Ridley conversion update

 The new, mountain 12-speed barcon arrived for the Ridley cross bike conversion. The differences between it and the road shifter were obvious.

The light wasn't great, but the picture does show what I mean if you squint at it. The road shifter, silver, has a smaller cam and the stops defined by the shape of the shifter mount restrict its travel. The 12-speed shifter, black, has a larger cam and a wider angle between the stops. It handled the gear range easily.

Now that I know this, the barcon shifters I keep on hand for friction conversions will be 12-speed mountain just to assure that I have ample cable for whatever industry-defying drive trains I want to assemble. Once indexing becomes irrelevant, the possibilities proliferate.

The rear derailleur exhibited a quirk I had already seen on other bikes. If you throw the lever to dump the chain across more than half of the cassette, the chain hops out on top of the arm to which the cable attaches.

This is less likely to happen with index-only shifting, because you have to push the shifter multiple times to move the derailleur. You could do it if you fired a bunch of clicks and then took your first pedal stroke, but not if you were continuously pedaling as you operated the shifter. With a progressive lever like the barcon, you can move the derailleur much more quickly than the chain can respond, increasing the chance that you could strand the chain out there. This problem is purely a product of the weird derailleur geometry and monstrous low-gear cogs used in currently fashionable wide-range gearing.

Once the shifting issue was squared away, I could finish taping the bars and release this beast into the wild. There may be follow up tweaks, since it remains the most ambitious gear range I've attempted.

Just a technicality, followed by another technicality, followed by...

Shimano's latest mechanical shifting systems seem designed to make you hate mechanical shifting systems. Weird cable routing in the frames already made mechanical derailleurs an increasing nuisance. This style of front derailleur cable attachment puts another few solid spikes into the coffin lid. And it gives double value to current technofascist fashion, because it's not just an annoying cable, it's an annoying front derailleur cable. Front derailleurs? Why did we ever think those were cool?

The instructions for this style of derailleur are an 8-page PDF. That's simple and straightforward compared to the treasure hunt I went through later in the week looking for information about electronic shifting and hydraulic road disc brakes on a bike I was assembling. Bikes like that used to come with a few helpful hints and diagrams to help with componentry that is less and less intuitive all the time. Now most of the printed matter is just legal disclaimers and directions to "visit our website."

The front derailleur on this bike led me upstream to the R7000 front shifter. In yet another silent recall situation, these marvelously redesigned shifters are apparently hanging up, jamming intermittently on bikes that are new or nearly new. 

I poked around looking for clues, but found nothing that I could tweak to make the ratchet behave consistently. I found a video by some guy that supposedly showed how to fix the problem with a little piece of plastic and some double stick tape, but further investigation revealed that whatever "cured" the problem was purely coincidental. The comments include testimonials from people who followed his instructions and achieved satisfactory results, but my explorations in the interior revealed an oily place where double-stick tape would have a very short service life. And why should someone have to fiddle around with their new shifters because Shimano screwed up again?

After I poked at things for quite a while, the shifter worked consistently without malfunctioning, even when I tried to make it misbehave. That doesn't mean I cured it. It just means that the clever bastard decided to go underground until the heat is off. I advised the rider to go to the shop where she bought the bike and ask them for warranty support, rather than pay us to dig around in it any further. The problem is similar to the old 105 ST-5600 almost-recall a few years ago. It's become common in the industry for a big component manufacturer to hand out free replacements to anyone who asks, while doing nothing to publicize the problem or take direct responsibility for it, which would cost them a lot more money. If you haven't ridden your bike enough develop the problem, why should they spend their money to give you something that actually works?

The current fashion for cable routing under the bar wrap requires some ingenuity in feeding the cables so that they don't get a kink in them at any of the tight changes of direction needed to make their way into the cable housing.

This little screwdriver with a notch filed in the tip had been kicking around the workshop for years after whatever job had led to its creation. It has now become a crucial tool for guiding a new cable into the exit from a Shimano brifter.

You have to push the end of the cable into the exit groove without extracting a lot of cable behind it. The little notched screwdriver is perfect for this.

Another bike with the annoying front derailleurs was a gravel bike with through-axles front and rear. The rear wheel shows how designers have realized that long horizontal dropouts really did serve a purpose back in the dark ages:

Whoever assembled this bike was not familiar with horizontal dropouts. The wheel was crooked in the frame. With an old style dropout, you'd just undo the quick release, straighten the wheel, and tighten the quick release again. With a nutted axle, loosen the nuts, straighten, tighten the nuts. In the through-axle version, you have to loosen the through-axle attachment, loosen the two 20mm nuts, turn the threaded adjusters to straighten the wheel, re-torque the 20mm nuts to 200 in.-lbs, and re-tighten the through-axle itself. The nuts are alloy, thick enough to make a cone wrench an inadequate fit, but not thick enough to fit a regular off-the-rack spanner.

In the middle of one morning, in came a regular customer who never buys a bike from us, but comes in for service when he's at his spare home up here. He said he was just starting out on a road ride with  his daughter, when the bottom bracket made a "snap" noise, and the crank got really loose.

