New Shop vs Old Shop

 Long before I arrived, the shop where I work opened in 1972 with a few simple tools. The bike side started as a way to generate summer income in a business primarily focused on cross-country skiing.

They picked a great time to go into both of those markets. As the shop grew, the owners were able to amass more tools, both new and by purchasing at the liquidation of one or more bike shops that went out of business in the region. They never had the legendary Campagnolo tool chest, but they had a lot of classic tools by the time I showed up in 1989.

Remembering a few items that were extremely useful in my first shop job, I introduced them to the lineup. Most frames were still made of steel in 1989 and into the 1990s, so frame prep tools were a sensible investment to increase our capability in the competitive business environment of the mountain bike boom. We started keeping an annual wish list of tools to add.

When suspension forks became standard, we tooled up to service them. But that's when the math got more complicated. Suspension designs evolved rapidly. The tool kits to service each generation changed as well. Now we had to consider how many jobs we could bill for, to offset the prestige of being able to do them at all. We could easily spend a few hundred bucks to work on something that consumers and industry would quickly abandon for the newer and better model. Some of the tools might still apply, but designers were looking ahead much more than considering backwards compatibility in anything.

For the latter part of the 1990s, with threadless headsets now the standard, and fork designs changing every year, it made more sense for consumers and for us to have them buy a closeout fork that was newer than the one they had worn out, but not the latest greatest for the typical high introductory price. We could install a threadless fork for cheap money. They might pay more than an overhaul cost, but they would have a better fork. Every single customer went for it.

Before the internet, we competed with mail order. Customers would come in with their catalogs and ask us to match prices. Sometimes we could, but often we could not. We might get them to buy what we had because we had it, so they didn't have to wait for shipping and pay that extra cost. Sometimes we would tell a customer that we would match the mail order price but they couldn't have the product for five days. Pay now and wait, just like they would have to wait for delivery of their bargain purchase. Mail order places that gave free shipping put more pressure on us, as do the internet vendors today. A huge amount of retail has gone online, where big retailers seem to be feeding upstream from wholesalers, putting pressure on the whole supply chain for in-person shops like ours. The online stores can low-ball pricing and still make their margin, while wholesalers can't offer low enough prices to make in-person pricing competitive.

Service can't be automated. Maintenance and repair takes a human with knowledge, spending time and using tools. But tools and knowledge come at a cost.

As bike tech mutated through the 1990s, a lot of service was still intuitive. You could look at a mechanism and figure out how it came apart and went back together. Shimano led the way making inaccessible components, followed by Fox shocks that had scary labels warning that you were basically holding a hand grenade, but the progress to our current state of technological paralysis was gradual. We sidestepped the suspension service side until mountain biking suddenly died in its tracks shortly after the turn of the century. And it really did. Around here, it went from the thing everyone was doing, almost every day, to almost nothing. The remaining regular riders switched to road biking for perhaps as much as a decade, but even there the numbers overall were lower as the prices crept higher and motor traffic steadily increased. 

Road bike tech evolved more slowly than mountain bike tech. And in areas of the country where mountain biking hadn't died back as dramatically, the machines were mutating wildly, seeking the motorcyle-esque configuration that they have now. When some demand suddenly returned, we'd had no financial incentive to be ready for it.

When the mountain bike boom began, it built on the frugality of the ten-speed boom that had preceded it. One of biking's great appeals was that it was cheap fun. Buy the bike. Get some clothes and shoes if you want to get that much further into it. But then you just have to keep up with routine expenses like tires, chains,, lube... You could do a lot of riding for a little money, and have the rest of your cash left over for the delicious food that fuels your travels. Early mountain bikes started out as cheap beaters. Off-road riding was just kind of a hoot, a side line. When it seized the public consciousness and took off, the bikes were still made on the principles of the ten-speed era: solid, as affordable as possible, and marketed as fun and practical at the same time.

"Practical" went in the dumpster a while ago. Fun is a matter of opinion. "Affordable" was replaced by "money is no object."

With recent sporadic demand for suspension services, I reopened the inquiry to see what we would need to invest to tool up. For just two brands of suspension, Fox and Rockshox, the tool cost got close to $6,000.00.

In the 1990s it was a point of pride, but also a competitive advantage to be able to do things that other shops couldn't, even if you only did it once or twice. Reputation mattered when shops were competing across a fifty or hundred mile radius. Actually, with our summer population, we had to withstand comparison to shops more than a thousand miles away. But the investments were incremental. Even if the demand was inconsistent, it enhanced our legend to have done it. Replace the ratchet springs in your Campy brifter while you wait during your ride around the lake? Can do! Just take a long lunch. More elaborate services took longer, but every time we exceeded expectations it built our reputation. However, the budget to do that depended on a lot of cash flow from the other sectors of the shop. Our reputation-builder jobs seldom paid for themselves directly. Campy ratchet springs are cheap enough, but suspension service takes up a lot of clean space and requires tools and parts on hand.

A new shop starting today will invest in the tools needed for the technology of today. A new shop aimed at the new clientele of incoming young riders and established riders still spending the money to have current technology will make their money back on the jobs those riders demand. Over time, the new shop will mature, accumulating legacy parts and tools as they fade from the leading edge and become "that old stuff." In an old shop, our old stuff reaches well back into the last century. But we acquire our new stuff based on actual demand, not anticipated demand. We don't manage to keep a full representation of tools and parts for whatever might come in, because we only make survival margins on what actually does come in. And what might come in probably won't bring with it enough money to have made our preparations worthwhile.

The arc from new shop to old shop to used to be a shop plays out everywhere in different proportions based on local conditions. A big shop in a busy area will be able to invest in tools and training. They stand a better chance of recruiting young mechanics who will put in their few years before moving on to something that might actually earn them a living. At the same time they will accumulate old parts and tools to service the variety of machines that might come to them as bikes remain in service for decades. The bikes that remain in service for decades are not the ones with all the fancy new crap. The new shop, focused on the latest, will have to make an extra effort to learn about the antique stuff, and master the skills to care for it.

Wolfeboro has a mountain bike subculture now that exists completely separately from our shop. No one has yet invested in a new shop to serve them officially, but one or two amateur operations do it now as hobbyists.  It would cost us thousands of dollars to prepare to compete with these hobbyists, with no guarantee that we would prevail. In all likelihood, we would never see a return on our investment. So we limp along as those contemptible old geezers with a noisy bar underneath us and toilets flushing over our heads from the short-term rental condo above us.

