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.

Simplifying things gets more complicated every day

 Friction shifting is the key to simple versatility. As long as the derailleurs will handle the chain wrap and the largest cog* you can put any wheel in there that will fit.

*If your frame has long dropouts, you can even push the limits of the largest cog. Just pull the wheel back to make more room for the upper derailleur pulley to clear it. Good luck finding a modern frame with long dropouts unless they're track dropouts, but the concept is sound. However, there are limits. And the industry pushes them closer and closer every day.

A customer received a Ridley cyclocross bike, looks to be about a 2014, and wanted to convert it from its racy gearing to something more comfortable for a "more seasoned" rider negotiating New England gravel roads. New England doesn't do switchbacks. By the Puritan ideal, if the Good Lord placed a hill in front of you, you go straight up it and sing a hymn at the top.

The tight gearing on the bike was as low as it could go with the short cage Dura Ace derailleur. Any derailleur compatible with his index-only brifters wouldn't handle as large a rear cog as he was hoping to employ. But he's been at this for enough decades to have lots of experience with downtube friction shifters. He used them for multiple recent long distance tours where he essentially section-hiked a transcon over two or three seasons. That was on a much older steel bike which he has now replaced with a Surly Disc Trucker. But the Ridley was a gift from one of his kids who was finished with it as a race bike, and he couldn't let go of the idea that he could make it suit his needs for day rides around here.

After crunching a bunch of numbers I concluded that there was no way to make his desired setup work with those brifters. I assured him confidently that he could do anything he wanted with friction barcons. I based this on all of my own bikes, and numerous conversions for other customers. But none of them were very recent, and none of them had pushed for as much gear range as this rider wanted. The friction barcon option seemed to bypass most of the obstacles, but a new trap lay in wait.

He figured that a 42-tooth low gear cog would suffice with the 34-tooth inner chainring on the existing crankset. He would pull down the outer ring from 50 to 44. I researched rear derailleurs to find one that could handle the chain wrap and large cog. Using friction shifting, we didn't have to worry about index compatibility. It just had to haul the chain from one side of the cassette to the other.

Cable routing was complicated because they run inside the down tube. Routing on the handlebar was also complicated because the 3t bars run the cables inside the top section. While slightly less messy than running hydraulic lines through both the bars and the stem, it's still virtually impossible to feed a piece of cable housing through the holes they give you after you remove the one that used to be in there because it's too short to reach the new shifter position. So screw that, I ran the housing outside the bars, but only after wasting a couple of hours trying to feed housing through the route that 3t intended. I could have fed a cable through the old piece of housing before I yanked it, but I needed to be able to fiddle and fit the new housing to get the length just right, which would mean multiple insertions and removals. That would have gouged up the sheathing of the housing before I made the final connections.

Although the rider was not going to try to index, I used index housing in case by some miracle the indexing worked. It's also stiffer in general, which should help when hauling the chain up onto that ridiculous low cog. However, routing it under the tape takes a lot of hand strength to hold the bends in place while I secure them with white tape.

Note: Electrical tape has no place on a bike, especially on your handlebars. It gets disgusting.

To keep the route clear inside the frame, I had to place feeder sleeves so I could install and remove the cables multiple times while establishing the proper length for the housing, including the inline adjusters. Inline adjusters aren't needed for friction shifting, but I wanted them in case I got the indexing to work. They're also nice to snug up the cables to make sure that you can hork that chain up onto the lowest cog, even if the lowest cog isn't freakishly large. Your average technolemming has no appreciation for the stress placed on the parts that give them their fashionable gears on demand.

With the cable finally secured enough for a test shift, I hauled up on the right shifter. The derailleur made it to about three cogs from the lowest gear and stopped. Okay, the cable housings probably needed to settle in. Snug the cable, try again. Same result. The cable was tight. The shifter itself had reached the end of its travel well before it moved the derailleur enough to make the full spread.

The term "actuation ratio" entered the biking vernacular way back in the 1990s, when SRAM was trying to establish technical credibility after their lawsuit pried Shimano's fist slightly loose from OEM spec on every brand. It had been a factor ever since Shimano forced index-only shifting on us in 1990, but other factors obscured its importance. Even after SRAM started clucking about how their actuation ratio was more efficient, it mattered so little compared to other factors that no one considered it more than a piece of marketing hype.

