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.

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.

Bikes are like cars now

 Our energetic trail builder has been forging alliances all around the region for the ambitious vision of turning Wolfeboro into a unique destination for mountain biking. He recently met the owner of a prominent shop in neighboring Maine, who told him that the pandemic had provided a great opportunity to start nudging service prices up to "where they should be."

This shop owner starts from the laudable goal of paying his staff a good, livable wage. To earn this, the technicians are certified to do suspension work, provide full service to electric bicycles, and any other credentials that will look good in a simple black frame on the waiting room wall. He described it as similar to taking your car to an auto service center, where the people all wear neat jump suits and have documented training. "And you pay for that," my friend said.

And you pay for that. Thing is, the best car service I have ever gotten has been from a hard-drinking, independent genius whose shop uniform may start the day clean, but ends up fully grimed by the time he knocks off somewhere between 8 p.m. and 1:00 the next morning. You'll never find him there before noon. He's semi-nocturnal, because it suits his biorhythms and he finally gets some uninterrupted hours when the phone doesn't ring and people don't drop in on him. He has some certificates hanging crooked on the grubby walls of his waiting area, which is mostly a place for his dog to lounge. The fancy service place isn't just charging for competence and your best interests. They're charging for the jump suits and the spiffy building and the cheerful person who checks your vehicle in, and the ones who answer the phone.

I can see both sides. I hate having to interrupt a tricky bit of mechanical work to answer an insistently ringing phone or launch a party of bike renters or just answer casual questions from someone who hopes to impersonate a customer long enough to be able to ask to use our restroom. I would love to make more money and achieve respect for my knowledge and ability. But I also remember when bikes were a vehicle of true independence. If you want to invest in more and more expensive tools, and learn how to service the more and more temperamental and complicated mechanisms of the modern super bike, you may still achieve a measure of independence. But because of the complexity, and the perfect precision with which all the pieces have to work together, your freedom only lasts as long as someone can make you the parts that fit your particular marvel of modern engineering. It misses the point of the bicycle entirely.

We've gotten used to the idea that a car is old when it's been on the road for three years. People do hold onto them for longer than that, or buy them used from the first owner who loses patience, interest, or trust after three years. The used car owner then holds onto it for another three years before handing it on to the next level of owner, who can't afford to buy anything fresher, and puts up with the increasing eccentricities of an aging vehicle. Eventually the car is too degenerated to function anymore, and gets scrapped. But the system has evolved around motor vehicles to provide the parts it needs at all of these stages. My used car is a 2003. When I got it I felt warm and happy because it wasn't too old and hadn't been driven hard. But the years sneak by, and suddenly it's 17 or 18 years old, and it's been driven by me. But I can still get it fixed. Something will finally break that dooms it. Maybe by then I'll be working for The Dream Shop in Wolfeboro, earning a livable wage, so I can buy a newer old piece of junk to pilot through my declining years.

This is the vision of the crowd that wants riders to pay like drivers. There's already a bit of a used bike progression, but because parts support isn't there for obsolete high-tech bikes, the used buyer of a formerly cutting-edge bike depends a lot more on luck to get any use out of the investment before something breaks that dooms it.

Your odds are better buying a 30-year-old bike than a 10-year-old bike, or even a five-year-old bike. They're even better buying a 40-year-old bike. For instance, I just changed the gearing on this 40-year-old Motobecane road bike, to give the rider the lower gearing of a compact crank and a wider range freewheel.

I'd done the rear derailleur and freewheel earlier in the year. The other parts weren't available yet. The crank is a 74-110 arm set offered by Quality Bike Products under their Dimension house label. The rings -- bought separately -- happen to be ramped and pinned for easier shifting, but the rider is used to flat rings, and shifts in friction, so there are no clicks to coordinate. The inner ring says "for ten speed only," meaning the current version, with a skinny chain and ten cogs in the back. I had to use spacers on the chainwheel bolts to set the ring over properly for the 6-speed chain. If or when he replaces the ring later, maybe we can get a thicker one and ditch the spacers. The whole job took a fraction of the time needed to rebuild the brake lever and caliper on a mountain bike, or replace suspension pivots, or chase down electrical gremlins.

The down side to simple bikes is that the work still takes skill and art, but the machines are so starkly simple that customers don't respect the people who work on them for a living. They don't want to do the work themselves, but they assume any idiot can do it. Therefore, you must be an idiot. Many days, I agree with them. I didn't get into bikes because I wanted to work on bikes. I got into bikes because anyone could learn, and bikes offered a great alternative for a world already getting smothered in asphalt and choking on fumes 50 years ago. Emission standards improved the fume situation somewhat, but the proliferation of pavement and the culture of haste have only gotten worse. And the emissions ignored by the standards are destroying the climate itself. Widespread adoption of the bicycle by those who could, aided by a societal resolve to support that alternative, would have bought us more time to work on the traffic systems and polluting output of the motor vehicles we still legitimately needed. I would much rather sell tools and parts, and share knowledge, than clean up someone's crappy, abused piece of junk or touch my cap and bob my head respectfully to the squire when he brings his immaculate machine for me to fine tune and polish.

People can break their bikes in more profound ways than the local auto service center will see in the cars that people bring to them. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, it's all vulnerable. I don't see how a flat rate book can account for stuff like the twisted wad of this derailleur:

This rider didn't just shove it in or pedal hard enough to yank it up in the back. He rode it all the way around the dropout, making a full wrap with the chain and cable.

With the trail system and the Dream Shop fantasy, its supporters believe that if you build it, riders will come, and bring business with them. But that also assumes that the consumerist, privileged lifestyle of expensive toys ridden by highly paid people with both the leisure time and the temperament to play that way will survive much longer in the economic and social adjustments being forced on us by our decades of unwillingness to enact incremental changes to head off the problems that are now boiling over. In my research on some other service topic I found a guy's blog post from the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, about trying to make an "apocalypse-proof bike." If it has suspension and a complicated shifting system, it ain't apocalypse-proof. You want a real apocalypse-resistant bike, build yourself a fixed-gear. Find a frame with long horizontal dropouts so you can stack cogs that will allow you to get off and shift manually among a small selection of maybe four gears, tops. You'll need a two-sided hub.

The trail builder wants to build a little Bentonville North, with trails for all abilities, including completely non-technical path riders. It still ignores the real-world transportation cyclist. We have to dream our own dreams and live in the real world, negotiating our way among the indifferent majority. I guess their nod to the transportation cyclist on the open streets is the e-bike section of the service department, because the only way bikes are going to become popular is if they are actually motor vehicles. And you'll pay for that.