In another part of town, a "makerspace" offers bike services through a hobbyist who retired from medical practice, and perhaps a few other volunteers with varying degrees of knowledge and experience. People pop up all the time who "used to work in a shop" before doing something actually respectable for the bulk of their earning years. Some of them possessed a high degree of skill for their time. Absolutely none of them have the slightest interest in picking up a couple of shifts in our shop to cover small gaps in the schedule. The makerspace does free service and offers repair instruction by the good doctor. He seems to be fairly competent, but only with what he has personally used. And he's devoted to tubeless tires, so I consider that a bad influence on inexperienced newcomers.

We never get to find out who didn't come to us because they went somewhere else. Our overhead dictates our pricing, so we face an immediate handicap against hobbyists who require little or no money for their services. That's one of the pitfalls of the "free market." People who will do the work for free have to be pretty bad at it for the average consumer to choose to go to someone who costs anything, let alone charges a rate that tries to keep pace with the cost of living. Even a spiffy new shop equipped with the tools and parts to fix your space-age marvel will face that challenge.

Maybe mechanics shouldn't be riders

 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 rock and ice. 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.

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.

Replacing car trips with e-bikes

 "Replacing car trips with ebikes." That headline greeted me as I skimmed through the ol' inbox a few days ago.

First of all, it's a great idea. It would reduce the volume of large, boxy vehicles in traffic, although it would probably increase the overall number of vehicles. Second, it would reduce fossil fuel consumption. By extension, that would reduce tailpipe emissions. It would drastically alter the parking situation. But it would also drastically complicate the riders' lives in ways that they haven't imagined.

Motor vehicles have been the norm in this country for so long that massive support systems exist to keep them rolling. How many parts store chains can you name? NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, AutoZone, WalMart... you can get auto parts everywhere. You can go in with pretty fragmentary information about your car and the people behind the counter can usually find what you need in their voluminous cross-reference books. No such network exists for bicycles, e- or otherwise.

Most people drive vehicles that they don't even begin to understand. Car broken! Go to mechanic! Mechanic fix! It costs a lot of money, and we often feel that the mechanic might be shady or not that competent. But at least we have options, and the mechanics -- professional or home DIY -- can get parts, tools, and manuals, as well as the ubiquitous YouTube videos.

Electric bikes have almost none of this. Not only are they a much younger technology, they come in from a scorned and neglected sector by identifying as bicycles. In addition, many companies have abysmal tech support.

Because smokeless mopeds are so popular, independent support will evolve quickly, but it's happening very unevenly. In Wolfe City and the surrounding area, smokeless mopeds have been playthings of the rich for more than a decade. For some of them it's been since the 1990s. As the category has taken off in the past few years, the opposite end of the income scale has taken to it heavily. The wealthy have had resources that the worker bees will never enjoy, including calling up the CEO of an e-bike company and getting parts sent directly as a favor, executive to executive. That ain't the real world.

A local working class e-bike user who grew up working on his own internal combustion vehicles has delved into the inner workings enough that he is considering starting an e-bike service business. We are encouraging him, because smokeless mopeds are not bicycles. They share traits in common, but the motors and electronic aspects demand knowledge that the average bike shop shouldn't be burdened to acquire.

You might say that the competitive economy presents challenges and opportunities, and that anyone unwilling to embrace this new aspect of "bicycle" evolution is a slacker and defeatist, but you would be a dick. Simple economic reality stands in the way of this idealistic vision.

Someone starting a business from scratch can decide how to expend capital to equip that business. Let's assume adequate funding to establish the business. For smokeless mopeds you will want a powered lift, or at least one with some mechanical advantage built in. Depending on your expected volume of business, you might want two or more. I have only the vaguest idea what you would need for tools to service the electrical aspects, but they aren't free.

You will need space for this operation. If you also service regular bicycles, that will probably call for a parallel service area with the usual few thousand dollars in tools and workstands, plus staffing. Smokeless mopeds being a separate genre, you can probably focus solely on them.

My car mechanic has a three-bay setup in a side-street industrial park, for just himself and an occasional assistant. Smokeless mopeds don't take up nearly as much space as cars and SUVs, but they're generally bigger than regular bikes. Just as car repair places tend to accumulate derelict hulks parked here and there around the place, so do bike shops, including smokeless mopeds. Owners abandon them over the bill, or you scavenge them for parts, or you just get tired and go home at the end of day after day and never quite get around to processing the carcasses.

Once a business is mature, and has been operating in a dying industry that went into decline right after a phase of merciless competition between retailers, it has been getting by on slim margins and a shrinking customer base for years. We have no bag of cash to finance an effective expansion into a rapidly changing market sector only vaguely related to our original core strength. It's hard enough to keep up with the ridiculous bullshit produced for pedal-only bikes.

For now, the network of commercial and private e-bike mechanics barely exists. New owners are coming in much faster than support is forming around them. The vehicles are fairly reliable, but when they fail it could leave you stranded. The rider who is considering starting a service business almost lost his storage shed and more when the battery caught fire during charging. Fortunately, someone else spotted the fire in time to knock it down before it really took off. Battery fires are the most spectacular hazard of e-bike ownership, but hardly the most common.

Electric bikes either work or they don't. An internal combustion vehicle will enjoy its youth all shiny and tight, devolving gradually through the various stages of beater car (or truck), probably passing from owner to owner in the process. But electric motors don't generally just run rough and metaphorically burn oil. They either work or they don't. If something is loose, you don't want to let it rattle for too long. If power is intermittent, you need to find out why, or risk having to pedal your 60-pound behemoth with nothing but your li'l legs. Because that's another thing that evolved to support cars and has no comparable service for bikes: towing.

E-bikes are mostly massively heavy. Batteries and motors are heavy. You can buy light e-bikes and you can buy powerful e-bikes, but you can't buy light, powerful e-bikes. This may change, but for now the lightweight materials that might help with that equation are things like titanium and carbon fiber, which have mostly appeared on high-priced bikes. Carbon fiber in particular can suffer from the abuse and neglect that most of us inflict on our daily drivers. Light, thin metal and plastic might serve to lighten cheaper bikes, but with a resulting loss of ruggedness. Things will bend and break more.

You can't blame the industry and its cheerleaders for encouraging as many consumers as possible to become test pilots for generation after generation of failed experiments. The bike industry did it with mountain bikes through the 1990s without a twinge of shame. They also destroyed their market in the process, but they raked in some good bucks for a while before the dropoff. And the evolved product really excites the few people who can afford to buy one and ride in the style that the bikes have been shaped for.