The left crank bearing (press fit) had blown apart. Most of it was now cozied up against the right side bearing. The rest of it was greasy fragments inside the bottom bracket shell. He borrowed a rental bike to nip home and get his gravel bike, so that he and the offspring could continue their ride. We didn't have the bearings in stock, so we ordered him a nice mid-price set. No need for hundreds of dollars in ceramic bearings, but nothing too cheesy, either.

On the lower end of the price range, someone checked this thing in, with a couple of squirrel tails woven into the cables at the handlebar.

I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't think I want to know.

Sometimes, a rider will get the rear derailleur caught in the spokes or jammed with a stick. The pieces will be dangling or twisted up around the dropout. But this guy set a new high mark, sucking the derailleur cage all the way through the rear gears:

Moving back up the price range, it was time to assemble a special order bike for another summer customer. 

This Specialized Tarmac does away with cable-actuated anything. Specialized had previously sent rather detailed instructions with their technological marvels, given that the consequences of error are potentially worse than embarrassing for all concerned. Not this time, though. The most detailed instruction sheets were for parts that were already fully installed. The hydraulic brake lines were not connected, and electronic shifting reveals nothing to the external observer. The enclosed sheets from Shimano contained only the vaguest generic information in one or two sentences buried in paragraphs of even less useful verbiage. Their website was even less help. After studying it from all angles and trying to piece together clues from all of the fragmentary or obsolete sources I could find, it was time to poke and hope.

The brakes have "easy connect" brakes lines that aren't really. There was nothing magical about them. Fluid did get lost. Air did get in. I did have to do a short bleed of the top end of the system. It was better than a complete fill and bleed, but not significantly easier than any other pre-filled system on which I've had to trim the lines for size and replace lost juice.

The electronic shifting either works or it doesn't. At least the wires had already been run, but I did have to stuff the battery into the seat post. The non-round seatpost on this bike holds the battery more conveniently than the round post on a previous bike I wrestled with last summer. But I didn't want to mess up its brain by fumbling something in the initial startup, if such a thing is possible.

The charger that came with the bike only had a USB plug, so we had to plug the bike into the shop computer to top up the battery. The system was set in manual shifting mode. The customer can decide if he wants to use either of the synchro modes. The rear derailleur clicks or clunks into gear depending on how many cogs you've asked it to cross at one time. The front derailleur makes an officious, annoyed whine when it shifts. Back when Shimano first pushed index shifting on the road biking world in the mid 1980s, riders joked about how you knew someone was attacking when you heard their shifters click. On large-diameter frames like Cannondales, the snap was amplified. But it wasn't enough of a problem to keep indexing from becoming the norm, paving the way for STI and the rest of the Super Highly Integrated Technology we deal with today.

Look Ma! No cables! Just Shimano Mechanical-Electrical Gear Manipulation Apparatus.

The customer will have to synchronize his own personal electronics with the crank. Your riding style will determine the kind of targeted ads you see on the internet after every ride. And if you complain about hunger, muscle aches, or saddle pain, those remarks are recorded and uploaded to your profile to help refine your personalized marketing even more.

There it is, in serious black. Not only does it look badass, the manufacturer saved lots of money on paint. And the naked frame is easier to inspect for damage that could "lead to serious injury or death."

Evolution is a popularity contest

When you walk into a store or other public place that has music playing over a sound system, you have to listen to it. You may be distracted enough not to notice it consciously, or you may find it inescapably intrusive. Or you might even enjoy it. And it changes you. Like it or not, because the popular hits soundtrack is so ubiquitous, you will have songs that autoplay in your head when you hear the first three notes. Regardless, you have to go through the experience with everyone else in that environment, because someone, somewhere, determined that music in public places was the more popular choice.

Think of the mass of humanity's environmental and social choices the same way. If everyone else set themselves on fire, would you set yourself on fire? You might prefer not to, but you will still have to breathe in the stench of charring flesh. And one or more of the happy incendiaries might careen into you and set you ablaze against your wishes.

In the USA, some percentage of people are unquestionably law abiding, and another percentage are automatically resistant to, and defiant of, any authority. In between lies the greatest number, fluctuating between the poles of obedience and defiance as they analyze each situation they happen to notice. A lot of us are oblivious to larger implications most of the time. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when we should have been paying attention to the first bits of debris leading up to the avalanche of deferred consequences our species now faces, the Baby Boomers were focused instead on the basics of life: finding paying work, establishing homes, reproducing. Even the politically savvy tended mostly to view it from a personal perspective, multiplied through an uncounted legion of their theoretical allies who would all benefit if a particular policy made things better for one of them. It's hard to imagine a life very different from one's own. You really have to go try it out. Even the most detailed book or movie can't drag you right in and trap you in it. Interactive video games may come close. I don't know, because I have never tried one. As detailed as they may be, every single thing that happens in one was created by the mind of someone else and is known to them.

Believers in an almighty deity say that the simulation we think of as real life is also the product of a creator to whom everything is known. That really takes the fun out of it. I see how the notion can be comforting, but it's also limiting in more ways than moral strictures and mandatory rituals.

Now that the Teachable Moment has come, environmentally, we find that a substantial portion of the class wants to act up. Look at the scorn and ridicule that greeted California's plastic straw ban. Read the back -- and sometimes all sides -- of a truck or van belonging to a really jacked-up paranoid who sees threats to sacred liberty in every admonition to throttle back and lighten up. You won't have to wait long to see some sentiment that will make you want to retire to a cave and live with the few surviving animals.