I'm not a doctor...

Stock photo: syringe shown is for mineral oil. Organic cotton mask by Graf Lantz. Not surgically approved.

 

Before I had to work with hydraulic brakes a lot, I didn't really know how to get the air out of a syringe correctly. When I would get an injection from a doctor, I didn't watch the procedure closely. Never stop learning! I'm not a doctor, but I play one in the workshop.

Yesterday's hydraulic fluid surgery had me rebuilding the lever and caliper of a SRAM Guide RS brake. Not only was the lever piston stuck in the characteristic way, but the caliper pistons were stuck. Water gets into the brake system in various ways. Oxidation and corrosion can follow. The glycol-based fluid SRAM uses absorbs water, so it is distributed evenly throughout the system. That reduces the effects of undiluted water pooling in a low spot, but does decrease braking power steadily, as the percentage of water increases and the boiling point of the fluid gets lower.

At least it was a front brake.

On the Lefty fork, you have to remove the brake caliper to unbolt the wheel from the axle. You should remove the wheel when working with brake fluid, to avoid contaminating the rotor. I was removing the whole brake anyway, because it had to be taken apart.

You can't start a job until the parts arrive, so that put me a bit behind schedule. The customer had hoped for the bike that day. It had been hanging in the shop for about a week, but we needed to get parts. They're lucky that the parts were available. Then nothing went according to the basic printed instructions or cheerful YouTube video tutorials, because every piston that needed to come out was jammed tightly in. I had to reassemble the caliper and put a spacer in, wrap the whole thing in a thick cushion of rags, and blast it with compressed air. That brought out three of the four pistons with varying degrees of willingness, but left one of them stubbornly buried. I had to reconfigure the spacer to hold the other pistons back a bit and leave space for the one holdout to expand into when it was finally willing. This took several tries.

The lever piston was also not responding. Compressed air doesn't help there, because the pressure vents into the upper reservoir of the lever rather than going full force against the recalcitrant piston. In that case, you can just clamp an old spoke in the vise, pointing straight up, insert it into the little hole where the brake line was connected, and tap the lever body down with a rubber mallet to dislodge the old piston. Feel free to damage that. It's not going back in. Just don't hit the lever body very hard with anything, and certainly not a metal hammer. Also be careful not to score the inside of the cylinder with the spoke end. It's pretty well guided by the size of the hole it's fed through, but if you get angry or frisky when hammering it could bend and give you worse problems than you already had. A scored cylinder will not seal, even if it just looks like a scratch. Hydraulic systems are very unforgiving.

After the tedious process of disassembly, the caliper halves and lever body need to be cleaned and inspected. Then all the new parts need to be installed cleanly and without excessive force. With the caliper pistons in particular, you're working blind once you go to shove the piston in, so you take it on faith that the seal stayed in place. There's quite a bit of resistance, because the seals have to hold sufficient pressure to stop a rider and bike going hell-bent down a rough slope. They're squared off and fit into a squared-off recess in the caliper half, but in a worst case you might fold one over partway. Once it's mangled, it's done.

The component on the bench never seems to look exactly like the examples in the manual. You have to determine whether the difference makes a difference. Are these the right instructions for this version of a component that may have been manufactured for a couple of years with the same model name and superficial appearance, but actually have critical differences inside that are not made obvious by any marking you can readily see? In that case, you may have ordered the wrong parts kit as well. The differences this time were not enough to stop the job.

Once the caliper was back together I had to assemble the lever. The current parts kit includes things that this old lever didn't use, but they were trivial. Still, getting a lively new piston in was fiddlier than getting the stuck old one out. The return spring on it fought hard against the insertion of a washer and spring clip that hold it in its proper position so that the little push rod on the cam that the lever actuates can do its thing, and all the magic juice stays in. You're working in the narrow interior of the lever body, to try to cram the spring clip at least far enough that you can coax it the rest of the way by pressing it with some object that gets it to snap into its little recess and properly engage. Except that it doesn't really snap, it just sort of stops and you have to keep peering in there with a light that you keep blocking with your own face as you try to align the light beam and your sight line to sort of confirm that you're pretty sure you've got it. That sums up almost all work on the most modern bike crap.

After successfully reassembling the whole brake, line and all, it was time to fill and bleed it. That's another fussy procedure that drips caustic brake fluid all over the place. Because it was a complete fill, there was a lot of air to chase out. The first go-round did not end with a firm lever feel. Because it always feels good on the bleed block you use to hold the caliper pistons back, you have to completely reinstall everything and test it with pads on the rotor to see if you've really got it. If not, the wheel comes out, the pads come out, the bleed block goes back in, you refill the syringes, hook everything up, perform the ritual again, and then reassemble to check, cleaning carefully as you go so that the brake fluid doesn't eat the paint on the bike or ruin the pads.

SRAM's instructions say to be sure to clean the brake fluid off of the lever and caliper, in part because the fluid's tendency to eat paint will remove the snazzy logos. Seriously? You guys have been working with this fluid -- by choice -- for how many years and you haven't come up with a way to apply the logos that's immune to it? Way to innovate.

It was well after official closing time when I left. It's bad luck to put any of the tools away when you're doing a brake bleed or a tubeless tire job until you're absolutely sure that it's a winner. I left the bike on the stand and the bleed kit strewn across the bench until I return today and make sure that no little air ninjas sneaked out of a crevice in the caliper.

There's no tool like an old tool

 This thing has been getting workout this summer:

The 70-year-old BSA was followed by a 50-year-old Raleigh Sprite. The owner of the Sprite said that he had bought it new and loved the bike, and had ridden it everywhere for years before it got hung up in a barn somewhere for many more years. When it came in, it was thickly coated with bird crap. The estimate to return it to rideable condition was several hundred dollars. The owner initially said that maybe it was time to say farewell, but called back later to tell us to go ahead. 

In the early 1970s, it was up to you to figure out how high to put your stem. 

No max height/minimum insertion line here.

The bike hadn't seen new grease in any of the bearings since the early 1970s. I may be wrong about that, but if it was ever overhauled it was probably no later than the late 1970s. The bearings are all designed to be serviced. But everything needed extensive cleaning. Hence the hefty estimate. And I told him at the outset that it would not be like new.

The bottom bracket was full of tiny seeds and a small acorn that rodents must have dropped in through the opening in the top of the straight steel seatpost. 