E-bikes probably won't shrink to a niche product the way mountain bikes did, but their wide variety creates a parallel universe to the categories of bicycling. The categories don't line up exactly, because the e-bike spectrum extends from very bike-like all the way to virtual motorcycles. An e-bike is a motor vehicle. Expect costs to reflect that, even if they're lower than for a car. They'll never be as low as for a nice, basic transportation bicycle.

Remember "House?"

 In the medical drama "House," caustic genius Dr. Gregory House diagnosed mysterious afflictions that suddenly struck down the patient of the week, for eight seasons of often nauseating entertainment. The nasty genius used his mega mind, extensive education, and long experience to slice through the confusion and bring us the answer.

After the previous medical drama ER made patient -- and even doctor -- survival far less likely, viewers were trained not to expect a happy ending. House delivered pretty often, but sometimes the patient died. Also, House would be wrong several times in the episode before delivering the right diagnosis within a few minutes of the end. After you watch a few, you realize that early certainties never pan out. "Do this!" House snaps at his team. We look at the clock and go, "Nah, that ain't it."

Without all of the good-looking actors, life and death stakes, and medical bills that would bankrupt a medium sized city, bike repair has become like episode after episode of House. A patient comes in with weird symptoms or what looks like a simple problem at first. We diagnose and treat. It fails. We try something else. Thing is, no one has bike medical insurance, so we the greasy healers are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money on these false starts.

Bike shops have no medical associations in which we share our experiences and publish papers in a journal. We don't know what other mechanics are doing. Online videos show either idealized versions of various procedures or selected experiences of individuals who may be amateurs and inexperienced. And if the video doesn't cover the exact model in the exact year that you're dealing with, the information might not help at all. On top of that, who has time to spend hours trolling through search results in hope of finding a tutorial that might not even be out there.

Forums may yield some useful knowledge, but are just as likely to attract experienced misinformation or loud, confident, and wrong newbies. You have to sift carefully to find cases that fit what's in front of you on your work stand.

The manufacturers really don't care if you can fix anything. They just want you to buy it. Ancestral sources like Sutherland's and Sheldon Brown can't keep up. We're thrown back on our experience and education -- such as it may be -- to analyze the problem.

With every added cog in the cassette, mechanical shifting gets more and more temperamental. As the manufacturers abandon what used to be the state of the art, replacement parts for that number of speeds are made more cheaply. This includes shifters and derailleurs. You had fancy ten-speed when it was the best? You're just part of the rabble now. Eleven speed is rapidly going the same way.

Any repair could turn into a frustrating mystery these days. I like a challenge, but most of this crap is just an affront. Parts are disappearing for the old, reliable, simple bikes, while tech support barely exists for the new, throwaway bikes. I get it: to a racer, the entire bike is as consumable as chains, tires, and tubes used to be. As long ago as the 1980s, racing was already turning into a massive science experiment. It has only gotten more so. Rider and machine need a complex support system to eke out those hundredths of a second per kilometer.

Advancements in racing technology through the 1970s improved quality for all riders, because we all used similar mechanisms, shaped slightly differently for variations like racing versus touring, and, later mountain biking. As disciplines diverged, particularly off-road, there was a lot less cross-pollination.

People here used to complain from time to time about the level of detail I would go into, but less time was wasted diving right in as opposed to dithering around trying to figure out how to avoid it. Lately, though, it seems that diving in doesn't assure solid results. Too many things have to work too perfectly together.

The road bike that's giving me fits right now was built on a bare frame in 2017. The owner rides hard. He raced a couple of short seasons, mostly just a nearby training series, but it's a competitive series. He rides with people who never go easy. Over the years, we have replaced gear cables and housings as necessary to restore precise shifting, along with chains and cassettes. This time, though, I can't get it to behave.

The brifter seemed to be worn out. It needed too much lever travel to engage, which meant that it didn't have enough left to climb to the low gear cog. I changed the brifter. It was crisper, but still did not have the reach. The chain gauged pretty new. We'd already changed all cables and housings with tried and true 5mm. The bottom bracket cable guide can't be removed because the bolt that threads into an insert in the BB is rusted in, and the insert itself is broken loose from the bottom bracket shell. It's been that way for years. It shouldn't matter as long as the guide stays in position. Cable tension should hold it.

I rigged a brifter in parallel, using full-length housing, to test the derailleur itself. It shifts the full range. So something in the cable system is eating lever travel. I can see motion where the cable housing enters the upper end of the downtube. There's a bit more waggle where the housing exits the chainstay near the derailleur. Is that enough to cause the problem? Parts are all original, and very simple. But the hole in the downtube could be worn. After all this, is the answer something simultaneously stupid and difficult?

Possibilities on the whiteboard: Maybe I should drill out the frame and run full-length housing. That's a one-way trip, though. How about using carbon-compatible epoxy to shim up the frame hole? But I don't want to glue the cable stop into the frame. That might make future cable changes even more time consuming.

I tried every combination of cable housing, including 4mm, 5mm, and mixing widths in case the flex characteristics of the 4mm handled the bends better than the 5mm we can get now. I'm happy to say that 4mm did nothing to help. Eventually, I put on a new brifter, new cassette, and the 5mm housing we had installed first when we thought it would be the routine repair we had completed successfully several times over the bike's life. I got it to hit every gear from the 39, and every gear but the Ned -- the full cross 53-28 -- from the big ring.

Given the option of taking the bike with the gears we could get or making permanent modifications to install full-length housing, the rider opted to take the bike as it is. He even said that it hadn't been getting the Ned for a while, and he was fine with that. We'll see how things go.

Nothing is a sure cure anymore. Every fix is temporary. Who needs another metaphor for life when we just want reliable machinery? I hop on my primitive bike, day after day, and just go. I can change a cable on the side of the road in about 15 leisurely minutes. If I get a flat, I put in a new inner tube, pump it up, and ride on.

Correcting a long held misconception

 Conservatism in its best sense means a cautious acceptance of change. Changes have to represent actual improvement. Things get murky from there, as various factions debate what is an improvement.

Science is conservative in its insistence on peer review and repeatable results. The method is methodical in the strictest sense.

Evolution of technology throws ideas into the world to fend for themselves, often with very little testing beforehand. Get something so it sorta kinda works and throw it out there for eager early adopters to risk their lives on. That approach dominated the 1990s mountain bike tech boom. Companies competed not only to invent and refine parts and systems that actually worked, but to market whatever they made to an eager and largely uneducated public, to make customers pay for the R&D. Let riders in the field break stuff on their own dime rather than pay for exhaustive testing before unleashing the next latest and greatest transitory offering from the firehose of obsolescence.

During this time, I judged each new thing on the totality of its merits: initial function, longevity, and serviceability. Some was good. A lot was bad.