In the 1980s I had the same vision that I have today: we could use the grid for good as much as ill. Convenience is not a sin. But conveniences required adjustment to keep them from becoming the engines of global destruction that they eventually did. And eventually was pretty rapidly, because moderation was scorned and ridiculed.

The slogan in the 1980s was "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." It was the golden age of the loaded roof rack, when Yakima and Thule products on the roof of your increasingly large vehicle needed to be locked securely. More than once we heard from friends who had made a day or evening jaunt into a city, only to find their roof rack stripped of every unlocked accessory. We were Recreation Nation, and anything related to the popular activities had really good street value. My attempt to steer that behemoth hinged on trying, through my published writings and in my day jobs, at least to get more people thinking about doing it without internal combustion. Try to get an appreciation of nature to sneak up on them, because Americans -- and probably most humans -- are very resistant to confrontational change. We love confrontation, but only to demonstrate how we can stick to our original position until it kills us. Think of the Confederacy.

I'm approaching a deadline for my quarterly environmental cartoon. The cartoon has been increasingly hard to draw because so many great causes make poor subjects for a single panel image. And I have realized the uselessness of mockery. Humor will only work on someone already inclined to agree with it. The inclination may be deeply buried, unknown to its owner, but it has to be there. Are the few who seem to be awakened worth the stiffened resolve of the outraged opposition?

I don't mind preaching to the choir. It keeps morale up. But nothing seems funny. The extent of the problems that begin with simple individual choices and multiply instantly to a global epidemic, like air pollution or the proliferation of plastic is better served by animation and real video, compressing the sequence of events into a much more visceral revelation of the ugly truth.

One of the hardest things to get used to when you're out there riding a bike and trying to live a low impact life is finding out how many people hate you for it and think you should die. It doesn't have to be the majority. You only have to encounter one homicidal jerk. That's true whether you get tagged by a hit and run driver or you happen to be at the mall the day one of them shows up and opens fire.

Less dramatic and more deadly is the steady accumulation of pollution and degradation by one individual at a time, repeated across a global population in the billions. The system that has evolved funnels gains to a small number of dominant apes, requiring that the lesser apes -- regardless of good intentions -- play some form of the game just to survive. The lifestyle is as inescapable as the music in a department store. It touches every place on this small planet. "Pristine" places are not pure because they are out of reach. We could strip mine the Himalaya, and eventually we probably will.

Another great used bike

After getting a bunch of sass from hydraulic brakes for a couple of days, I figured I would knock out a quick tuneup on a used Specialized pre-gravel bike that someone found. First I had to extend the seatpost so I could clamp the bike in the repair stand.

Good luck with that. The seatpost was jammed in there like the worst rusted Muffy in the junk pile. Carbon on carbon. It's so tight, you'd think it was manufactured that way.

Here beginneth the floods of light oil and other procedures. The first treatment, plus leverage, only produced the first couple of light cracking noises that tell a mechanic to back off.

The rider would have to change the seat height for proper fit anyway. Or they could toddle around with their knees out, chortling about what a great deal they scored.

This is how hours get wasted in the workshop. A few minutes at a time, to save the rest of a profitable and productive repair job, half a day gets flushed away on one attempt after another.

Now put an electric motor and hydraulic brakes on that thing. And route the cables inside the frame, because everybody needs that shit, too.

The things we make and do for each other

In a recent laudatory puff piece on Pinkbike, about his visit to Shimano's factory in Japan, Richard Cunningham used the expression "bowels of the factory." This common metaphor made me laugh out loud. What comes out of bowels, after all?

After decades of cleaning up the wreckage that lies on the shore after a tidal wave of innovation devastates peaceful villages over and over, I have no love for obsessive gear weenies and the corporate behemoths that feed off of them.

Cunningham described and praised the ingenious automated machinery that Shimano designed for themselves, eliminating the human touch from nearly all aspects of their production line. Machines feed material to machines that stamp out parts combined and transported by machines, to be assembled into machines eventually to be ridden by people.

In the article, Cunningham writes, "Keizo said that Shimano realized early on that automation was going to be key to their survival, so they began the learning process by building their own assembly robots – first, developing some of the automation in the machining and forging factory, and culminating with their precision assembly process. Shimano’s experiment grew into a new enterprise and at some point, they were building robots for other industries as well. Connecting the dots, it could not have been a stretch for Shimano to automate a derailleur shifting system after inventing the robots that assembled those components in the first place."

Industrial manufacturing began as a way to speed up individual craft processes and increase their output. It also assured more uniform products that were easier to maintain and repair, that could provide measurably similar performance wherever they were applied. Factory output required fewer people to produce it, compared to individual artisans working start to finish on the same kind of product. Factories could also produce much larger items, through the intermediary of large machinery beyond the means of an individual artisan. Early factories still needed quite a bit of labor, however, to operate and maintain the machinery. Human hands moved a lot of things throughout the increasingly standardized processes. Management and the accounting department have been working steadily to carve down the human element from the beginning.