The bottom bracket axle had a little engraving on it. It looks like it might be a picture of a rider.

I was too busy to document the whole thing. Another three speed from about the 1960s waits in the queue.

Other jobs included fixing the control lever for a guy's dropper post on his Trek somethingorother. The special screw had fallen out, so the lever was all afloat.

The threading is easy. There are basically only two thread sizes for parts and accessories, and this was the smaller one. As a shorthand I call it "water bottle thread." We have lots of bolts in varying lengths for the many applications in which they're used. About a 12mm button head with a couple of washers would do, except for the difference in diameter between the shaft on which the lever mounts and the inside diameter of the hole on the lever itself. Because the unit is only available as a complete assembly, the Internet could not tell me what the regulation innards look like. I scrounged around until I found a donor for the bushing I envisioned.

Who remembers Cannondale's annoying Force 40 brake enhancing cam from the early 1990s? We have a bag of these lying around. I pressed the pivot bushing out of this one and cut it in half.

The improvised bushing fit perfectly. 

Another rider's weekend saved.

On to the next thing.

What the hell is lianium?

This stem was on a bike that a young guy was building for himself from items he'd ordered online. He could do most of it, but wanted us to cut the fork and check a couple of other things. Lianium? Maybe it was supposed to say titanium. Sort of like what happened to this knockoff of a Shimano freewheel:

Here's what they're ripping off:

****

Top-routed cables led to a variety of approaches to the direction of cable pull on front derailleurs. There are front derailleurs made for the cable to pull from above, as well as models with a cam arrangement that will accommodate cable routing from above or below. But when top route cables were a new concept, designers used a directional pulley at the bottom of the seat tube to run the cable around and up to the traditional bottom-pull derailleurs that everyone had to use. This method is still in use, along with all the others.

The directional pulley is supposed to rotate smoothly on that rust-encrusted, deeply pitted bushing, which was smooth and shiny before the bike was ridden in wet and wintry weather, and probably cleaned with a hose. Between parts that are not available because of the pandemic disrupting things, and parts that were never available as replacement bits, recovering crudded-up pieces like this has become routine.

Lots more has gone by without a picture or notes in the relentless flow of repair work, but some things merit a moment to immortalize. The owner of this bike balked at the complete estimate to make it even remotely safe, including replacing the broken fork.

She insisted that she only rides it very mildly with her kiddies, and has been doing it with the fork in this condition for years. Then when she picked the bike up she said she was taking it to Highlands mountain bike park, but she "would only go on the easy trails." Hopefully her kiddies won't have to learn to spell "quadriplegic" any time soon.

Some dildo on a road bike, and other workshop trivia

 I had not yet had occasion to unwrap a set of these bars. Be the "envy" of your ride group. This manufacturer has an eccentric way of securing the bar tape at the end of the drops.

The mushroom cap is permanently affixed. After you make the first wrap at the end of the bar on your way to spiral up to the tops, the flexible cap flips down into the position you see here. Below shows the cap in the open position as I prepared to remove the old bar wrap.

 

 

In no particular order, here are other observations and problems solved:

Short rider with small frame complained about her basket dragging on the tire. I remembered that we'd salvaged this little front rack that attaches to the cantilever brake bosses. It actually fit without interference from some other component. Always nice when something works as intended. Advantage to rim brakes.

Here's a rarity: Back when Shimano first entered the rotating shifter market, they actually made changing a cable easy. They soon spotted their error, and the later models are almost impossible to open at all. They love to make puzzle boxes out of their shifters.

And now a reminder of why I hated crank arm dust caps. They almost invariably ended up bonded to the crank arm so thoroughly that they needed to be chiseled out. Or, if you were lucky, one or both of them fell out and disappeared. Good riddance. Especially in the early mountain bike era, anything that stood between you and checking your crank arm bolts was a bad idea. From the late 1980s through much of the 1990s, we replaced an uncounted multitude of left crank arms for riders who hadn't kept up with that vital bit of regular maintenance. The coming of socket-head crank bolts with no dust cap significantly reduced the problem, which freed up the bike industry to devote more attention to creating many other problems for their addicts loyal customers.

While we're in the neighborhood of the crank, this Shimano replacement crank displays a copious application of the pus-like grease that congeals into earwax in early versions of their under-bar pod shifters for mountain bikes.

A little grease on the threads of a crank bolt and under the flange of the head of it is a good idea to help torque it down. But this much grease is way too much. It will get onto the flats of the square tapered bottom bracket axle, compromising the security of the crank arm. Shimano started advising techs to grease the drive side flats of their cartridge BBs in the 1990s during The Great Cheapening, because over-tightening the crank arm against the face of the BB bearings  -- while bad for the crank arm and less secure overall -- helped hold the basically defective design of the bearings in place. While the design of the cartridge BBs has been quietly improved without acknowledging fault, the practice of over-greasing right crank arms remains. Left crank arms -- the ones that fall off more often if bolts aren't properly torqued -- remain completely neglected by them. It falls to individual mechanics to clean up after them and install things correctly to survive for as long as possible in a throwaway society. Do not grease the flats of square tapered bottom bracket axles. Do grease the threads of crank arm bolts. That is all.

A customer attempting to keep a used bike in service brought in his $25 great thrift store find. It was a Schwein mountain bike from the last few moments when Schwinn almost pulled back from the brink of collapse with some decent and well-reviewed machines. The bike he bought was one of the lower-end models, but still a decent platform to fix up and use for a bit of fun cruising and retro trail riding. There was just this mysterious bit of duct tape wrapped around one fork leg...

You may have spotted the guilty secret concealed in a sliver-gray wrapper, but below it is shown fully revealed:

 The fork leg was completely broken. All that held things together was the tape around the outside and the internal parts of the cheap suspension. Silver tape. What can't it do? 

Specialized was kind enough to send us one of the three ebikes we had ordered prepaid back in January. 

What do you think? Do they want me to update the firmware? They have a groovy website where we're supposed to connect with all of the electronic brain stuff. After we updated that interface as directed, the screens we got in the firmware updating process didn't look like the examples in their help and guidance area, and it was never clear whether we had actually succeeded, or if the bike didn't really need it after the hysterical admonitions of the included printed material. 

To compound the annoyance, this expensive machine came in a smudge-attracting matte mint green. Matte finishes are stupid. Light-colored matte finishes are downright sadistic.