Drive train manufacturers each defended their proprietary shifting systems, which meant that we had three or four different freehub spline patterns duking it out in the marketplace for a couple of years. While I agreed that the freehub concept put the rear axle bearings in a better position to support the axle, I recalled that freewheel threads had seemed like a pretty universal standard. And that is the misconception that got corrected last week.

I'd been fortunate in my time as a rider and novice mechanic never to encounter a freewheel thread disparity. In the 1970s, anyone who tried to do their own bike work learned about nationalistic thread pitches and other variations, like Italian bottom bracket shells, weird tire sizes, things like that. Because I didn't read myself to sleep with Sutherland's every night, I missed a lot. One or two of my bikier friends had copies, but I only looked into them when I needed specific information, like spoke lengths for a wheel I was building.

So: last week I started in on a complete overhaul for a customer's 1980s Panasonic road bike. I was told that he had done a lot of his own work, but wanted to have the bike gone over professionally before a big trip he was planning this summer. The bike was old enough actually to be serviceable, so I had no misgivings. It looked well used, but not too weird.

At some point, someone had installed a sealed bottom bracket, so I wouldn't be opening that up. The pedals didn't look serviceable, either. The BB is central, often the first place I'll start. Pedals that do have serviceable bearings are the pickiest components to work on because the ball bearings themselves are tiny, and adjustment can be hard to secure. I chose to start with the rear hub.

The wheels don't match. The front has a Joy Tech hub and Araya rim, probably original. The rear wheel had a Campagnolo Record hub and a Mavic rim. The freewheel looked like a Suntour two-notch Winner 7-speed. But no brand name was visible, and the notches looked slightly atypical.

Suntour freewheels can present problems, especially the four-notch models. The tool has to be very carefully secured. The two-notch models are generally more robust, but you can't rush them.

I secured the tool in the deep recess presented by the seventh cog, so I couldn't see what was going on in there. The tool slipped when I applied leverage with the big Park wrench. I examined the damage and determined that the tool couldn't seat fully. I dug in a bin of other old freewheel tools for one that looked like it would engage more fully. No luck. It didn't mar things, but it didn't budge the freewheel, either. I started examining the various elements of the puzzle more closely.

I'd had to remove the locknut, spacers, and hub cone from the drive side to get the tool to seat. Markings on the cone indicated that it might not be English thread. That sent me to Sutherland's to look for all possible variants of the Campy hub, and freewheel threading. And there it was: French threads don't play nicely with any other type of threads. This rider had an English thread hub and had graunched a French thread freewheel onto it. It can't have gone on smoothly. That thing is never coming off.

Best guess from internet image searching, it's a Maillard.

You can overhaul a hub without removing the freewheel...sometimes. This is one of those times. It won't be as clean or quick as a complete disassembly, but it will be better than the loose and crunchy mess he had.

As I removed cones from the axle, I felt that they presented continuous resistance. This could have been from crud in the threads. But no, I noticed a tiny curl of metal coming off as I painstakingly unscrewed the cones and fought them off over the slightly buggered threads that had held in the dropouts. Once I had the axle out I could see that someone had ham-fisted the Campy cones onto a generic Asian axle. Yeah, you could do it, with steady force, as long as you don't care about the damage to the threads. The axle was also too long for the 126mm spacing of the rear triangle. I dug up a new axle with appropriate threading. 

Replacement axles used to be very reasonably priced. Now, however, very few people must be buying them, because they're stunningly expensive. Like, they were between ten and twenty bucks retail all through the 1990s and early 21st Century. Now they're more than $40. You could buy a functional Shimano RS400 rear hub for about the same money. Now, if you were fixing up something that was really good in its day, a $40 axle might make sense, especially if you enjoy thumbing your nose at the industry. The cost of a good time just keeps going up. Inflation.

The bike may originally have had only six speeds in the rear. I can't tell from shifter clicks, because the right-side downtube shifter is permanently jammed between the index and friction settings. It makes a scraping, rasping sound when you shift it. I would recommend friction shifting anyway, because it allows you to use any freewheel or cassette that will fit in there. Number of speeds doesn't matter. All of my road bikes have personalized 9-speed cassettes running with 8-speed chains.

The controlling factor on chain width, aside from whether you get interference on the cassette, is whether the front derailleur cage fits closely enough to shift efficiently between chainrings.

My acceptance of a technology reflects a constant cost-benefit analysis. The new crap might offer some specific advantages, but are they worth it for the average rider compared to the added expense and pain in the ass that they bring? The stone age simplicity of nice bike componentry from the 1970s into the 1990s provides reliability and durability to general purpose riders of all types. Racers and technical specialists, regardless of competency, will need the more temperamental, expensive tools and weapons at the cutting edge. The rest of us can have a sporty good time on the old-fashioned stuff, or a facsimile made from the remaining offerings still on the market.

In conclusion, any time you thread things together, don't keep going if they don't go smoothly. Find a copy of Sutherland's. Check out Sheldon Brown's old site. If you have multiple options in your parts stash, feel around for a combination that works easily. 

Waste is not just a personal choice

 I'm cleaning up e-bikes for a very wealthy customer. They need parts replaced because of careless maintenance and poor storage. I was told by their property caretaker that the bikes are fairly new. The parts aren't worn. They're corroded. Brake rotors deeply pitted. Aluminum parts beginning to bubble their paint as white blisters of oxide form underneath it. Chains rusted to rebar.

As the bike industry has suffered shrinkage that was largely self-induced, merging with economic setbacks related to the pandemic, and end-stage capitalism in general, I have less and less patience for the rich and feckless who don't have respect and care for their toys. I compare these bikes to that of a worker who literally rode his ebike to pieces, using it as transportation through the New England winter. I resent the grimy task of trying to remedy rich people's neglect. I will charge them. They will pay. They always have. But, while we wait for parts, their 50-pound pigs are cluttering up the shop's limited storage space.

They waste equipment because they can: a trivial write-off that they excuse because they can afford it. They're creating jobs. But they're also wasting manufactured objects that may be in short supply. They're spitting on the labor that went into making their bikes in the first place -- labor that they wasted by taking crappy care of machines that someone else might have wanted and been able to put to good use.

The brake rotors they need are not in stock right now at our supplier. I will piece together something out of our stock, just to get the bikes out of our way, but that means that anyone who shows up right afterward, while we're still waiting for replacement stock, will not get a quick turnaround, even if they depend on their bike to get them to their subsistence job.

