Blue

The mechanic's bike always needs work.

Last night I finally got time to rebuild the rear wheels on the Cross Check and my road bike. Tonight, in a burst of overconfidence, I thought I might make some progress on Blue, the Traveler's Check fixed gear. I had all the parts, right? I'd built the rear wheel weeks ago, before I discovered the rim failures on my other bikes.

Here's how it stood when I got home.

The blue theme developed gradually. The frame is blue. The Sachs crank Frothingham gave me ten years ago is blue. The rear tire is blue. So is one bar plug.

The biggest job on a bike this simple is facing the head tube. The BB threads look pretty clean and cartridge bottom brackets don't demand perfect facing, but the head tube needs to be right. Before I dug into that, though, I wanted to hang that blue crank to confirm the BB axle length.

110 was wrong. It was also the shortest thing I had. And all I had for crank bolts were some 15 mm Campys that didn't fit comfortably in the crank arms. I figured I would just shove the right one on there to check the chain line.

That Sachs crank is going to take a very short BB. The 110 had it hanging way off the chain stay. So I dug out an old Dura Ace I'd scavenged. It looked great, but it's a 175. #^%$^$! I pulled out a 600 and it was a 175 too. @#%^$%&#! Then I remembered one on a frame in the crawl space. It had a 110 bolt circle, which meant I could use the 49-tooth ring I was going to put on the Sachs, but the arms were 165! &^$%*&^%#&#!

I hope I can dig up a BB short enough to make the Sachs work, because I was really liking the blue, and I have that 49 ring. The only thing I know for sure is that I will have to carry a bunch of parts back and forth until I get it figured out. But building bikes has ALWAYS been like this. 20-30 years ago it would have been some nationalistic thread pitch or oddball seat post size.

At least the Cross Check and the road bike are back up to par.

Right Out Straight

At the moment, the repair shop is the sole source of income for the bike shop. After a few early-season sales, no one's closing the deal on new bikes, although we've moved some used ones. A lot of people are digging out the trusty two-wheeler with vague notions that they will beat high gas prices somehow.

Bad news, guys. You do actually have to pedal these things.

In that vein, we did have a guy bring in his mid-1990s Haro for a tuneup prior to his own installation of an after-market helper motor of some kind "to help out on the hills." All well and good, except that all these electric bikes and assistance motors add so much weight that they virtually assure that the rider will never feel like pedaling that contraption. So thanks for the repair business, but why not skip the investment in the bike motor and go buy the Vespa you really want?

Because I have an automobile trip scheduled for my "weekend," I had to deal quickly with the Ford's most recent stuck brake caliper. It would jam so solidly that the wheel cover would almost be too hot to touch in just a few miles. I also looked at the odometer and got a sudden sinking thrill when I realized it had passed the magic number for the next timing belt failure. My trusty mechanic informed me that I would not have made it to Connecticut. Oh yeah, and have a new water pump while you're at it.

"I saw some stuff I'd like to do to the rear brakes next month when you come back for inspection, but I wanted to give you some time to recover from this one," he said. He's good that way.

Getting the car to the mechanic meant that I had to get up at 5-ish. I actually woke up around 4, with the early light, so I'd had about 5 hours sleep at best. I had to absorb some breakfast and try to get through the usual morning routines when my body still felt like half-melted lead and my brain was actually still dreaming.

I drove through Wolfe City to drop off things I didn't want to bother to carry back with me on the bike, like lunch and my work clothes. I tried to drive just faster than the speed of stink, but slowly enough to avoid heating things up too much. Fortunately, the morning was cool.

Once I dropped the car at the clinic I had to scamper 26 miles back to Wolfe City more or less in time for work.

Back at home, I had to come up with a cartoon that was already a day late. I'd spent Tuesday racking my brain over it to no avail, after devoting Monday to final preparation and submission of my five entries in the Union of Concerned Scientists' annual cartoon contest. The finalists are collected into a calendar, and the winning entry gets the cover. A panel of judges selects the finalists, which are then posted on the UCS website, where public voting selects the overall winner. I made the finals last year, so I was surprised to learn I could play again.