The workshop continues to be buried in repairs. El Queso Grande declares that he's never seen anything like it in his almost 50 years in the business. I still wonder if it only seems worse because we can't fill our staffing needs. Leafing through a journal from 2005, when we still had Ralph, I found an entry referring to how buried the workshop was during the early summer rush. EQG likes to go on short conservative rants about the corrosive effects of government generosity and the shabby work ethic of teenagers, but the reason that we can't hire people right now is that they think the work is dirty, complicated, and boring. And they're right. Any youngster thrilled by the new stuff will have no patience for the old stuff. Anyone not thrilled by some aspects of bikes or the bike business won't be lured in by the awesome salary, high prestige, and sex appeal.

 REMEMBER: THIS NEVER HAPPENS

EQG is undefinably agitated by the incentives some employers are offering to entice people to sign on with them. He mentions seeing reports on the news of college tuition incentives, bonuses, and prizes. He rightly asserts that a little place like ours can't compete with inducements like that. But once the novelty of the perqs wears off, you're still left having to do the actual job. And I don't think anyone in our immediate area is offering anything like that anyway.

The young whiz kids are great and all, but a fully functioning bike shop still needs some poor old gray-haired bastard who's pissed away his life at this, and has simply seen a lot of stuff. Or the bike business in general has to cut its ties to its past and leave the maintenance of the derelict hulks still in service to the back street and home garage outfits where someone has the tools and knowledge and can be bothered to use them.

The good news, if you could call it that, is that the pandemic bike boom is already winding down. The lack of bikes to buy has now become widely known, so anyone whose interest was marginal already will be looking for something else to do. Anyone who remains interested still faces a treasure hunt that could yield nothing. No bike means no new participant. It may not be the bike industry's fault exactly, but it's still their loss. Also, with the reopening of many activities and venues that had been unavailable during the height of pandemic restrictions, people are returning to their established preferences as much as possible. Those preferences had verifiably not included biking. With the exception of ebikes, which are really a low level of motor vehicle, the bike industry was not growing, regardless of what the evangelists of mountain biking will tell you.

A low-end ebike will provide more satisfactory performance to a budget-minded customer than a low-end mountain bike will. Neither is a particularly good investment, but the low-end mountain bike is pretty well guaranteed to be beaten into junk within a couple of months of vigorous trail riding. A cheap ebike, with care, might last for years. Thus the two categories belong pretty exclusively to the higher income brackets. It remains to be seen how long higher income brackets will remain viable in the face of all the balancing factors that are increasingly hard to hold back. These include both natural and social forces.

An article I read recently about the social, economic, and environmental impact of mountain biking referred to riders coming not only from the traditional high earning professions, but also from workers in occupations like construction and landscaping. Participation in an expensive activity lasts as long as you are willing to devote your funds to it. The fact that no one disses you for being a dirt worker as long as you can hold your own on the trail does not make the activity egalitarian. Anything with a buy-in of thousands of dollars up front, followed by ongoing consumption costs is not open to all. One section referred to a study that showed that 2/3 of mountain biking tourists in a particular area had annual incomes of $70,000 or greater. Another reference listed average household income as $100,000. You gotta bang a lot of nails and mow a lot of lawns to play in that league. You also can't afford it if you make your living fixing bikes. Not for long, anyway.

More tar pits than cake

 Maybe it starts with a rusted bolt, or a stripped-out socket head cap screw. Maybe a bike that was too grimy for quick diagnosis at check-in turns out to have multiple problems once the veil of crude oil and sand is wiped away. Or a suspiciously clean bike is corroded into a single block of inseparable metals because its owner has diligently hosed it off after every ride. The basic tuneup becomes a trap, capturing you for hours as you try to outwit or overpower the sticky quagmire.

A minor version would be this bike with a rear disc brake rubbing. The caliper pistons needed to be reset. To do that I needed to take the pads out. The little bolt that holds the pads in place was basically welded in there. The socket head rounded out almost instantly under the first attempts to dislodge it.

Delicate work with the drill gained me a purchase for a screw extractor.

Screw not sold separately, of course, but I found one from a different brand that fit well enough.

We can't possibly charge enough to cover the costs of some of these repairs we make to preserve the usefulness of a bike that is otherwise quite recoverable. And further time is often lost as we play phone tag to reach a customer and then try to explain what weird thing is wrong, and get authorization to fix it. In the worst cases, the tar pit opens after we've expended time and resources to nearly complete a repair before getting sucked into that "one last thing" to finish it up and clear the ticket.

Or maybe it's a simple, albeit somewhat mysterious issue that draws you in a few minutes at a time, like the mountain bike that came in during the early afternoon last Saturday. The rider reported that the chain would derail two cogs when he tried to backpedal in low gear. The bike is a Diamondback full suspension model with a 1X11 SRAM drive train.

It was never a good idea to backpedal extensively on a derailleur-gear drive train, but it has become increasingly true as more and more cogs are added, especially trying to serve a ridiculously wide range from a single chainring in front. However, mountain bikers in particular need to be able to pedal back at times, to reset their foot position for technical sections, so they should be able to get at least a full crank rotation before the inherent flaws of the system flare up. The rider said that he had formerly been able to backpedal enough, but that since he "tagged a tree with the rear derailleur" it was no longer allowing him to operate unimpeded.

To the eye, nothing looked terribly deviated, despite the tree contact. He left the bike for us to consider in due course, when it came up in the queue, but El Queso Grande thought that I might be able to kick it through very quickly, since its ailment looked to be so minor. I agreed that it would probably respond to some obvious treatment.

The derailleur hanger did turn out to be very slightly deviated. That should do it! Actually, since the derailleur is below the cassette, it would have little effect on whether the chain feeds smoothly onto the top of the cassette when the rider pedals in reverse. But maybe, just maybe, since it was the only apparent variable...

Nope. But you knew that already, didn't you?

There was a chance that the derailleur itself was bent. We've seen it before. Especially with the long, long cages needed to handle the chain wrap and cog size of super-wide gear ranges, and the intolerance of systems cramming 11 and 12 cogs into very little more than the space initially carved out for eight, tiny deviations can lead to intractable shifting and chain feed issues. But again, the derailleur is below the problem, not above it. With alignment and adjustment again dialed in, the chain still dropped.