Two of the mounting bolts of the rear brake rotor on one of the bikes are rusted into the hub. The hub is the motor housing. The rotor is heavily rusted. Worst case, they have to buy a whole wheel because the bolts won't come out, but can't be trusted to stay in after all of the efforts to remove them. Drilling them out would require perfect precision to remove only the old bolt without damaging the bolt hole. If threads needed to be repaired, it would require a skilled machine shop, not just a hand tap, because the holes are shallow and blind.

This isn't a metaphor for the destructiveness of wealth. It's a flat-out demonstration of it. The attitude became prevalent in the 1980s, as we accelerated away from the early surge of the environmental movement and our flirtation with social consciousness based around the gains of the civil rights and women's movements, and the anti-war sentiments stimulated by the Vietnam War. The pursuit of personal wealth became the main focus of society. The sole measure of whether you should do something was whether you could pay for it. You didn't even need the money, as long as you could get the credit approved. That, incidentally, is why the economy collapsed at the end of the decade, ushering in the 1990s on a recession. Eventually you run out of places to transfer your balance, and actually have to pay something.

Economy is hard. We have unemployment when more people need jobs than jobs need people. We make poor provisions for the players on the bench, because we tend not to think of them as such. We just hope they're still alive and functional when we need to put them in the game. An actual pro team pays those reserves. Not the free market, though. Social safety nets are stigmatized. Employers know that people are busily manufacturing more people, so someone will be around for the next call-up. Industrialization views people as interchangeable parts. Life is cheap and individuals are common.

The winners in the economy take what they want of land, possessions, experiences, and delegate as much as possible of the grubby chores. Their contribution to the economy consists of the money they didn't pay to some laborers, redirected to as little as they can get away with paying to selected other laborers. What are their actual job skills, and why are they worth that much to the rest of us? It's an honest question.

I value real services provided by people who might not have to exert much or get physically dirty in the course of a work day. I can still ask what's fair on a basis other than "whatever the market will bear." The market is driven by marketing. What if things we've been conditioned to condone as lucrative are complete bullshit? I'll bet you can think of a few. I know I can. But only an impossibly detailed audit could disclose all of them and devise a genuinely fair pay scale.

Down here in the middle and lower reaches of the current income scale, we tend to hire each other to do things for which we personally don't have the tools and knowledge. Pure self sufficiency is a myth. It doesn't even exist at the level of photosynthesis. All of life depends on some kind of external input. The higher you go on the income scale, the more you find people who can delegate everything, providing only money and demanding satisfaction.

The level of demand varies widely. People with only one billion dollars look up the steep face of the mountain above them to the lofty heights where the multi-billionaires live and feel like they're one of us little people. Billionaires are people too. They're just as capable of expressing appreciation, even as some scrabbling dubs can be real jerks about paying for services rendered. I could tell you stories... But even as I recall a few, I realize that they're based on a sense of economic asymmetry. We were the richie rich bike shop in the richie rich lakeside town, and the customer was a hardworking dirt digger from that place between the luxury of the lakeshore and the tourist dollars of the mountains: a no-man's land where even the glaciers just dropped their junk and left all life to fend as best it could on scraped rock, gravel, and sand.

This particular time presents a new level of challenge, with the economic policies of the current regime and the unrest associated with the threat posed by their authoritarian governing style. The bike business already suffered from a number of ongoing forces bent on squeezing us into a smaller and smaller social and economic space. Biking in general suffered from the industry's attempts to create consumer dependency. Now all of those struggles wiggle through the obstacles presented by a drop in tourism, and reduced spending by consumers in general.

We still see people who seem oblivious to the instability. Consumer confidence is supposedly low, but some of the individual consumers who show up to spend seem almost dangerously manic. By and large, people buying things ask the same questions that they always have. Buying a bike, they ask about its features and benefits. Getting a bike repaired, they ask if it's worth fixing, and how much it will cost. They're little islands of normality scattered through days where hours pass without a phone call or a customer coming in. It's in those hours and silences that we see the effects of uncertainty.

Repairs are trickling in. Usually they flood as soon as the weather gets warm. The warmth has not come on in a steady rise, but the waves of chill are shorter and more above freezing. It's been years since we had a "normal" bike season. Those years depended on circumstances that will never be repeated. So we feel our way. We try to be ready for customer needs...and wants...

And on to the next dream...

 After finishing the e-bike stretch cruiser it was time to replace the shifters and crank on a beautiful late-1990s Dean. The bike might actually date from right after the turn of the century. We've been seeing it in the workshop nearly every spring or summer for a long time. I built those wheels more than ten years ago. Maybe so long ago that we looked up parts in a printed catalog and placed orders by phone.

The picture above shows the bike after its recent changes. Originally, it had a Campagnolo Chorus crank, Record 10-speed brifters, and Centaur derailleurs. I vaguely recall that we had already upgraded it from 9-speed to ten-speed by the turn of the century, but we did work on a number of Campy-equipped bikes. Campagnolo actually provided instructions for changing some internal parts in a brifter to change the number of speeds. And, of course, the internals were completely repairable. But the shifter bodies and so many internal parts on this bike were now so worn that repair would have cost a lot more than a new set of brifters.

A lot of years had passed, but Campagnolo had always been the leader in backwards compatibility. You can buy quite a few parts for a 25-year-old shifter, although some of them are being phased out. During that 25 years, the parts fit models that spanned more than eight years, which is phenomenal in the post-Shimano era of technological hyperactivity.

The rider wanted lower gearing than the 53-42 chainrings on his existing crankset. Campy's 135mm bolt circle limits how small a ring you can fit, and they have to match that proprietary bolt pattern. Back when Campy's BCD was 144, other manufacturers copied it. Then Shimano and the Japanese makers brought in the 130 bolt circle diameter, and the industry shifted to that. This meant that you could put on the 53-39 combination that became the de facto standard for road cranks for years. You could even get a 38 for the inner ring, but few did.

When compact road cranks came in, they used the 110mm BCD that mountain bike chainrings were using. Mountain bikes still used triple chainrings. Road compact cranks were designed for just two rings up front. While the young and strong would combine the new little 50-tooth big ring with an 11-tooth cog for the hardest one on the cassette, the 50-34 combination that was most common served as sort of a secret granny gear for riders who were starting to feel a little faded as age took its toll.

So many years had passed before the owner of the Dean felt the need to gear down that a nice compact double for ten-speed was tricky to find. I also recommended trying to match the aesthetic of the old steel frame rather than sticking some aerospace monstrosity on there. I suggested, and he agreed, to get a Velo Orange Grand Cru Drillium crankset. It was actually a little more retro than the bike, but it's also fairly affordable and distinctive compared to the monotonous hellscape of soulless modern componentry.