It matters now, buddy. For much of the 1990s, owners of road and mountain bikes could do a fair amount of mixing and matching. Shimano and the technofascist industry hate mixing, matching, and independent mechanics. We're bad for the bottom line. Perfectly matching parts groups offer the kind of precision that the average rider craves until it doesn't work. Tell the consumer that they have to buy a complete purpose built bike for every application and the ones who can afford it will do so. However, the bike business -- as separate from the bike industry -- was a very early canary casualty in the crumbling middle class economy. That and the consumer thirst for entertainment that requires no exertion and little independent thought. Fewer people overall had disposable income and fewer of them were disposing of it on bike stuff.

The bike industry offers a plethora of categories, and models within those categories, so that the well-funded consumer can have the exact bike they crave for a given riding style. If you don't have enough money, they ain't talkin' to you.

With everything index-only and engineered to perfection, actuation ratio not only controls precision within a category, it also can now impede the friction shifting outlaw. I have to see if I can find the right combination of a shifter and derailleur to make the full span. For instance, a 12-speed barcon intended to match Shimano mountain actuation ratio pulls more cable than the 10-speed road shifter I spec'd originally.

Total cable pull is not a statistic that ever mattered. With a downtube shifter with no hard stop, just keep pulling until the chain goes where you want it. The angle could get awkward, so there's a functional limit, but not a solid curb. A barcon, on the other hand, has to work within the angle set by the bracket inserted into the end of the handlebar. The amount of cable pull is set by the radius of the cam through which the cable is inserted. No one keeps track of that specific dimension, because the "number of clicks" is the determining factor for the riders who depend on that crutch. Total cable pull just comes along for the ride.

When I chose parts for the conversion, I looked past the 12-speed shifters. I shy away from the high numbers by reflex, because I avoid the sheet metal cogs and tinfoil chains of high-count cassette systems. I've used nine-speed cogs to build custom cassettes, but nothing thinner if I can avoid it. Cog farming becomes increasingly difficult, so I have had to slip the occasional ten-speed cog into the mix if it's the only one available with the right tooth count.

Personally, I would never own anything with ten or more cogs in the back. New bike purchasers can't escape them, though. Some bikes have come through with nine-speed cassettes, but the available derailleurs for nine-speed index-only are getting cheesier and cheesier. Derailleurs in general are getting cheesier and cheesier, but the amount of metal in them drops off sharply at the lower price points where nine-speed lives now.

We had other options. Originally I had found a crank with 46-30 chainrings that would work with his brifters, but then the compatible rear derailleurs still didn't get him the low gear he was looking for. Once we ditched the brifters, we seemed to have a clear path to the giant cassette, but that led to the current complications. I looked at using the 46-30 crank again and noticed that the one I had marked didn't work with the BB30 bottom bracket on this bike. There is a BB30 model, but you have to look for it. Even then we have no assurance that it will function smoothly, because all compatibility info is geared toward making the indexing work, and nothing else.

"Screw your indexing," I say, but they're making that difficult. So what's next for the simple rider? A fleet of fixed gears each with a different pair of cogs on the two-sided rear hubs? Choose your pair of gears for the day? Or have your caddy follow you with a rack of bikes, each geared differently for the various sections of the route. Or go with the old way of hand-lifting the chain between chainrings and rear cogs, but you definitely need long dropouts for that.

Refusal of technology is getting to be as hard as keeping up with it.

The current project remains incomplete while we wait for the 12-speed shifter to arrive. If that solves the problem, along with off-label use of an 11-speed Deore derailleur, that'll be that. If not, we try the crank. Each option comes at a cost. We warned him at the outset that it would be expensive. Advised him to hand the bike off in its original form to someone who wanted to ride it the way it was. Your odds are much better converting a classic steel frame to various other purposes than they are if you start from anything later than 2010. Little by little the industry walls off whole sections of the bike -- literally in the case of internal cables and hydraulic lines. Figuratively in the case of proprietary shifting systems. You even have to worry about the shape of your chain now, because the really cool ones are directional. SRAM's even have a flat top that's apparently crucial to proper operation.