The relationship between human labor and industrial manufacturing has been dark and complex. The self-appointed emperors of the industrial age viewed the workforce as serfs. Hours were long, management was oppressive and suspicious. The owners wanted to get as much as possible, and pay as little as possible for it, from the contemptible grunts they hired, chewed up, and spat out, in a human reflection of the growing culture of assembly lines. Labor organized. Conditions improved. But labor and management remained opposing camps. Is it any wonder that "Take This Job and Shove It" became a popular anthem right before people started to notice the sudden drain of manufacturing jobs to countries overseas?

Automated manufacturing frees people to take "better" jobs that don't require as much actual laboring. But they remove the human touch, the human soul. Sure, we invented the soul, and can make it obsolete, but an awful lot of our social conventions were based on humans contributing to the common good. What's left when we don't do that anymore?

If mechanized production lines really do a much better job producing reliable parts, riders are safer by that incremental degree. Only time will tell if we have any more massive recalls like Shimano's crank debacle in the mid-1990s, or the Lambert/Viscount fork failures of the 1970s. Those hinged more on design flaws by the supposed better brains in the engineering department than on manufacturing errors by the drones down on the line.

Vestiges of the human touch remain among those of us who try to fix things. Underpaid and still considered overpriced, we alternate between following the manuals when available and improvising when authoritative guidance can't be found. Last week, I did a restomod on a 1970s Windsor that an older gentleman had found at a bargain shop. He loved the classic styling, the chrome lugs, and general elegance of the bike, but wanted the bars a little higher (of course) and the shifting more accessible. I put on a Technomic stem,  aero brake levers with interrupter levers, and stem shifters. He wants the option of the drop position, but neither of us thought he would like barcon shifters. I hoped to find a vintage set of Suntour Power Shifters on a stem clamp, but I had to settle for a recent set of SunRace friction shifters. The right one didn't offer very good leverage for an aging hand, so I substituted a longer lever from our salvage bin on that side. If a set of Power Shifters ever shows up, I'll call him in to make the switch.

At the same time I'm refurbishing something 40 years old, I might have some tweaky marvel from last week on another stand, or next in the queue, needing its internally-routed cables replaced, or some little air ninjas chased out of its hydraulic brakes. And there are always noises to evaluate in bikes with low spoke-count wheels and carbon fiber everything. Fatal or trivial? Quickly now, the guy wants it back for the next hammerhead ride.

Far away, the presses pound in an automated factory, and robot forklifts carry pallets full shiny new possessions toward what they hope is a waiting public.

Subsidized complexity

The stereotype of the Amish is that they opted out of any technology later than the 19th Century. The truth is more nuanced and intelligent. But the basis for their very measured acceptance of any new technology depends on whether the new thing will help the cohesiveness of their community or harm it.

The evolved division of bicycling in more and more distinct categories reflects the fragmentation of society in general in narrower and narrower interest groups that still try to claim larger allegiances, to a religion in general or to a national identity. There is no single Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, to name the three with which I have even passing familiarity. And the full menu of world religions is much, much longer than even the sects of those three. In bicycling terms, a "bike shop" is expected to know about "bikes" and be able to service most of them.

In biological terms, a bike shop is more like a veterinarian than a physician for humans. Under the broad heading of animals, a vet might have to treat anything from a gerbil to a horse, and more. Under the broad heading of bicycles, a bike shop -- regardless of size -- may have to minister to a downhill mountain bike, touring bike, hybrid, recumbent, e-bike, BMX bike, enduro bike, road bike, cable systems, electronic systems, hydraulic systems, suspension, steel, aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, and more. Way more.

The swirl of complexity pleases many customers who find just the gimmick they're looking for in that infinite variety. At the center of the vortex sits the bike shop. Onto the shop the cyclone drops different pieces of debris.

I refer often to the 1990s, because it was the Big Bang of the current universe of technological ostentation. At that time, our shop tried to update tools and parts to be able to service the rapidly evolving suspension systems. A couple of years into that, we realized that the expense of new tools would not pay for itself when a two-year-old fork had already been supplanted by a newer model that worked better. A three-year-old fork could be replaced with a closeout model of a new fork from a year or two ago for only a little more money, and a lot less trouble, than tearing down the thrashed old fork and trying to rejuvenate it. Threadless headsets made it easy. The 1 1/8-inch standard used a standard size crown race. A new fork could be cut to whatever length the rider desired. It was actually a bit of a golden age for customizing that part of a mountain bike.

All good things must end. If the bike industry has anything to say about it, they can't end soon enough. The arrival of dual suspension and the emergence of disc brakes threw us into another chaotic tumble down a slope of loose rock.

A small shop has to do a constant cost-benefit analysis. Because send-away suspension service centers had taken a lot of the burden of that off of us, we could solidify our policy and tell people what it would cost and approximately how long it would take. If they opted to replace a part rather than repair it, we could order and install whatever they needed -- provided its manufacturer still supported it. In the case of something like a rear shock, an exact match isn't always necessary, as long as the overall dimensions and travel will fit.

When it comes to details, some of them quite subtle, we have less to offer. I don't burden myself with overly complex bikes, and I don't recommend that anyone else do so either, but my reasoning is philosophical more than technical. Anyone who wants to ride a mountain bike in the modern style will need a modern mountain bike. Anyone who wants to race on the road will need a bike that matches the average modern road bike. Those who can afford to pay more will get more.