In the process of investigation, I had to remove the rear wheel. The through axle did not want to come out. EQG theorized that the through-axle itself was bent, but it didn't seem to be. My theory is that the dropouts aren't parallel. Who knows if they ever were. The bike looked sharp at first glance, all bright orange with the brand name also in bright orange, very subtle. It could also be a way of hiding your identity so it wouldn't be blatantly associated with your crappy product. A lot of things have to be exactly right on a rear suspension swingarm and a through-axle wheel mount. It's another version of the press-in BB with misaligned bearing seats. It ain't never going to be right. Y'all had one chance to make it so, and you blew it. At least with a BB you have some chance of finding a Wheels Manufacturing thread-together unit that will put the bearings in proper alignment relative to each other, sidestepping the error in frame manufacturing. Misaligned dropouts are a tougher nut since the through-axle format does not lend itself readily to the old style of alignment tools, and materials like carbon fiber or aluminum either can't or shouldn't be tweaked.

Tell me again how much better our lives are with this temperamental bullshit?

Of course I had to have the wheel in and out of those dropouts a dozen times or more as I tried cassette spacers and different cog sets to try to coax the chain line into a more cooperative orientation. I also removed the bottom bracket -- an outboard thread-in model -- to put a skinnier spacer behind the drive side to pull the crank in a tiny tad. Can't go too far, or it will act up at the high-gear end of the range. But sometimes just a little more than a millimeter can be just enough to get by.

Not this time. Nor did any cassette yield a result worth what we would have to charge for the parts and labor. I had noticed that the original cassette had a slight bend in that 42-tooth low gear, but replacing the cassette with a brand new one with a well-made, beefier 42 produced no improvement. I put the cheesy bent one back on because it made no difference.

Bent chain links can cause no end of disruption, but this chain was neither bent nor excessively worn. Hardly worn at all, in fact. Was lack of lube making the chain less laterally flexible? You couldn't prove it by me. I juiced it right up and it still hopped off.

At the end of three hours we had disassembled and reassembled the drive train multiple times and come up with absolutely nothing billable.

The wonderful world of Internet forums had no definitive guidance. There were blessed experts who had sure-fire solutions to this problem, in the same thread with the vast majority of people who said either that you should just never backpedal because the chain always derails, or suggested trying each and every thing we tried -- all of which have worked on other bikes.

There was no obvious sign that the whole bike had been bashed out of alignment by the tree encounter. And it's true that wide-range, 1X drive trains are very prone to this problem. It's another reason that I no longer feel any sense of accomplishment when one works, only a sense of foreboding, wondering when it will stop doing so, and why.

A cake tuneup, by contrast, is one on which everything goes so smoothly that the bike is on and off the stand within half an hour. These tend to happen on older bikes that have been coming to us for years. If they were thoroughly assembled, almost nothing -- and sometimes nothing at all -- will have gone out of adjustment in a year. The same is true if a tuneup was once done to full specifications. It helps if the bike is ridden with some sensitivity to its vulnerabilities, but it can still be ridden a lot. We regularly have alumni come in who have worn the chain to the point of replacement and perhaps cooked a shift cable or two, but whose hub and headset bearings are exactly where they need to be. Locknuts are called locknuts for a reason. Or a bike might need only a genuinely simple, specific repair that works as it should. But on the whole, we deal with more tar pits than cake.

Spring Avalanche

Just as March looked like April again this year, so did the repair load go from zero to backlogged in a matter of days.

With only 1.3 mechanics on duty most days, we get buried more easily than we did in the boom times of the 1990s, but even back then the amount of repair work this early in the season would have been remarkable.

I did manage to finish the crash repairs on that Pedego.

The battery case takes a long time to install, because it is held together with eight little Phillips head screws that are mostly inaccessible. Inaccessibility is no excuse, however, so you have to use several different screwdrivers and contort your wrist to coax the fastenings down to seat fully. This was after rewiring the damn thing. Sliding the battery into the case was an appropriately satisfying insertion. Bit of an anticlimax, really.

The fun had just begun there, though. Pedego had changed their wiring harness (of course) since the bikes were built, so the new light and control unit had to include the adapted fittings for the old harness. Even the wire from the brake levers, that cuts the motor when the brakes are applied, had the connectors reversed. Most of the work was not complicated. It just took time to collect all the necessary little bits, from Pedego, from the hardware store, and from the crash-damaged parts that still had useful wiring.

Mixed in with the earliest arrivals was a Motobecane from the 1980s with a classic corncob freewheel.

Back when 52-13 was considered a big gear, and we only had six in the back, the 13-18 was the mark of the racer. Anyone old enough to have a freewheel like that now is not pushing a 42-18 up the hills of the White Mountains anymore. Converting this bike to lower gears required not just a wider-range freewheel, but also a derailleur that could handle the cog size and chain wrap. We're still waiting for the crankset to convert the front end to 110 compact. Adaptable old bikes can have new lives. They'll still be rolling along when the exoskeletons of the most recent marvels are already lying cracked and discarded, the batteries in their shifters dead, hydraulic fluid and tire sealant seeping into the ground.

I do like the 1890s leather on 21st Century carbon fiber on this Trek road bike:

Carbon fiber the bike may be, but it's such a relic that the cables are actually outside the frame! The poor bastard riding it is getting by with only ten speeds in the cassette and has this weird device that moves the chain between two chainrings on the crank. Old people have weird stuff. They say things like, "By cracky!" and "Jehosaphat!" too. And they do that weird little jig with their elbows out when they're excited. This guy still has all his own teeth, though. I can say things like this because I'm pretty sure I'm older than he is.

A couple of posts ago I said that only a rare old codger wanted me to build a wheel anymore. Then two wheel jobs came in. One of them was for the Trek above. The 24-spoke Easton rear wheel had a cracked rim. No rims were available, but we could get a 28-spoke hub and rim to build him a complete new wheel. I'm not a fan of low spoke count wheels, but they do go together more quickly.

                                                                   Hub porn

The All City hub is very nice for the price. I thought about stockpiling one or two for future wheels of my own.

The other wheel project used hub, rim, and spokes provided by the customer. I couldn't figure out why the wheel had been completely disassembled in the first place. The spokes were bundled and labeled right and left side for the disc hub, but even though they were supposedly the correct lengths the wheel was difficult to tension evenly. The rim had taken a couple of hard shots. Also, the customer had told me it was two-cross, but it turned out to have been three. It's easy to overlook that first cross down by the hub flange.

In the repair mystery department, a bike this week was completely missing the return spring assembly on one brake arm.

It wasn't a model with plastic parts that could break easily and allow the spring to fall out. There was no sign that the brake arm had been removed. I had nothing in the salvage bin to replace just the missing pieces, so we had to install a complete brake set. This tends to happen on repairs where the customer has set low financial limits. We agree to a minimal repair, trying to ignore anything off the script, and then find something we can't let go. Fortunately, the customer accepted the necessity.