It's actually made by IRD. But Velo Orange has their Grand Cru badge applied to it, and they deserve support for being such a friend to the retro rider.

The owner dropped the bike off in late March, 2024. I was able to get the brifters and bottom bracket right away. The crank was shown as out of stock for a month or so. The customer was willing to wait. That ETA got kicked down the road a month or two at a time, all the way to the end of the year. We nearly lost the job entirely, but I had contacted Velo Orange directly by that time, to confirm that they were still going to have the cranks at all. We got the customer to hang on. The crank finally arrived a week or two ago. We were still in ski mode, so I didn't start the job right away. We were also buried in the stretch cruiser project, which had been plagued with its own spec problems, but those had resolved more quickly.

As I dug into the Dean, I discovered that the slop in the shifters had been masking slop in the derailleurs. They were very floppy. That led me to look at what we could get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs.

Nothing. That's what we can get for Campy 10-speed derailleurs. Not a zippin' thing. Zippity doodah. Zilch. Nada. Campagnolo has abandoned their faithful long-term customers actually worse than Shimano. Shimano at least still makes some 10-speed road derailleurs for mechanical shifting, with brifters to match, for those who are addicted. For the friction shifters, the truly free, we can buy whatever derailleur we like the looks of and can afford. But for the brifter-dependent, the company that launched the industry into technofascism still has a little lifeline hanging out for the laggards still nursing their older stuff.

Funny: fascism was actually invented in Italy, and the Italian company was the slowest to adopt technofascism. But they're racing to catch up now. Be sure to shell out massive bucks for their 12-speed electronic stuff. It's kind of nice to see them back to duking it out for pro team spec, but the game has no soul anymore, so what are we really winning?

Way way back, in the 1970s and early 1980s, you could actually get every part of a Campagnolo derailleur, separately, to replace what might have gotten bent or cracked in a crash or a workshop mishap. It was treacherously easy to strip the threads on a front derailleur swing arm when tightening the cable anchor bolt. Good thing you could buy just the arm, install it, and pledge to use a lighter touch after that. You could also crack the clamp band, tightening the derailleur on the seat tube. Again: press the rivet out, replace the band, put on the new one and be more sensitive, you clod. Do you caress your lover with those awkward, loutish hands?

Well yes, yes I did, which explains my long spells of monkish solitude, but anyway... You can't get parts to rebuild a derailleur anymore. Long gone, though I do recall seeing them as late as the early 21st Century. I'll have to dig into my archive of Quality catalogs. QBP's print catalogs used to provide such complete tech information that we could figure out a lot of repairs and compatibility puzzles just from what they included about each product.

I had recommended that the customer stick with Campy because of their legendary durability and product support. Seems like I should have investigated them a little more deeply before charging ahead with this job. The customer and I were both trying to extend the life of existing parts rather than junk stuff and start over. Now, if he isn't satisfied with how this thing shifts, we have no option that doesn't cost him a chunk of change to take a different tack.

These shifters seem less substantial than they used to be, and the upshift thumb lever impedes removing the rubber hood to mount the brifter or run cables.

They also only fit 4mm shift cable housing, which means that we can't fit them with the easier-running 5mm which cures so many shifting problems.

Just like Shimano, Campy declares that their shifting systems and drive trains have to be completely matched, 11-speed with 11-speed, 12-speed with 12-speed, end to end. While I would be inclined to test them, trying to graft in 11-speed derailleurs with these 10-speed brifters, the lowest priced front derailleur retails for about $60, and they don't even list an 11-speed rear derailleur. So then we're experimenting with a 12-speed rear derailleur costing more than $200. Or we go on the hunt for good used, and new old stock.

If we talk him into friction barcons, he either eats the cost of the 10-speed brifters and buys some nice brake levers on top of the barcon price, or he uses the brifters as brake levers only, which looks kind of weird and accentuates our defeat at the hands of the technofascists. And all of this is just so that we can graft in whatever derailleurs he wants to try. Whatever derailleurs he wants to try includes pretty much anything on the market if he shifts in friction. They just have to have the gear range and chain capacity to match what he has. And friction shifters will be much more forgiving of the slop in the old derailleurs. He could just keep running those until they totally flop off.

I'm insanely loyal to old machines that I've grown to love. Aided by my own mechanical knowledge, friction shifters, and access to parts, I will keep my own stuff going for decades. I provide the same service to any customers or friends who want to cultivate and maintain the ancestral riding skills. It bums me out deeply when a customer decides to euthanize an old bike because they fall for the lure of the new and exotic, or just decide that something old isn't worth spending money on. I can't afford to rescue any of them, let alone all of them. And I always feel guilty if my enthusiasm for bike immortality and persistence in the face of a challenge leaves them with a result that they're not delighted with.

The industry makes it increasingly hard. Any of us interested in the deathless bike need to pay constant attention to keep track of something that might have been replaceable that has now turned into a vital organ to be preserved. Friction shifting can cover a lot of situations, but it can't work around systems that the industry completely abandons, like certain chainring sizes, or cassettes for proprietary freehub bodies. I'm looking at you again, Campy. While it's contemptible on one level that the entire rest of the industry adopted Shimano's Hyperglide spline pattern, it does create a de facto cassette standard that makes mix and match a lot easier.

I do have a Campy-equipped carcass in the shop basement that might yield donor organs, but it might be 9- or even 8-speed. It's that old. I have defended it against many a clutter purge over the years. Vindication would be sweet. I'm not into losing to the industry and the throwaway mentality.

5 Days ≠ 5 days

Ski season demands a different kind of energy than bike season. In some ways it's lower. If we have good snow, leading to active rentals and retail sales, we have to deal with a lot of immediate customer needs, but almost nothing spills over into complicated services. Dealing with the public can be tiring and annoying, but it's basically a revolving door kind of transaction. They trample in, we hand them gear, they trample out. In the afternoon, renters return to drop their wet gear and leave again.

I work some long days in rental season, arriving early to set up the shop after wet boots have laid out overnight to dry. My personal life goes on hold for as long as the peak period lasts. That depends on the weather. It could be a couple of months or a few days. It only demands patience and infection control. The five-day week is tiring. I'm always glad to get to the shorter hours of spring.

Here's the thing: bike work, especially service work, is way more exhausting than ski work. Winter is exhausting in its way because I have to take care of my house, clear my driveway, shovel my roof if the winter calls for it, and still get to work on schedule. It taxes my body. But bike work absolutely drains my brain, and has an emotional component as well as I try to handle all of the variables.