The shop owner has bought a 2018 full-suspension mountain bike. It's already old. The 2019s are out. A customer just bought the 2019 version of the same bike, so we could compare the differences and try to guess where it will break. El Queso Grande has gone on a group ride or two on the fluorescent green rocket. He's picked up a little lingo, but at age 62, with a heart condition, he has not developed any stature in the off-road riding community. We used to dominate not only through our power as riders, but through our unassailable knowledge. The bikes of the 1990s still owed more to pedal bikes from 100 years ago than to motorcycles from 10 years ago. That's no longer true. So our heritage and knowledge is just historical trivia to the few among modern riders who might be curious. The only way we could win their love now would be to buy it with killer deals. You know who gets killed with killer deals? The shop that gives them. If all your deals are made at margins you can't live on, you cease to live. It's that simple.

Hampered by economic setbacks and the caution born of experience, we have invested only reluctantly in new tools. Last year we bought a new truing stand to rebuild a fat bike wheel for a guy who had been going to the cool kids' shop in Alton. The cool guy at the cool shop had built his wheel with alloy nipples. Alloy spoke nipples should always come with a big warning label that your wheel will have a definite limited lifespan. On top of crumbling aluminum releasing his spokes without warning, he'd also bashed up the rim pretty well just from slam-banging around on the singletrack with the currently fashionable .75 psi in his tire. I actually put in a few shorter spokes to accommodate the low spots, so that protruding spoke ends wouldn't pierce the seal of his rim strip. The customer bubbled enthusiastically about how we were his new best friends and that he and all his buddies would flock to us.

We haven't seen him since.

As El Queso Grande curses and grapples with the complexities of this year's crop of technology, it rapidly becomes the old stuff and falls to me to be repaired. A Cannondale, roughly circa 2011, had a sticky caliper on a brake no longer enthusiastically embraced by its maker. We recommended an update rather than a rebuild, given the condition of the whole mechanism. But the new caliper mounts to the posts on the fork without room for the intermediary of the centering washers that were fashionable when the original brake was installed. This made it obvious that the brake posts had never been faced. The tool for that costs more than $250. In the case of this bike, I was able to hand file the posts to get the caliper to sit squarely enough.

All the modern tweaky bullshit eats a lot of shop time. This means that all repairs cost more, because we can do fewer of them in a day. Our daily overhead remains the same, so prices have to go up. The rank and file, with simpler bikes, end up subsidizing the owners of the complicated modern marvels. The riders of these marvels often have no idea how much more of a hassle their equipment presents, because they have such a cushier ride as users of it. They push a button, the gears shift. They push a pedal, the obedient servant provides a power assist. They squeeze a lever, the overpowered hydraulic system clamps the pads against the rotor. It's all perfect until it doesn't work at all. What a perfect metaphor for industrialized, consumer civilization. Here we are with flush toilets, motorized transportation, pretty widespread access to clean water, wondering what the heck is making so much of the rest of the world mad at us. Our biggest problems are traffic jams and finding a parking space for the land yacht. And why are these protesters blocking a road? They should be killed for that.

If every rider owned complicated modern bicycles, service would still be expensive, or it would vanish completely, as the industry got its wish and everyone just bought a new bike every two years. The old stuff just goes on the growing mountains of industrial debris forming a forbidding range between humanity and a world that they could have inhabited pretty happily for an almost indefinite period.

Coming Soon: Moped Monthly Magazine!

Someone dropped off a pile of back issues of Bicycling. One of them included a special section devoted to ebikes.

Check out the Buyer's Guide to Sidewalk Motorcycles, and articles like "Hate to Pedal? Who Doesn't?" Read reviews of selected accessories, like helmets, gloves, and weightlifting belts. Find out why your smokeless moped must have electronic shifting and computer controlled suspension.

I don't mind if people want to invent labor saving devices. But I don't recall the Bicycling Magazine of the 1970s reviewing mopeds. The fact that the power is provided by an electric motor seems to blind people to the fact that this is not a bicycle, except in the sense that the original term for motorcycle was motor-bicycle. Yes, it has pedals and uses a lot of the same componentry. That in itself is a problem, when a 50- to 75-pound vehicle is using a suspension fork and brake system designed for something that weighs 25- to 35 pounds. Wheels and tires are gradually mutating to reflect the actual loads involved. This leads to other problems when the motorcyclesque tire for a given smokeless moped gets dropped from production. I ran into this working on a couple of massively heavy models from A2B. The only tire available to fit the rims is definitely not for a 75-pound behemoth. The rubber will melt away.

The bike industry, desperate for cash after they destroyed the mountain bike boom, is grasping at every straw, including electric wires. I suggest attaching those to the genitals.

You can't stop progress. You also can't stop diarrhea.

Electric vehicles are great. They are a separate thing and need to be considered as such. Quit dumping every whacked piece of crap with pedals onto hardworking little bike shops. Improvement is one thing. Over-sophistication is something else. The minority thrilled by space age, temperamental componentry is vastly outweighed by the people who want a relief from that crap, who were perfectly satisfied with simpler mechanisms, well made, and ask only for safe riding conditions.

It's still winter here, but a pretty crappy winter, so I have too much time to think about the next season and the technological marvels that are imposed on us in a deeper and deeper pile every year. Tool up! Study up! One or two people might need something annoying and expensive worked on! Meanwhile, all the older stuff still needs its routine attention.