Salvaged parts featured prominently for another repair. A road bike turned out to need a cassette after a new chain did not play nicely with the original gear cluster. The bike has nine-speed brifters, from back when that was respectably middle class. The cassette was a 12-25. We can't get one. We had an 11-28. The derailleur theoretically could be coaxed to handle the 28, but couldn't handle the chain wrap. I went to the cog farm to piece together just the cogs on which the chain had skipped. In the process I discovered the intact low-gear section -- 17 through 25 -- of the exact cassette we needed.

Save old cogs. Most of the time, a cassette is not completely chewed. Even if the chain skips on more than just the cog with the fewest teeth, others less used in the cluster may have lots of useful life left in them.

Finally, I was looking for videos on a repair procedure on a smokeless moped. At the end of the YouTube video, the montage of stills for "videos I might like" included this excellent accidental pairing:

Remember those words and heed them always.

Follow the bouncing temperature

 March came in like a nasty day in April, but immediately shifted to a harsh hit of January. The forecast as of Sunday afternoon showed the temperature dipping to a single-digit night on Monday, a frigid Tuesday, but then daytime highs well above freezing on the ensuing days, alternating with hard freezes at night. That has now shifted to a single bounce to the upper 30s on Wednesday, followed by a solid few days at or below freezing before the next wave of sustained thawing, but it still shows vestiges of the volatility that has become common.

With cross-country ski season in the immediate vicinity apparently tapering off, bike repairs have already stacked up. We've had three of them hanging around from the end of last season, held up by unavailable parts, and then suspended while the workshop shifted to things that don't mix well with grease. Then five more piled in, for people who are traveling south in the next couple of weeks.

Trainee Dave and I have been missing our bikes. He said that he wished it was bike season, so I set him onto what seemed like straightforward tuneups on a family fleet of four, preparing for a trip to Florida. The first one he picked was a Specialized Chisel 29er in a large frame size that looked like it might fit him. Go for the fun one first. He gave it minor cleaning, but it wasn't even very dirty.

A clean bike can be very bad news. Is it clean because it's had light use, or is it clean because it's been hosed? Based on chain wear, we both thought that this bike looked lightly used. Everything seemed pretty straight. The brake pads weren't very worn... Then Dave tried to run it through the gears.

Mountain biking has embraced the 1X concept because front derailleurs and ham fists don't mix. Riders who might have unbelievable finesse when airborne and rotating in balletic maneuvers off a jump put nowhere near the same delicacy into coaxing a chain between rings on a crankset. Road riders are similarly afflicted; front shifts are the biggest contributors to chain failure.

The chain takes abuse shifting up or down. Going up, the rider mashes the lever and forces the chain over against the side of the larger chainring, hoping that the specially engineered pins and ramps do their thing and slurp the chain over without hesitation. That might happen half the time. The rest of the time, a certain amount of chewing takes place. Going the other way, the return spring of the front derailleur gets its one chance when the shifter releases cable tension abruptly. The derailleur cage snaps over, hopefully dislodging the chain from the larger ring and depositing it onto the smaller one. It's like having someone direct you right or left by punching you in the face. If the chain goes out over the high side or drops to the inside, a rider can sometimes ride it back onto the chainrings by shifting the opposite way and continuing to pedal. If that maneuver doesn't work, it graunches the chain even more. We still try it.

With a single ring, front derailleur problems vanish completely. However, you now have to provide the whole gear range with the rear cassette. This led to low gear cogs of 36, then 40, then 42, and now 50 teeth. The rear derailleurs have had to evolve longer and longer cages to handle the chain, and still try to manage a reasonable gap between the upper pulley and the cogs on everything from an 11 (or the even more ridiculous 10) up to the 40, 42, or 50.

All the wide range systems that I have worked on have obvious trouble managing this range, particularly getting onto and off of that huge low gear. The bike that Dave was working on had a basic SRAM SX derailleur. We have no idea if it ever worked any better than  it does now, because the owner dropped it off with the usual statement, "It has no real problems, I just want to get it tuned up." He said the same thing about all the bikes, including one kid's 20-inch that was missing the axle nut on one side of the front wheel.

SRAM has spawned at least two different "B-gap adjustment tools" that are supposed to help a mechanic set the angle of the parallelogram to achieve optimal clearance between the upper pulley and the immense cog. However, this derailleur does not want to shift away from that gear once you're in it, no matter what the B-gap is. You take the cable completely off and shove it over there by hand and it settles in like it wants to live there forever, a tree-climbing single-speed.

Hosing could have led to corrosion and silt in the pivots. This would resist the return spring starting the derailleur back toward its released position. Under full cable tension, the parallelogram is folded quite tightly. If little detents had developed from wear, when it's all folded up it might stick. Clearly something is making it stick. I just have to figure out what. But right now, with ski season still nominally underway, it's hard to concentrate on all the variables of temperamental machinery.

I had one bike on my stand for several weeks. First we were waiting for parts. Then ski season got busy again after a lull while we had no snow. I was so far out of the flow of the repair that I couldn't say for sure that I had addressed all of its unique needs. The rider is not abusive, but he's relentless, and has already ridden three bikes into the ground. Indeed, when they dropped this one off the rider's father said, "Let us know if it's time to buy a new one again." And it's only been a couple of years, but between this rider's perpetual motion, and the industry's embrace of disposability, it's not ridiculous to consider having to replace your mid-price bike every two or three years. Well it is ridiculous, but it's become plausible enough to be accepted. I was going to say acceptable, but it should never be -- or have been -- acceptable. But a consumer public well trained by the ephemeral quality of everything else that they fork out good coin for is not surprised when their bike is made to the same exploitive standard.

With this foretaste of the mind-numbing and soul-destroying realities of servicing modern bikes, we both agreed that what we missed was riding our bikes. As much as commuting stresses me because I have to do my daily miles in what passes for rush hour, I have reached the point in driving season where I've turned into a complete asshole behind the wheel. I always hit a peak some time in February and shock myself into mellowing out a bit until I can get the hell out of the car and return to the more satisfying flow of biking.