Somehow I was still awake at 11:30 at night, 19 hours after my first reluctant crawl to consciousness. In fact, it was hard to drop off for my next 5-6 hours of sleep before Thursday.

Thursday morning I had to finish inking the cartoon for Tuesday's deadline before sprinting to work. Every bike but my fixed gear needs some kind of work, although the Cross Check is functional. I just haven't had time.

Thursday evening I stopped at the grocery store on the way home for supper protein, which I threw on the grill once I got home.

Yesterday morning, it was up and out again after another inexplicably late night. The early light of pre-dawn does a good job shortening sleep on the other end of the night.

Meanwhile, the cellist is getting ready for her final studio recital. I really don't even have time to be writing this, because we'll have a house full of student musicians in a little over an hour. I'll have left for the shop by then, but have to sprint home to rehearse my own piece with the other token adult in the program.

Most of the kids are better than we are.

Tomorrow, after whatever might fall out of the dump truck of broken bikes at work, I get to drive to Connecticut among the receding flow of weekend visitors, and the first influx of Motorcycle Week. My ingenious wife had determined that it would actually be cheaper to take the bus from Dover to the train in Boston, but the trains aren't running this week because they're fixing the track. Shit! I'd really fallen in love with the idea of less driving, more relaxing, instead of doing battle with the motor maniacs of Massachusetts.

Coming out of the trip to southern New England I get slingshot into the following week. Hell, summer will be down the flush before I know it.

Four Bolts to a Happier You

Maybe six bolts.

We spend hours, days, weeks, years, and sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars dialing in the position on our bikes, only to have something change. We age, get injured, change bikes or riding style.

There is no perfect solution.

Right now, I love every handlebar position on my Cross Check when I'm riding alone, but feel too low and stretched out when riding at a leisurely pace with slower cyclists. I'm going to try an experiment.

Open-face stems are very easy to change. I've ordered a short (80 mm), slightly steeper-rise stem to substitute for my usual 90-degree, 100 mm when touring with a load in slow company. That will bring the brake hoods closer and raise the bar tops slightly. It won't affect cable length or require other complicated adjustments.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Dummy News from Surly

Follow the links in this post on the Surly blog to stories about people using pedal power in their daily lives.

On Commute by Bike, riders report various levels of increased commuter activity in their areas. The site also has a poll asking readers about the level of physical activity in the jobs to which they commute. Results are heavily skewed since the poll is on a website. Respondents need to have Internet access and find the site, which narrows the sample considerably. But the discussion goes on.

Around here, I sense far less hostility than usual, and more respect. This is not a very hostile riding area, but being rural it has what I can only call a redneck element which most commonly dishes out contemptuous gestures. These include passing too close, sudden downshifts, excessive use of the horn, thrown objects, poured beer and indecipherable yelling. I've seen less of that this year.

As tourist traffic increases we get city people who bring their hatred of cyclists with them. Since the tourist season hasn't really gotten going, I have no data on that group.

There will always be highly principled, die-hard bike haters. Recently, one truck driver laid on the horn behind a cyclist in downtown Wolfeboro, then shoved past, cut in and slammed on the brakes before accelerating away. Drivers like that are in or nearly in the same category as the ones who mowed down that pedestrian in Hartford, CT, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. It seems there will always be homicidal sociopaths. But tolerance in general definitely seems to be rising.

In any war there is always a last casualty. Assume nothing when you go out to ride. And accidents still happen. Still, it's nice to feel a little less like prey and more like a good example.

Cluster Headaches

The brawny lad who had his Mavic Cosmic wheel replaced with a snazzy DT on DT we got for him came back to report weird shifting issues on the nine-speed 12-27 cluster with which he had replaced his 12-25.

Most commonly with index-only shifting systems, the derailleur moves sluggishly shifting up the cassette or down, because cable tension is to strong or too weak. If it moves sluggishly both directions, the most common culprit is 4 millimeter housing, further constricted by grit and grime. The next thing to check is whether the linear wires in the housing have pushed through the ferrules or the cable itself has frayed inside some recess, even inside the shifter itself.

