Cog blocked

 Blue is almost but not quite perfect. The gearing covers a little wider range than on my original Cross Check. As I’ve put more miles on, I noticed that the steps in the cassette could be a little more even. What’s on there is 13-15-17-19-21-24-28-32. 

On the green bike, I had added a 30 to a seven-speed block with the same gears that the blue bike has, only culminating in a 30 instead of a 32. So the intervals from the 13 to the 30 were 2-2-2-2-3-4-2. By subbing in a 27 for the 28, I made the intervals 2-2-2-2-3-3-3.

Large intervals and strange intervals mess with your cadence and power. On the 13-32, I wanted to Frankencog a 22 for the 21 and a 25 for the 24. That would make the intervals above the 19 go 3-3-3-4. At least three of my bikes have cogsets I assembled for them to suit my needs. I have a cog farm at home, and we have a deeper one at the shop.

A 12-25 used to be common on road bikes in the late 1990s. Some riders still ask for gearing that high. Surely a 25 lay in the big treasure chest at work. The 22 might be more challenging, but I remembered some combinations that had not interested me before that might contain one.

Nope. No 25, no 22. A search for new cassettes turned up one, described as a downhill mountain biking cassette, that had a 25. I’m not going to shell out for a whole cassette just to scrounge two cogs. The industry has cog-blocked me. Maybe a 25 will turn up eventually, but without the 22 it only creates a weird 4-3-4 sequence in the lowest three gears.

I should have bought up as many Miché cogs as I could get, back when they were available. I used some of those to make my “8 of 9 on 7” cassette for the Isaac/Trek.

If a particular part becomes too rare it negates a lot of the value as a reliable tool. True victory over the technofascist bike industry is won by using durable but also replaceable parts to rejuvenate a simple bike indefinitely.

Buttery smooth

 

Buttery smooth. Those words kept forming in my mind as I rode this bike on its shakedown, on the grueling and not altogether enjoyable Gilford run after dropping my car off for spring service. The route is tediously familiar, with its hills and its tight, narrow stretches shoulder to fender with drivers indifferent to your survival, but it's also peaceful and beautiful for quite long portions. And, being so familiar, it was a perfect proving ground to test out this bike.

I figured it would be great, because the frame is a version of  the Surly Cross Check. If I could only own one bike, it would be a Surly Cross Check. Agile on pavement, but sure-footed on dirt, built of reliable steel and configured so that it can be adapted to many options, it's not a bike to take out with the local hammerheads on a take-no-prisoners road ride, but it will definitely get you most places you want to go if there's a mapped public right of way to get there. I built my first one to make the dirt variations of my commuting route more pleasant. It has evolved into a practical beast, with generator lighting. In the process it became a little hefty. Surly bikes aren't for weight weenies anyway. Add a few pounds of practical accessories and the package bulks up even more. 

The Traveler's Check frame on which today's bike was built has S&S couplers so that the bike can be taken apart and fit into a checkable standard size piece of luggage. I bought it when I had delusions of traveling. The first build was kind of slapped together: hence that saddle. That thing came off the bike as soon as I got home. Blue Version 1 was a fixed gear, the simplest to take apart and reassemble in a train station or airline terminal for short hops around a destination city. But that never happened, and now it won't. So I had a frame ready to build up without some of the heavy add-ons that encumber my daily commuter, to recapture some of the comfortable nimbleness of the original 'Check.

Buttery smooth. The bike rode like an extension of my body. I shouldn't be surprised, since I had built it to the same dimensions as its older sibling, but I had set the bars a little higher by leaving the fork a little longer. I was looking ahead to its touring configuration, where I might want to sit up just a little more, to take in the scenery. Fortunately, it's not so high that it kills the handling. In fact, the stem attaches higher, but drops more than on the other bike, so the bar height nets out about the same.

The first thing I noticed was that the bike seemed twitchier. But twitchier soon settled down to "more responsive." The commuter has a heavy dynamo front wheel. The SRAM dyno hub wasn't the slickest on the market to begin with, and now it's probably pushing ten years old. If I could scrape up the coin for a Schmidt I would. A generator hub has some rolling resistance all the time from the magnets. This increases slightly when the lights are switched on. You get used to that, but notice the difference on a bike that doesn't have it. Hence the impression of twitchiness on the bike with the plain front hub.

I use the lights in daylight in certain situations to enhance visibility in a few intersections where the sight lines make it worthwhile. Not having them felt like a bit of a loss. I had blinky lights for front and rear, but I like being able to pair those up with a full-size, solid beam headlight to present a more vehicular impression as I bomb into a crossroads or shoot a stretch of town traffic where drivers like to pop out of parking lot exits when they don't think anyone who can hurt them is coming. So maybe I get a more aggressive battery light for the handlebars of Blue 2.0.

I feel my age. I'm in some kind of pain most of the time. That made the performance of Blue 2.0 all the more impressive. I felt pretty crappy, but still peppy because the geometry and setup of the bike supported me so well.