In February I have to get to work earlier to rack the rental boots that had to sit out overnight to dry, and perhaps take the bandages off of elderly rental skis that I had to glue after the previous day because the bases were starting to delaminate. All of this has to be completed before opening the doors to the day's flood of renters, who will keep us in continuous motion until late afternoon. We're masked, they're masked, we're trying to keep everyone somewhat separated, and the whole slam dance usually obliterates a lunch break. Sometimes it ends with more OT doing service work like mounting bindings or waxing skis, that we couldn't do while immediate demands from the rental and sales counters called for all hands on deck. It no longer energizes me the way it did a couple of decades ago. Now it's just something to get through.

If the day isn't busy, it drags, because we can't get too deep into anything else in case it does get busy. Even if we know it's going to be quiet, because we're getting rain or something, converting the main workshop to bike work involves moving a lot of stuff that doesn't get along with grease, and cleaning the bench completely before moving it back again for the next wave of seasonally appropriate business.

If we had a bike-only shop, I would solicit winter overhauls and custom builds. But even those are less fun now that traditional skills have less value. It's only a rare old codger who wants me to build a set of wheels. I used to like the alternative activities. I still believe in using the season for what it offers, rather than fighting it. It's still reasonable to look forward -- as much as I look forward to anything these days -- to the more consistent rhythm of riding season, now that I can no longer count on a consistent rhythm of winter activities.

When you are the bike

 When you take your bike to be worked on, the mechanic puts it into a work stand where it can be positioned to get better access to the parts that need attention.

I've thought about this a lot when lying in a dentist's chair. Dentistry seems to be more like bike repair than any of the other medical or cosmetic services we receive. It involves small parts, small tools, and a certain degree of machining skill.

Last Monday I had the first visit of two, to replace a crown. This required the usual large hypodermic needle into the jaw hinge, but once we all got settled in the two trained experts were working away, elbow-deep in my spit hole. Because of the pandemic, they have installed a high-capacity vacuum system designed to capture the evil droplets flung off by a gaping patient under the pressure of power tools. It was so loud that I couldn't even hear the drill, let alone the canned music that has been the soundtrack to many a cringe and writhe as various nerves have been assaulted in procedures through the years. I rather like the playlist, not so much for itself as for the anthropological musing I can do as I dissect the familiar lyrics. But being blanketed with a thick duvet of white noise turned out to be better still.

I could hear the dentist and the technician well enough to respond to commands, and to catch the general trend of their mix of consultation and banter. I was in their work place, the object under repair. They are kind, gentle, and skillful people, but it's also their job. It was pretty funny right at the start when they had to give me double shots of Novocain just to get me to functional numbness, and then they asked me to move my tongue out of their way. I sent the mental command, but I couldn't even feel whether I had a tongue, let alone whether it was behaving as asked. They seemed satisfied, so it must have worked.

After the drilling and some rather interesting scraping and gouging with specially-shaped little picks, it was time for the dentist to move on to the next patient, while the technician tidied up and made the temporary cap to cover the sculpted stump of the molar. The caps are made of some kind of polymer resin, cleverly shaped in response to a computerized model that they get by scanning the tooth. No more biting the hot wax to take an impression. The cap as it comes out initially needs a bit of fine tuning and smoothing. As the technician stood out of my view, behind my head, I heard the cap fall to the floor.

"Oops," she said. She picked it up. I had a momentary laugh as I imagined her just blowing on it and buffing it on her sleeve, but no, this is a conscientious outfit engaged in medical-grade professional procedures. Besides, she was wearing a mask, so blowing on the little plastic doohickey wouldn't have done anything. She resumed whatever she was doing back there. Tink clink te-tink, I heard it hit the floor again. It's hard to hold onto little things half the size of a tooth, especially when you're wearing gloves. She located it on the floor, retrieved it, and cleaned it again. The third time it happened, we both laughed. I have definitely had days like that at work, some of them quite recently. Between wearing gloves for some things, and having skin as dry as wood this time of year, it's hard to hold onto anything small. She finally got it ready and secured it.

Because the temporary cap has to come off once the permanent crown is ready, the technician didn't go crazy with the glue. Thus, late Friday night I just waved a piece of dental floss in its general direction and it popped off like it was spring loaded. Of course it was Friday night. I had to get through the whole weekend just to be able to call in to get it reglued.

The post-op instructions say that you can stick your temporary back on using toothpaste. I'd had really good luck with previous temporaries, so I had never had to try it. Now I did.

WOW, was that incredibly painful. I got the crown on backwards on my first attempt, so I had to pop it off and press it onto the throbbing nerve of the tooth stub a second time. YEAH, buddy! I kind of staggered around the house while lightning bolts of pain radiated from the back corner of my jawbone out to the periphery of my skull for a few minutes. Maybe I didn't have the right toothpaste. So then I had to get through Saturday and Sunday, eating as best I could, and going to work. The pain subsided to basically nothing unless I managed to hit things the right wrong way. I could be guaranteed to do this somewhere near the time I was going to bed.

This morning I got right in to have the cap reattached. The technician settled me into the chair and lifted the cap off with tweezers. She turned to her workstation behind me and I heard her knock something to the floor. It sounded like a metal bowl with multiple small objects inside it. She said something humorous and I laughed as well. More of the normal workplace slapstick comedy we all deal with. But then I couldn't stop laughing as I envisioned a dentist office where the people working there swear like mechanics. Something hits the floor in my workshop and I let go a string of profanity. I know a lot of you superior motherfuckers are above all that, but to those of us who are Profanitarians, it is part of our rituals and devotions. I have my favorite combinations. Most often it is said with annoyance but without excessive heat. They're like the little fuckin' earthquakes along parts of major fault lines that prevent major ruptures from occurring right there. Of course in geology, the little grinders simply pass stress to sticking points where the whole clusterfuck finally breaks loose in a massive shit storm. The technical terms in geology are different of course; much more precise and scientifically descriptive, as one would hope.

A friend on Facebook posted an item endorsing alternatives to profanity. They're like decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer. Sometimes you just want the substitute because you only want a hint. Or you might use one of the expressions humorously. Because many of them sound rather archaic, they bring a historical perspective as well.

 Quite a few years ago I toyed with the concept, "what if you tasted everything you said in anger or annoyance?" Fudge nut brownie sundae would become the most virulent curse. Then again, between accidental lapses and some people's weird tastes, you would always have to wonder why a person chose to say a particular thing. It would be even more revealing than their current choices.

Not the fire ax

As predicted, the road tubeless tire that I had such fun with last month came back last weekend because the tire had lost pressure. The rider told me that he had been having problems with the tires since he bought the bike. I'm pretty sure he's going back to tubes. I put a tube in the troublesome front tire, no charge.