Bike comes in for service. What kind of bike is it? How old is it? Expensive or cheap, was it well made? Plenty of expensive stuff out there in the last 20 years is poorly thought out. Some of it, particularly from fringe e-bike companies, is shamefully crappy. But even the "good stuff" from what are perceived as reputable companies suffers from technophilia. So when I assess it I have to determine if it was ever fixable, let alone whether it is still supported.

As the 20th Century neared its end, bike companies started getting more and more coy about publishing tech information and specs. For a while we could keep an archive of printed catalogs to have some idea. Back when we went to trade shows, we could pick up materials from the brands that we didn't sell as well as the latest from our own vendors. That not only helped us when chiseling customers quoted competitors' prices to us. It also helped us repair those bikes. And the bikes themselves were simpler, which helped everyone, especially riders, whether they realized it or not.

I advocated for simplicity as I saw the trend in the industry toward complicated, expensive mechanisms. No one listened to me. Customers voted with their wallets in two ways: A bunch of them abandoned biking altogether. The remainder were technolemmings eager to run off of whatever cliff the industry put a shiny new gizmo on the edge of.

The next steps after figuring out if a repair is possible at all are to determine if we have parts on hand or can get them. At the same time I have to calculate the cost and see if the customer is willing to pay it. People will sink astonishing amounts of money into a piece of cheap junk, while others will walk away from something in the mid or upper price range that could be fixed for significantly less than the price of a new one. It's just that new ones are so expensive that "significantly less than the price of a new one" is still several hundred dollars. We have repairable full suspension bikes abandoned in our basement because the owner ghosted us. More than once this happened after they said, "I do want to pay you for your time." No you didn't. Don't even bother to lie.

You might think that we can then spiff up those bikes and sell them for enough to recover our sunk costs, but with all of the other things that we have to do with a rapidly aging skeleton crew, like vet our decrepit rental bike fleet and keep up with the billable work for customers who do want to pay us for our time, rehabbing a mountain bike rapidly going out of fashion never seems to get done.

As a repair moves through the process, setbacks might occur that lead to additional charges. Then I have to feel out the customer without scaring them off and figure out how much, if any, of the extra cost we can recoup to avoid losing our entire investment of time and material in the repair so far. Most people don't need their bikes. It's all discretionary spending.

The ones who do need their bikes don't usually have a lot of slack in their budgets, no matter how willing they might be in theory to pay us what we're worth. We've had two bikes hanging downstairs for at least four months while the owners try to scrape up the money to have a flat tire repaired. We know from experience that if we fix the bikes and let them go without payment, the owners won't get back to us with the money. Heck, we've got a guy who actually worked part time for us to score employee discounts who is into us for a couple thousand for an e-mountain bike and trailer. Times are tough. A lot of our inadvertent charitable donations are not tax deductible.

The work no longer inspires hope or is particularly satisfying. Some customers appreciate it. Others take it for granted. The cool kids are all way cooler than I am, so I'm barely a step above someone pushing a broom to them. Maybe not even. So at the end of the day, and emphatically at the end of a week, I'm fckin' done. I want as much of the season of light and warmth as I can get. All too soon we go spinning into the darkness again, to grapple with whatever passes for a winter.

Who is this dirtbag?

 We see them all the time, even in our affluent resort town. A sketchy character brings in a bike that no collecting hobbyist or trendy technolemming would ever want, and bargains for the least amount of work we can do to get the machine operational again. It doesn't even have to be safe. Just get it so that the pedals pull the chain around and the bike moves forward. Some of them don't even have brakes. A scuffed work boot or blown out sneaker will suffice.

Then there are the eccentrics with limited finances and one oar in the water. They come in all ages, genders, races. Some are born with challenges that hinder their pursuit of income and housing. Others suffer head injuries, or battle addictions. Some are just on their own track, seeing the world in their own way. Somehow, they have all come to the bicycle, and the bicycle has welcomed them.

Life already wasn't fair when I was a kid, and it has only gotten less fair since then. There are more and more people, many in unstable family settings, or no family setting at all. It's comforting to embrace the lie that they would all be fine if their families were miraculously transformed into the mythical models of the 1950s and '60s, but the cracks were just plastered over back then. The simple fact that we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet while wondering why ecosystems are failing and the climate itself has been buggered never seems to influence the idea that social failure is solely the result of flawed character in at least two generations of strivers.

We deal with riders in each of those categories just in our dinky town. In my previous bike shop job, in 1980-'81 in Alexandria, Virginia, customers ranged from a family who could afford custom built little Eisentrauts for the kids, down to Moped David, who loved his yellow Motobecane "Yellow Bird." Location matters, so we had more from the affluent end of the scale back then, but in Annapolis I saw the bike hierarchy laid out as well. I only worked in a backpacking and mountaineering store there, but we had one customer who had lost his marriage and home and pickup truck to alcoholism, and now went everywhere on his bike. Two of the town's bike shops were on West Street, an artery that stretched from the heart of downtown at Church Circle all the way out to the edge of town at Parole, where it split into several two-lane highways (at that time) headed generally westward. There were many riders and few cyclists among the commuters along that corridor.

Annapolis was mutilated  through the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century by car-centric transportation decisions that made cycling much more dangerous and unpleasant, and didn't really do all that much for motorists either. The areas that grew large buildings and sprawling parking lots drove the development. Road builders just did what they could to throw down pavement in straight lines to connect everything. Some of it reamed out existing roads, adding lanes and traffic lights. Some of it added roads to slam traffic into the existing corridors whether they were ready for it or not. Don't even ask whether they ever really could have been ready for it. All this makes life less pleasant for the recreational rider, and exponentially more dangerous for the cyclist of necessity.

One customer in Wolfeboro now, whose backstory and physical appearance indicate that he may have native Alaskan ancestry, bought a used bike from us to commute to his kitchen job at a local restaurant. A little while later he said that he had gotten a construction job for more money. But then he showed up again at the restaurant job, because the contractor he worked for required him to have a motor vehicle, but his income -- increased though it was -- wouldn't support the purchase and routine expenses of car ownership. Economically, the restaurant job was a better deal, because he could continue to use the affordable bicycle. It's not a great deal, but it's more survivable.

I ran the same calculation numerous times in my own life. I might have made a fraction more money in various editing jobs during the decline and fall of print media, but it would have required owning and using a car every working day, driving as much as a hundred commuting miles each day. The little bit more money would be absorbed and then some by the expenses required to go fetch it. Or I could sell out where I was living and go rent in the more expensive area where the jobs were, probably never able to scrape together the funds to buy back into the real estate market. The real estate market itself is a problem: I don't think I'm unique because I bought a house as a place to live, not as an investment. I didn't -- and don't -- care whether it appreciates in value. I just want it to shelter me. The built-in inflation of a capitalist mindset screws the lower end of the income scale even as it devours their lives for necessities they provide. The same is true of any growth mindset rather than a maintenance mindset.