The industry's ideal is to make bikes that are addictively attractive, that can't be serviced. Customers will buy them, ride them into the ground, and replace them eagerly, because we all have that kind of money. What happens to the carcasses of the dead? Who cares? Maybe someone will develop a feel-good, token recycling program to salvage the 10 percent of the content that can be. And environmental groups will start reporting on how the remaining detritus has been pulled from the gullets of the last few whales, or something.

New England, where trends go to die

Fads and fashions in the rest of the country tend to take a while to reach northern New England. By the time they're hip and hot here, they're on the way out everywhere else. So here it is, 2017, and some idiot in a truck finally tried to roll coal on me as I rode to work on Sunday.

Rolling coal is the practice of setting up your diesel truck to spew out copious quantities of thick, black smoke in defiance of the prissy wussies who give a shit about clean air. It is childish, vindictive, and one of the clearest indications that the human species might as well kill itself off now as later.

After laying down a rather thin smokescreen, the brave road warrior appeared to try to tail-whip his truck at me, but he was too far past. Off he went in triumph, having put me in my place. I rode in the fumes for a half-mile or so before the air cleared or I got used to the higher pollution level.

I have to remind myself that evolution is a long-term thing, and that I have no control whatsoever over the outcome. A human lifespan is too short for the big trends to matter, unless your span happens to line up with a sudden accumulation of the consequences of a few generations of ignorance and greed. Even then, you can't do anything about it. If massed ignorance and greed wants to keep going, thoughtful people can do nothing but endure the spectacle of destruction that so many people seem to embrace and enjoy. As much as I feel a surge of rage at the antics of destructive idiots, I have to remember that human existence is itself pointless, and that life has been fairly cushy in spite of the looming collapse of a nation that has chosen to live up to its potential to be a nest of spoiled brats rather than the thoughtful, diverse and interesting culture that the advertising led us to believe was possible.

I can only hope that the arrival of coal-rolling in northern New England signals its rapid decline elsewhere, and that the trend here falters and dies out in the face of ingrained cheapness and practicality. When it comes to flamboyantly destroying motor vehicles, however, the famous New England frugality goes right in the crapper. The American love affair with smoke, flames, and loud noises overcomes any restraining convention in this age when restraint is scorned. And the belief that the best expression of freedom is to offend as many people as possible guarantees that offensive behavior will enjoy rampant popularity.

I'm getting too old for this

The bike business does not respect age. Not surprising when you consider that a young adult can propel and maneuver the vehicle to its greatest potential. Not too young; the best riders need seasoned muscles and honed skills. But at a certain point a rider can no longer keep up.

Bicycling in general encompasses an array of machinery and techniques suitable for all ages. Bikes for children are mostly toys, or perhaps prepare them for what they might some day achieve in bicycling's real theater. Bikes for older riders reflect what people past their prime can still manage to be.

Certain elders achieve the status of wise men. Owners of companies, famous innovators, retired racers all can manage to make the young pups shut up for at least a minute. But put one of these silver-tops in a greasy apron in a little shop in some nowhere town and the young guns would not know to be impressed. And if the greasy old geezer turning wrenches has never been one of those luminaries in the first place, the world really passes them by.

In what passed for the glory days, my physical prime happened to coincide with the mountain bike boom and my skills and style happened to be slightly better than average. This is no modest understatement. My edge was very slim. Mechanical skills and analytical ability made up the rest of my powers, but these were certainly enhanced by the number of people I could leave puking behind me on a long climb. The fact that I was puking to stay in front of them, and chasing faster riders, was excused by the fact that nearly all of us were chasing someone faster. If I could stay ahead of two thirds or three quarters of a ride group, that was solid enough. I knew that all the riders ahead of me were puking to stay out there.

There's a lot of puking, actual or metaphorical, in the prime of cycling. And a lot of acid reflux in your declining years.

Briefly, the local mountain bike crowd shifted to road riding before succumbing to the various ailments of aging athletes. Mountain biking itself went off a cliff, literally. Even if I was in my prime, I would not want to ride in the modern style, on the modern arthropod.

The fragmented bike market does not need hard-driving, monomaniacal riders as much as it needs experienced observers and interpreters. But some of its segments still feed on the intensity of the competitor. Lots of riders claim to understand their lower place in the hierarchy, but when they ride you know they're listening to the narration of their private video, or at least feeling the savage satisfaction of chasing down their quarry, real or imagined. An awful lot of people who come into a shop look at the people who work there and mentally assess whether they would be the chasers or the chased.

Actually, an awful lot of people don't come into bike shops anymore. Not in Resort Town, anyway. Even when there was money to be made, it was not easy because it attracted a lot of competition. We left all of them in the dust eventually, but now the dust settles on us, on a course nearly deserted. The segmented market seeks asylum in enclaves of its own disciples. You're either a big shop or a specialty shop.

We're an outpost, in Resort Town. We're that palisade far from civilization where a traveler hopes the blacksmith can knock together something to keep the wagon going long enough to get them home. We'll never be a big shop, because we've chosen to live beyond the edge of big civilization. The place is hardly remote. The lifestyle has evolved from north country lite to rural suburban. But the rough and rocky land refuses to support much of an economy. When people no longer come from away, the locals can only do so much to keep each other afloat.