Fuuuuuuuck that shit. I feel deeply sorry for the young riders who never lived in an era of true mechanical freedom. I feel almost as sorry for the riders who did have a taste of that era who have bought the line they they need to "upgrade" to the modern ephemeral crap. I suppose the ephemeral crap serves as a memento mori, a reminder to live to the limit of your resources because neither you nor any of your works will live forever. But who can really forget that after the age of about 12, and that's if you lived an extraordinarily sheltered life. We spend most of our lives with an awareness of fragility and death. We don't need another reminder, fed to us through predatory capitalism.

I suppose that the industry might actually be operating with its old naivete, desperately trying to engineer its way out of the craphole that it engineered itself into. Manufacturers have earnestly tried to improve the machines all along. It's just that cycling has split into such divergent styles that the different species can no longer crossbreed. The original mountain bikes were descended from bikes. The modern mountain bike is descended from motorcycles. The genres have nothing to offer each other anymore. They share some characteristics like pedals and a sort of general configuration, but that's all.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

Independence Day

Main Street was blocked off. Spectators already lined the road to watch the parade. I rode up to the police officers at the Central Avenue intersection. It's a grand name for less than a hundred yards of street.

"Can I get through to Nordic Skier" I asked, gesturing toward Main Street.

"On that?" one said, indicating my bike.  "Sure!"

I thanked them and excused my way through a thin spot in the spectator crowd. I hate being the entertainment, but I had no choice. Hundreds of people waited on either side of the car-free street. I threaded carefully through the random wanderers popping out to take pictures of their friends or searching for a place to squeeze in.

At Mill Street I negotiated passage back through the spectator wall to ride around into the back parking lot of the shop.

Once upstairs in the workshop I had time to look out from the elevated vantage of the backshop windows at the automobiles stuffed into every possible spot, and the bands of parade watchers still streaming in. I spared only occasional glances at the parade once it started. Most of the time, I worked on repairs and contemplated the absolute saturation of the parking facilities. You could not have stuffed another car anywhere, in any direction I could see.

Even on the ride in I had enjoyed the cyclist advantage. Motor vehicle traffic stopped on Center Street at least a quarter of a mile from Main Street. I don't know where people hoped they could go, or how many -- if any -- were just passing through and had lousy timing. Traffic wasn't stopped completely. I had to ride carefully, threading the Death Slot to the right of them at times, and flowing with them in the short breaks where they could move forward.

Usually at the end of the parade, traffic both wheeled and on foot streams the other way, a tide going back out with Fundian energy. The high water mark of humanity and their vehicles surges strongly on the ebb. Within an hour, parking areas in town can be nearly deserted as everyone disperses to whatever other fun they have planned. They'll be back for fireworks at dusk, but I'm long gone by then. This year, however, the parking eased up considerably, but a lot of foot traffic remained. We sold three bikes, did multiple quick repairs for riders only here for the day or the weekend, and had to stop repeatedly to host browsers among the clothing racks, or ring up sales.

This stands in contrast to the previous month or two in which we sold no bicycles at all, and had many ominously uninterrupted days. I don't know why this particular Fourth and its attendant weekend was so busy, but the fact that it lined up so neatly, with the Fourth on Friday, might explain a lot. We're not used to seeing heavy traffic anymore, so a day that would not have impressed us in the 1990s now seems like a big deal.

Summer brings more vehicles, many piloted by people who live where they have to drive more aggressively just to survive. This leads to some increase in close, fast passing, but also a more subtly dangerous tendency for drivers to stop suddenly to wave their fellow motorists out of side streets and driveways. Those drivers nurture the fantasy that we're all nice to each other in this theme park rendition of a country town. A rider needs to be ready to stop short as well as sprint, and read the body language of the larger vehicles. It's our little urban experience embedded in the months of small-town riding.

At the end of the day, I pedaled serenely out my usual route. Evening hazards dwindle rapidly as I pass the driveways of a couple of eating and drinking establishments on the way to the back route out to Route 28. On the Fourth, the evening commute fit into the lull before fireworks traffic.