Transportation riders who have to wait weeks to have worn out tires replaced don't get any help except from a charitable friend if they happen to have one. No one gets "bike stamps" to help them keep rolling. The people who get any subsidy have been in jobs where the company health plan pays them to buy fitness equipment so that their prosperity doesn't make them sick with the expensive ailments brought on by forced sitting and boredom snacking. The HMO reasons that subsidizing equipment now will mean that they don't have to fork out for costly medical care later. It's not benevolence, it's cost accounting.

The rise of e-bikes has led many cyclists of necessity to choose the motor vehicle over one powered by meat alone. It makes sense: they didn't want to be pedalers in the first place. We fix what we can for those riders as well, just as the shop in Virginia fixed The Yellow Bird. 1980 was the waning days of the 1970s moped boom that accompanied the bike boom. That shop had a dedicated moped department with its own mechanics, who enjoyed the motorized aspects. Now, as the smokeless moped has slipped in through the side door solely by forgoing internal combustion, bike shops are expected to embrace and understand them. And the worker bees who choose them don't even give them that much thought. It's just a bicycle, right? But with a motor! How cool is that? It's - like - perfect!

People are accustomed to the failure of their devices. The steady reduction of quality in every appliance has led to a culture that replaces rather than repairs. The "right to repair" movement runs hard into the fact that most things haven't been made to be fixed. Assemblies snap together in ways that break when you try to open them. The people who do fix things have to charge an amount of money that will support them, making the services too expensive for many of the people who need them the most: consumers of used equipment, nursing it through its declining years -- or months -- because it was all they could afford.

The bike industry embraced the disposable model within the first decade of this century.  Parts are gradually being withdrawn for what had been ubiquitous standards throughout the 1980s and '90s. Up until the past couple of years I could confidently tell a rider that an older bike could be maintained and modified relatively easily to suit individual tastes and needs. It's still true, but the options are narrowing. As a low-budget rider my whole life, I appreciated the fact that I could put together a high-quality, nice handling bike from scrounged parts. They might be scrounged new, but they were not bound to any other parts so closely that I had to buy an entire drivetrain to match. Working in a bike shop has given me the advantage of buying things at cost, but the disadvantage of a meager income. But even when I worked outside the bike industry I could shop sales, buy used items, and make targeted purchases of new stuff. The incremental upgrades to my primary bike led to the parts stash that would adorn the next bike. Tools and knowledge put me in a position to help other riders to put together and maintain their bikes for as long as they were interested. That wasn't usually very long.

The bike industry of the 1970s and most of the 1980s built bikes for the long term. Twenty years was a goal. It was a selling point. Same was true in backpacking and hiking gear. Buy good boots, take good care of them, and you could resole them for decades. It offset the discomforts some people experienced when breaking in a sturdy pair of leather boots. But industry observers figured out that most people don't stick with anything for that long. Products can be flashy and flimsier, sell better in the short term and head straight to the landfill. It clears the way for more products to roll out to enthusiasts who decide to reenlist, and newbies looking for the state of the art. Old gear doesn't mark you as a veteran, it stains you as a cheap old geezer too dumb to evolve with the times.

Sometimes, change really does represent improvement. This is certainly true in both cycling and outdoor gear. But in both cases the majority of change seems to be driven by the marketing and accounting departments more than by long-term users who want to spend more time out doing the thing rather than shopping to replace whatever just wore out or broke after a few months or a year. It puts us all on the conveyor belt of expensive replacement, not just the poor idiots who can't afford good boots. The upper echelons of consumers can still support the expense of replacement better than anyone struggling to stay equipped at all.

Without a car, I depended on my bike to get to whatever job I had. Even now, with a car, I depend on the significant amount of money I save by not using it. I have the car when I absolutely need it. And my life has been propped up by several lucky breaks. See earlier reference to how life isn't fair. The person who presents as a dirtbag or a weirdo and doesn't have the backstop of a few strokes of luck is not a lesser person solely based on that.

Assholes inhabit every level of socioeconomic status. This is why I don't embrace any automatic standards of brotherhood on that basis. And, oftentimes, the downtrodden are scarier people because of the ways in which they might act out their frustrations. The psychopathy of the rich tends to be more impersonal, perhaps even unconscious, in perpetuating the systems that create and maintain an underclass that might drag a beat up bike into a shop in search of aid. That "underclass" rider might not expect brotherhood from a place that serves an activity forced more and more into recreational areas, using ridiculously expensive machines to go stupidly slowly compared to motorcycles and ATVs.

We've had a few young guys put full suspension mountain bikes on layaway after they worked with a cheerful trail builder who tried and failed around here before packing up and moving on. He presented a welcoming and hopeful scenario to the kids who helped him lay out the first professionally designed and meticulously built trails in the area. But his business acumen didn't match his cheerful personality and artistic standards. The young guys failed to complete their layaways, and have not returned to try again. Perhaps they have been lured to other attractions. Perhaps they would come back if they could scrape up what it costs for a trailworthy bike.

Back in those 1950s and '60s of golden memory, even through the '70s, kids rode bikes until they could qualify for motor vehicles. The surge of adult cycling in the 1970s recast bike riding as potentially a lifetime activity for more people than the enthusiast base that existed before then. Changes in development through the 1980s progressively reduced the habitat of youth cyclists whose parents were being fed increasingly scary possibilities by media coverage of crimes both real and imagined.

I rode my bike on the streets wherever we lived, from about the age of six or seven. I was never hit by a car or even seriously honked at, from central Maryland to Rhode Island to mid-coast Maine and back to Maryland. The Miami area was a little hairier, but still overrun with riders. It wasn't until the later '70s that motorist hostility went from startling to expected. Others had worse luck. One of my cousins reported getting drilled in the back with a full beer can while riding in the Philadelphia area in the late '60s or early '70s. There were more than 100,000,000 fewer people in the country when I was a kid, and kids riding their bike to get around were a common feature.

We were supposed to outgrow it. That was the accepted model. Then grownups started filling the streets that were increasingly filling with the mere mass of assembled humanity. We were bound to piss each other off.This is the environment that riders of necessity are thrust into and that idiots like me choose to stay in. We may not share a common love of the machine and its simulation of flight, but we do share a common hope to survive each trip.