The model for New England -- particularly northern New England -- is the subsistence farm. Now that the party is over for cycling, our shop is a subsistence farm. The woods are full of the weathered stone foundations of subsistence farms. The inhabitants of them gleaned whatever sustenance they could before they gave up and moved on, or simply dropped.

In the bustle of civilization, life is less of a struggle against indifferent nature and more of a brawl. There may be more activity in the lands of urbanization and sprawl, but it's no less strenuous. The specialty shop is only as good as its reputation. The big shop has to find the right size for its economy, and maintain a staff that will help it flourish, or at least not embarrass it too badly. If a specialty wanes, the little boutique must shift its focus or wither. The big shop or small chain can grow or shrink categories as long as the staff can keep up with the technology.

Technology is driven by desire. Perceived necessity is the mother of invention. Desire breeds an image. An image is an emotional construct. Emotion responds to first impressions. First impressions can be shaped by prejudicial beliefs. We look for what we hope to see, and often see what we have told ourselves to expect. Does this slightly limping, unkempt mumbler really know what he's doing? Why is someone that age still doing this job?

Because I can. Because the craft needs people who respect the craft. Why waste all that experience?

Like any writer, I console myself with the idea that I may yet figure out how to produce and sell something popular, or at least be discovered after my death and become influential then. Beyond that it's probably better not to pick at things too much. You can't do much more than what seems like a good idea at the time, whatever you're into. Good luck out there. If you need your bike worked on, you know where to find me.

Fat Bikes: from obscure to annoying in 24 months

Fat bikes started out as sort of a secret society. Now they're incredibly hip. Maybe that's the secret to success in America: Get fatter. The original mountain bikes were fat-tired, fun-loving and durable. Then they became tweaky and expensive. But once you go fat you can never come back. So only a fatter bike can capture the public's affection. And with popularity comes misunderstanding and come-lately "expertise."

As the fat bike bus gets larger and picks up more idlers from the sidewalk, the cacophonous chatter of misinformation rises in the background. And news of misbehavior filters in, like the report brought to us by a fat bike rider from Barnstable, Massachusetts, that fat bike tracks across fragile dunes in the Cape Cod National Seashore have brought unwelcome scrutiny from law enforcement. When popularity surges, idiocy increases.

A bike shop in the 1990s needed good answers to semi-informed questions from newly-minted experts who got their opinions from the plethora of magazines that blossomed to provide them. Now a bike shop needs to deal with another crop of enthusiasts who want to see fat bikes and hear about fat bikes even if they have no intention of buying anything. A shop's credibility rests entirely on having the latest cool thing.

I wonder how many people who are getting fat bikes now will use them enough ever to replace a set of tires. From an industry standpoint, who cares whether a customer actually uses anything, as long as they buy it? From a human standpoint, I just see more waste.

The fat bike in winter takes advantage of the snow-packing efforts of others. Some intrepid souls may pack down their riding trails by tromping on them in snowshoes first, but the majority of snow preparation is done with grooming equipment, unless the snow type and temperature swings have led to a naturally condensed and firm trail surface. Many miles of trail are prepared for snow machines and other motorized vehicles. The trails and logging roads provide access for human and animal travelers. These trailways were the fat bike's initial habitat. Only recently have the rising number of riders in a coincidentally difficult economy opened the dialog and debate between riders and cross-country ski areas.

The common characteristic in all these potential fat bike venues is packed snow. It's the winter equivalent of a paved road. Thus the fat bike is doing what the automobile did in the early 20th Century, taking advantage of road surfaces improved through the lobbying efforts of bicyclist organizations to take over those roads with heavier wheeled vehicles that would eventually try to make the bicycle extinct.

A fat bike would be good winter transportation if the roads were safe to share, but they're not. So fat bikes become another indulgence for a toy-crazed culture. If you happen to live where bike routes actually go to practical destinations, and someone makes the effort to keep them passable by plowing, snow blowing or grooming, bike on. But around here we're lucky if there's room for two motor vehicles to squeeze past each other in some of the snowier places, let alone maneuver past a cyclist none of them are happy to encounter.

IF humans in general -- and industrialized-nation humans in particular -- suddenly changed their transportation mindset and started providing for winter bikeways and other winter transportation options that did not require bare pavement, winter-adapted bikes would not just be toys. Unlikely as that is, it's not impossible. I like to imagine packed-snow travel ways on which someone could commute by ski or fat bike. I would pay tax dollars for that. Take it out of the road salt budget. Economically, it might make more sense for people in snowy regions to put the car up on blocks in the winter and use tracked vehicles rather than bathe the automobile in brine for six months. But then the tourists wouldn't be able to get around up here to shed money on us. Damn. It's always something.

Shimano temporarily made a good touring shoe (maybe)

Someone sent me a link to what seemed to him like a good touring shoe by Giro. It looked okay, but on the same page I saw something that was as close to a real old-style touring shoe as you're going to find these days.

Meet the Shimano SH-UT70. Closeouts are all over the world of e-commerce. 

You're not going to find a walkable shoe without a place for SPD cleats. The cover for this one at least looks firmly secured.

I'm always afraid to point out when Shimano makes a good product because then they'll notice and kill it. It's like in King Lear (Act III Scene VII) where Gloucester's loyal servant points out that he still has one eye left. Cornwall takes care of that in a hurry. "Out, vile jelly!"