The gearing is mostly the same between the two bikes. On the commuter -- code named Green now -- I have 30-36-48 for chainrings and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette of 13-15-17-19-21-24-27-30. On Blue it's 28-36-48 in the front and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette with the same cogs from 13 to 24, leading up to a 28 and a 32. I anticipated riding with a touring load, which could still happen. So the mid-range cruising gears were the same. Shift points didn't change, cadence wasn't thrown off. I might re-gear Green a little bit, though maybe not exactly the same. The great thing about friction shifting and separate cogs is that you can really customize your gearing to your specific physical and riding conditions. This adaptability has been largely eliminated by the industry. Many technolemmings have never experienced it.

The car is taking longer than planned. I'm living without it for a couple of days. That's not as casual an undertaking as it was, but you do what you have to do. I wish I still believed in pain relievers. Today's ride is Green, the fully lighted commuter, because -- hopefully -- I'll be heading out on the hell run to Gilford after work, and the sun could be setting by the time I get to the garage to retrieve my motor vehicle.

Beautifully crafted, reliable mediocrity

 Like finding an old friend's obituary on the internet when I'm looking for something else, I noticed posts reporting that Surly had discontinued the Cross Check. I knew it was on the way out when they discontinued the complete bike. You could still buy the frame, and I considered trying to stock up, but I have two already. Don't be a neurotic hoarder. But now they're gone. The ones in the wild will quickly command collector prices. 

The end of the era got me thinking about how misguided popular perception eventually destroys everything simple and true and good. I don't worship everything done the old way. I don't miss road brake levers with the cables coming out of the top. I don't miss downtube shifters. Compared to the targeted perfection that consumers are fed today, older bike technology is horribly primitive, and an actual impediment. Only in the long view does its superiority emerge. But who bothers with a long view anymore?

Riders decide what is superior for their purposes. Some will purchase their bike without thinking about how to care for it beyond a place to park it. Others will budget some amount of money to pay a technician to maintain and repair it, the way they would with a car. A few will work on their own machines with varying degrees of success. Or maybe they have a friend who can help them, who will actually take on the more intimidating tasks in their back room or basement work area.

As far as I'm concerned, hydraulic brakes, finicky shifting systems, tubeless tires, and suspension do not add enough value to make up for the increased upkeep. Someone in love with those things will put up with their many flaws for the beautiful moments they spend together. Someone brainwashed by marketing into thinking that those elements represent laudable progress will endure the troubles for as long as they want to bother playing with bikes at all. In the meantime, like some unconquered tribe that has evaded assimilation for generations, we who ride The Old Shit, keep pedaling through the background, patching and replacing inner tubes as necessary, changing cables when they fray, feeling for the chain to engage correctly on the next cog, mile after mile of pleasurable utility interrupted by simple tasks to keep the machine going and going and going.

Love is work. Love is compromise. What feels like love can be temporary. The end of a relationship depends on the type of relationship. When it's with a bicycle, it's not consensual between parties with equal freedom. It's more like a pet, only this pet can be rejuvenated many times, especially if it's an old, steel-framed pet with rim brakes and friction shifting. You have to decide whether to give it the lethal injection, or abandon it on a country road, or turn it in to a shelter, or take advantage of the bike's near immortality to rebuild it. You can even modify it, which was one of the Cross Check's greatest strengths. One of mine has been a fixed gear since I put it together. The older one has been a commuting, exploring, and light touring bike with 24 speeds (initially 21), for 23 years. It has evolved more and more practical features. And I plan to put a multi-gear setup on the fixed gear 'Check as soon as I get around to it.

With long horizontal dropouts, the Cross Check offered not only an easy setup for single speed and fixed gear riding, but an adjustable rear wheel position to change the ride and load handling, as well as accommodating some cassette and derailleur combinations that should not officially work. But versatility requires thought, and any option has its drawbacks as well as advantages. The bike industry wants you to buy multiple individual bikes perfectly set up for their latest version of each particular riding style. They'll abandon you next year, but don't think about that right now. Your bike will probably last two or three before you have enough problems to need expensive work...unless you're a mountain biker, in which case you might have stuffed it in the first three days and need a $300 derailleur. In any case, the industry hopes that you will weigh the cost of service on something they've already forgotten the spec on, versus buying the Shiny New Thing, and pick the latter.

I always approached gear purchases like they were the last one I was ever going to buy, in a life with no end in sight. Now I'm closer to the statistically likely end than the beginning, so I see the changes in the bike scene more in the context of the era that will die with my generation. I can feel sorry for the young ones who have never known the self sufficiency and reliability of simple componentry that is well made, but I can't say I'll be there to help any of them who might seek to reinstate it. There's a subculture of old steel bikes, but less and less coming into the field unless it's expensively hand built by dedicated fabricators. And even in the practical steel bike subculture there are devotees of disc brakes, and probably poor bastards beguiled by tubeless tires as well. I don't want to ask for details, because knowing would only annoy me.

For the riders who demand the ephemeral performance of the latest technology, it is vital. They could not ride in the style they have chosen if they didn't have the technological support of those machines. It's a devil's bargain that would not concern me if it hadn't invaded my profession by forcing me to decide whether to keep toiling to help them pursue their bad decisions or look for some other line of work in which I have no experience. So far, I just do the best I can to make bad designs work as well as they can, and enjoy the schadenfreude when they fail anyway due to inherent flaws. It's nowhere near as fun as fixing something that can actually be fixed and sending that rider happily back out for more pleasant adventures, but stuff like that is increasingly going the way of the Cross Check: withdrawn by the manufacturer due to decreased demand.