of pod shifters for flat-bar and upright-handlebar bikes, and brifters for road, the indexed shifters in all categories were built around the shape and placement of friction shifters, and all -- or nearly all -- had the option to revert to friction if the indexing went out of adjustment on a ride when you couldn't stop to dial it back in. Just select the friction option and go back to the old way of feeling and listening to get the gear you want.

The mania for internally routing everything on all high performance bikes has made mechanical cable routing a nightmare. Electronic shifting is the only way that makes sense for a modern spaceship. Maybe that's less true on a mountain or gravel bike with a single chainring and less need for absolute precision shifting, but those categories could still benefit from electronic "friction" shifting.

Think about it: electronic shifting sends a signal to little motors that move the derailleur a set amount to achieve the indexed shifting that mechanical systems relied on perfect cable tension and perfect cable movement to provide. As cogs got closer together and cable routing followed more and more tortuous paths through the interior of the frame, formerly trivial amounts of drag could throw everything off. And cables will still fray and break inside the shifters themselves. Electronic shifting, especially fully wireless, moved all that to the ether. Calling rear derailleur, come in please. Do you read me?

It should be easy for an electronic system to incorporate a "friction" option that would allow for wheel substitutions, for instance, that wouldn't have to be exact. You could stuff an 11-speed wheel into a 12-speed system as long as your friggin' through-axle matches. Maybe the other parameters of the ultramodern spaceship make the kind of improvisations I'm imagining impossible. I just remember dealing with minor compatibility issues getting a wheel from neutral support during a race, and imagining something similar translated into the modern menu of compatibility hypersensitivity. I guess if it would never matter to a sponsored professional it should never matter to an amateur technolemming. What is the industry's financial and competitive motive to bother with such a thing?

I haven't checked lately, because I don't own any of the crap, and no customer has needed me to mess with theirs recently, but the "friction" option may exist in the fine-tuners already built into the shifters as they are. Last time I had to mess with one from SRAM and Shimano respectively, it didn't seem like something you would want to do on the fly, especially every shift.

A true friction simulator would let the rider control the derailleur directly through its entire travel. Push the uppy control to go up and the downy control to go down. Stop where you want. Instead of fixed increments per push, just go until told to stop. Maybe it already exists. As I said, I have no personal interest, and have not had to develop a professional one as yet. And would a technolemming even put up with it? So much skill has been eliminated from the operation of the machine that several generations of riders have never experienced it.

A rider interested in durability, versatility, and longevity probably already gravitates away from the most spacy spaceships. Unfortunately, the industry kills its elderly and dishonors its ancestors as a matter of course, so top quality mechanical stuff is disappearing rapidly. At one time, Dura Ace STI was 8-speed mechanical. Now it's all electronic except for the last remaining barcons. And the barcons are index-only. If you have nightmare cable routing they offer no refuge. Index-only makes them picky eaters anyway. Thanks for nothing.

Electronic shifting brings with it the hassle of battery charging and eventual disposal. Old mechanical shifting cables have to be disposed of as well, but they can go in with the scrap metal to be made into something else. But if you're stuck on the modern way, electronic friction shifting might be a way to blend in some of the long-lost convenience of more primitive times.

"Customer service," LOL

 One of our hardworking customers who has been a bike commuter for years recently had the fork on his Fuji Conductor 2.1 snap while he was riding, leading to the crash you can well imagine. Thanks to his good karma or something, he did not get all stove up, but the bike did.

The steerer tube of the fork broke up inside the frame. This is a sign of poor material, not abuse or neglect by the rider. It just up and quit on him.

Here's the problem: Fuji was distributed in the USA by Bike Co. Fuji's parent company, Pacific Glory Worldwide, (PGW) decided to take over distribution themselves, cutting Bike Co out. Our customer bought his bike from us when Bike Co was responsible for support. But it's a Fuji bike, so PGW shares responsibility, particularly as they were the corporate titan above Bike Co. Neither corporation has a fork or a bike in stock to replace our customer's defective vehicle. "Sorry, we checked the warehouse. Nothing there."

There's been some chatter about kicking in for a generic fork if we can find one, but the industry as a whole has abandoned the 15mm thru axle and 100mm spacing on his fork, meaning that we would have to track down either a fork with the exact dimensions to match his now abandoned piece of industrial debris or a fork that will at least play nicely with the head tube on his bike, along with adapters to fit his front wheel to the axle dimensions of the current crop of forks.

This. is. bullshit. Because of the way that retail has migrated online, our trusty parts suppliers have less and less of the variety they used to offer. The vomitous explosion of different standards has led to a wilderness of new old stock, used, shady, or weird options that might or might not work depending on how accurate the published specs are. Order it and find out! Maybe you have to send it back and try again. Maybe it actually works.

The burden falls onto us, an independent retailer dealing with all of the work we have to do already, to do the treasure hunt for a replacement part to cover a manufacturer's defect. Yet the manufacturers quit treating shops like partners and started treating us like the first rank of suckers way back in the 1990s. The mountain bike boom made the bike business a lot less good natured and collegial.

US bike industry revenue surged approximately $4.1 billion between 1980 and 1999. It has only increased about $3.6 billion in the twenty-seven years since then, based more on spiraling prices than on increased unit sales. Number of bikes sold annually started dropping around the turn of the century and have remained flat ever since. Yet the industry continues to place its faith in higher prices, lower quality, and ephemeral features that may play well in the pro racing ranks, but nowhere else. I don't mean the lower quality part. Pro machines carry a hefty price tag. But they are not built to last. They're built to perform. Any wannabes who buy pro-looking stuff are just setting themselves up to pour money into their hobby. Is your hobby riding, or just spending money on your bike?

I owned a pro-level bike in 1980-'85, but that was when pro level was coming out of old world craftsmanship and componentry that hadn't changed a great deal in two or three decades. A pro of today stuck on a bike like that would consider it punishment. The global arms race has pushed the acceptable baseline far beyond a sweet old Masi or Cinelli that a racer could beat the crap out of, but a hobbyist could cherish for a lifetime. You won't have a modern high performance bike for more than the lifetime of a small rodent. The entire bike has become another consumable. You are expected to chew it up and shit it out on a regular schedule. If your budget doesn't extend to that, so long and thanks for playing.

If you are a practical cyclist, the math gets even tougher. I push around a fleet of bikes, none of them newer than twenty years old. I built a new "bike that never was" a couple of years ago to park at the cellist's work apartment, but the basis of it was a 1970-ish Raleigh Super Course. They are all moderately sporty, but I would ride any one of them to work, and most of them to the store. All but the road bike have racks and fenders. Two (so far) have generator light systems.

As the worker bees shift to electric bikes, their plight grows clearer. Where one might have bought a series of beater cars, now they buy a series of e-bikes as each in turn develops some crippling problem. For a worker who can't get a driver's license, this is their world: a revolving door of e-bikes ridden to death.

If we want to help out our customer from existing stock, our only remaining option is a nice mid-drive Marin with an original retail price nearly three times what his Fuji cost him. We could whittle it down some, but only down to a little more than twice what the Fuji cost. And why should we take the hit for Fuji's failed product?

I put the question to PGW and had not heard back at time of writing. My guess is that they offer us a shop a credit toward future purchases from them. We can only cash in by remaining a dealer and ordering more bikes to sell. It sort of puts cash in the customer's pocket, but again burdens us for representing the Fuji brand, come what may. This kind of thing is the norm now in product support. It goes beyond the bike business as I'm sure you have encountered. The freight train of obsolescence seems to have no brakes. That doesn't mean it has achieved perpetual motion. It means it's going to fly off a curve and plummet to the valley far below at some point.