Yeah, I was a friggin' English major. Certainly explains a lot about my financial struggles.

Go to Shimano's consumer site and they've never heard of it, because it's not in the lineup for 2015, but apparently it was out there for a couple of years. The Duke of Cornwall has already squished it.

A really good toeclip-friendly touring shoe needs a tapered toe without bulky bumpers. It needs a sole without a thick rand coming up around the sides of the shoe. It needs a stiff sole, but not a thick sole. It should have laces rather than a rail yard of Velcro or ratchet straps. The UT70 has all of that. It looks a lot like really old-school leather cycling shoes that died out in the early 1980s with the rise of step-in road pedals.

My brother, who has one weird leg, found he could not use this pair of old Dettos I gave him back when they weren't that old. He returned them to me. I might glue some rubber strips to the sole to improve walking traction and use them for summer day tours on the classic steel road steed.

Some day I will have to do a weight comparison between a light leather shoe like this, or one of its mesh-upper heirs with an alloy-cage pedal and a toe strap, and a reinforced shoe for step-in pedals along with a mid-grade step-in pedal. By now, of course, exotic materials have brought the weight down on the step-in systems. But I bet there was a time in the middle of the evolution of shoes and pedals when there was no weight advantage at all with the step-in system.

In racing the two times toes straps were inconvenient were at the start of a race when a whole peloton was trying to clip in at once, and just before an attack, when racers would check to make sure their straps were tight. Nowadays they check to make sure their shoes are tight. And nothing warns them if their cleats are a bit run down and are going to pop out under the explosive load of a sprint. Woo Hoo! We goin' DOWN! SMACK! SCRAAAAAPE! Human crayon. Massive pileup. And a whole peloton fishing around for the cleat interface isn't a whole lot smoother than a whole bunch trying to flip up their toeclips and snug the straps. The step-in is slightly more convenient because it's hands-free, but no one talks about the other costs. It's another thing that isolates The Cyclist from regular people who ride bikes and want to blend efficiency with off-bike functionality.

If you choose to use a toothy pedal cage and no strap system you will want a thicker shoe sole made of material soft enough to allow the pedal cage to bite in, but not so soft that the cage chews the sole away too quickly. All this has been covered extensively by far more revered experts well before my humble observations. I mention it because I like to cover a topic thoroughly.

Take away the strap and you no longer have to shun bulky rands and toe bumpers. That does not mean such details are really useful, only that they are no longer an inconvenience. Personally, I don't believe that every casual shoe has to look like some kind of hiking boot.

From Bike to Band Wagon: Fat Bikes are the width of fashion

As a small shop, the place where I toil is always trying to find a niche product that fits our expertise and cash flow. So I had been monitoring the development of the fat bike market in our area.

We're located in an outer province of what might be called Snow Country. We did a good business in the mountain bike boom and managed to survive without over-extending or humiliating ourselves. Our weekly mountain bike ride was known as moderately hot -- sporty but not ferocious. We did not follow mountain biking down its intensely technical and increasingly expensive path. But I did try to maintain a good relationship with Surly. We saw the Pugsley come onto the scene. It seemed like an amusing piece of overkill for our locale.

As cross-country ski seasons became more and more unreliable we reexamined the fat bike as a tool less dependent on snow cover. But as cross-country ski seasons became more unreliable our budget diminished.

Thank goodness the fat bike has gone from a subculture to a movement. We no longer need to regret missing the niche because the niche has blown open into a fad. You can get a fat bike from Bikes Direct to the Repair Shop.com for under $700. Specialized has peeled the Fat Boy name off its old BMX bike and slapped it on a production fat bike. Kona's playing. So is Trek. And that's where I quit looking, because I got the gist.

You can even get one from WalMart. It's only a single speed, but it's only $199!

Are fat bikes going to recreate the mountain bike boom? Don't bet on it. But the surge in popularity takes the pressure off the small shop because now we can have one or two of the beasts around without making a scary commitment to six or eight expensive behemoths. We can mix in a model from a vendor we're already showing rather than trying to do right by a small company that can't offer the same kind of terms. The small companies can maintain their exclusivity and stay the right size. This means Surly won't get blown out into a multinational conglomerate and have no use for the Cross Check anymore.

It will be interesting to see whether Big Bicycle will figure out how to bring fat bikes down to the lower price points they would need to offer to create a boom like the 1990s. When mountain bikes first rose they did it on a fairly broad front. Once the genre was accepted it used many conventional dimensions, so the industry had little trouble producing several generations of bikes before the rampant mutation set in. Not so the fat bike. It is a product of that mutation, an overstatement of the concept of wide tires and sturdy frames. It is a caricature suddenly appreciated as art. And it is art. But a huge boom will require an international roll-out not only of the bikes themselves but of the parts they need to keep them running. It has begun, but can it continue, with an average price over $1000 US on most basic models? Ignoring the Walgoose, that is. The Bikes Direct the Repair Shop $700 price is a limited sale, according to their website.

If I know the bike industry, they will start to get destructively competitive within a year. They always seem to assume ridership and battle each other for market share, oblivious to the way their technical shenanigans burn away participants. But all that lies ahead. For now, fat is beautiful and everyone proudly displays their ample spare tires.