A rim with a solid floor would eliminate the problem of rim tape, but requires a non-conventional approach to spoke nipples, such as putting them at the hub, which makes a wheel much harder to true, or threading them into the rim from the inner circumference, in the style of Mavic. In that case, you have to have their proprietary nipples to replace any that get damaged, and use a special spoke wrench adapted to them. Mavic has spawned two or three sizes already. Other companies have had to develop their own spline patterns. This is in addition to more traditional shapes with non-traditional sizes.

Because I started out as a self-sufficient home mechanic, I judge things from the perspective of a self-sufficient home mechanic. One of the greatest strengths of the bike as personal transportation that a rider could also use for fun was the relative cheapness and simplicity of the workshop one would need to support the machine or machines. I got drawn into it further than most, but even with the shop-quality workstand and truing stand my investment was far less than the price of a used car, let alone a new one.

There have always been some specialized tools. You can't fake cone wrenches or a headset wrench. You can put a big honkin' adjustable wrench on the top nut of a threaded headset, but you need the flatter wrench to secure the cone beneath it. And some form of fixed cup tool for cup-and-cone bottom brackets really assures that the cup stays fixed. There were few things more annoying than having the drive side bottom bracket cup working its way out of the frame on a long ride.

                                           Cone wrenches   Double-enders were handy for a home mechanic and to take on trips, but single-size shop wrenches with longer handles are more pleasant to work with when you have the luxury of better facilities. I've been spoiled a bit by the professional life. In either single- or double-ended form, the 16mm is the size to remove bottle caps.

                                            Headset wrenches     The upper one has a 15mm jaw on the small end, for pedals. The lower one has pins that would fit Sugino adjustable BB cups, as well as many other brands. You could also get adjustable pin spanners (not shown) just for BB cups, which I eventually did. 

Cranks used to come with a crank puller. They mostly looked similar to this Campagnolo puller that I got as part of a barter deal for some work on a guy's Schwinn Paramount. He had no use for tools he didn't know how to use, so I did the work in exchange for a nice collection.

I soon acquired a Park shop-type crank puller because it was convenient and I had little else to spend money on. Unpublished writers and bike nerds are unencumbered by social life.

You have to keep your crank bolts tight if you want the crank arms to remain obediently attached. First I got the Park multi-size, because common bolt sizes were 14, 15, and 16mm

Then, as part of the trade deal, I got a genuine Campagnolo peanut butter wrench. It was so named because the handle was perfect for spreading that affordable nutrient on your crust of stale bread.

While we're down around your bottom bracket, the official wrench for the most common flattened-oval fixed cups looks like this:

The hooked end fits the notches of the common BB lock ring. The wrench itself could be secured with washers and a crank bolt so that additional force or leverage could be applied to either seat the fixed cup or bust it loose as needed. There are cooler tools specifically for the task, but they've always been a little pricey for the slight advantage. I invested later, when I had a brief period of accidental prosperity. Rather than piss it away on frivolities, I invested in tools. Of course they were tools for tasks that nearly no one needs done anymore... but in the perfect post-apocalyptic, post-consumerist fantasy future, bike design would return to the accessible basics that were hallmarks of the late 1970s and the 1980s, minus the annoying nationalistic variations. Sort of a neo-classical period. Barring that I have a great supply of eccentric paper weights.

The well prepared home mechanic would have a chain tool. These became part of the take-along kit when mountain biking got big, because people were breaking chains right and left. This became especially common after Shimano introduced their "special pin." I developed a whole slew of phrases based on the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" PSAs on TV, starting with "friends don't let friends ride Shimano chains." 

Continuing the process of upgrading tools, I did get the fancy Park one that would handle up to a 10-speed chain.

Now, of course, you need one that will do 11, 12, and 13. I haven't bothered to equip for tinfoil chains, just as I never got sucked into buying new tools every year to keep up with changes in suspension design. I'm still holding out for that return to an ethic of simplicity and durability. Be the change you want to see, even if you know full well that it will never happen and that the world will cheerfully obliterate you and everything that you hold dear.

In the age of thread-on freewheels, you needed the proper tool for any brand that you had. The tools were small and inexpensive.

My brands were Regina and Suntour. Suntour later went to a four-notch freewheel that was not an improvement. The extra dogs on the tool created instability rather than greater engagement. Splined engagement was better, but only if you could get a tool in there without having to remove things from the axle. Phil Wood came up with the thin-walled tool that would remove Regina and Atom freewheels without having to disassemble the axle.

If you got into changing cogs on your freewheel, or messed around with fixed gears, this cog vise was great to have:

You will not find these anywhere now.

A chain whip or two is not only handy for self defense or really hard core S&M, you also need it to disassemble a freewheel or to immobilize a cassette on a freehub so you can remove the lock ring.

  Cable tension is important. Pulling them with pliers or just your fingers can fail to get things as snug as you'd like. Because of that, the Fourth Hand tool seemed like a worthy investment.

It's especially useful in today's world of high-tension shifting systems. It takes some delicacy not to crimp the cable, especially a skinny shift wire, but it's worth mastering. The Park version doesn't have as fine a nose as this specimen, so it's a bit harder to fit into tight spaces, but it has a locking mechanism that can come in handy when it isn't being a pain in the ass by locking when it feels like it.

Another score from the barter deal was this "Campy 5-mil with a growth on it."

The little knurled burl made it easy to twiddle quickly to thread down a 5mm cap screw.

The 8-9-10 Y wrench was another convenient item for the home tool kit or the carry-along set.

You'd still want regular box-open wrenches in those sizes, but the Y wrench was still worth its weight. 

I bought all of my tools from bike shops. Bike shops carried tools. I suppose there were mail order catalogs when I started paying attention to cycling in 1975, but I lived in places that had well-stocked shops. It never occurred to me to go anywhere else. Even my machinist friend moved into a series of shop jobs for quite a few years before she and her husband got away from retail and formed part of the shadowy support world of referral mechanics: people with the skills and tools to do jobs that the retail shops can't or won't. The referral network supports the shops by taking some of the load off, and fixing the problems that would cost too much money and time for a retail store's overhead.

 

Now I would probably buy on the internet, since shops don't tend to stock the more esoteric and serious tools. If I had to operate without a retail front, I would have to get parts somewhere as well. Depending on how far civilization degenerates once we've finished shooting ourselves and each other in every available foot, we may be scrounging in junk yards and landfills to piece together our mad creations.