Less commonly, shifters of advanced age can get dementia as all those tiny ratchets and springs have simply had enough. Or young shifters can develop amnesia due to manufacturing defects.

There are a few minor repairable issues in the areas you can get into with road brifters, but only a few. They include The Mystery Screw in some generations, and the return spring for the shift levers.

Sorry, I don't have a picture of The Mystery Screw right now. Look on the inside of a brifter for a small, short, Phillips head screw. Early and late models don't have it at all. Somehow it affects the synchronization of the levers.

After exhausting other possibilities, I could only conclude that the shifter was wearing out. I had to scavenge one off a new bike we've been parting out. But when I got it hooked up, it exhibited the same strange pattern of shifting errors.

The rider had no problems with his 12-25. I put on a new one from our stock and the bike shifted perfectly. That meant I had to put his old shifter back on. It still shifted perfectly on the 12-25.

The seven cogs from 12 to 21 are the same on the 12-25 and the 12-27. The errors only occurred below 21. I switched those cog sets and the bike shifted perfectly on the 12-27. Something was a tiny bit off in the spacing of the set that originally came with the 12-27. Tiny discrepancies make a big difference as the spacing gets tighter. It took hours to hunt this crap down, hours we really couldn't bill for. But we cured it.

INSPECT YOUR WHEELS

Chasing down mysterious noises for a burly rider, I discovered long but faint cracks in the rim of his elderly Mavic Cosmic wheel, radiating from each drive side spoke hole. The most spectacular was hidden under the label, so it just looked like peeling graphics. That one was about ready to blow.

This wheel had not gone out of true. The only sign was a noise that initially seemed to emanate from the freehub bearings.

Another rider, who is at least six and a half feet tall, mentioned that his Campy Nucleon front wheel has cracks at most or all of the spoke holes. He says he's been monitoring them. He also reported that another rider is monitoring the same problem with the same kind of wheel set.

If people were folding wheels right and left we would heard about it, so maybe this is just unnecessary alarm. There's usually some warning. But with more people riding wheels with very low spoke counts and high tension, each component carries more load. The failure of a single part will markedly increase the load on the remaining parts.

When I called Wheel Guru on Thursday to consult about spoke gauges and whatnot, she mentioned that she was at that moment building a 36-spoke rear wheel for a brawny rider who has killed one Cane Creek wheel a year.

"He brings them in with the big hand grenade holes in the rim where the spokes blew out," she said. "I've finally convinced him he needs something stronger."

The large rider, 200 pounds and up, ages equipment more rapidly than someone in the mid and lower weight classes. They are the canaries in the coal mine for smaller riders, because eventually those of us of lesser bulk will accumulate enough fatigue in an alloy part to experience the same effect.

Life is cheap on the street

The police chief of Hartford, CT made a bold statement after a hit-and-run driver mowed down an elderly pedestrian crossing the street in his city last week.

"We have no regard for each other," said Daryl K. Roberts. A report this morning on the Disney Morning News said he later softened that stance.

Too bad. Because that's succinct summation of how it feels to try to get around a crowded, supposedly public, thoroughfare when you're not in an armored vehicle.

I'm not saying we should dissolve into chaotic gridlock of doe-eyed drivers waving each other through stop signs. But why does it NEVER occur to drivers to slow down in congested areas? It is exciting to rip through a city street like Luke Skywalker screaming through the metal gullies of the Death Star en route to delivering his deadly payload, but in theory the objective of driving on a normal street is NOT to leave a trail of death and destruction.

Regardless of the fact that people called 911 within a minute of the incident, the fact remains that drivers maneuvered past the body as if it was just any piece of debris.

Few people want to see something distressing and gross. Later arrivals would not know if the body lay there because of an accident or perhaps a shooting. This may explain their reluctance to stop. But how about the ones with a clear view of the incident who just kept going? The two who hit the pedestrian fled with the typical guilty conscience of people who do things like this. They probably already had things to hide, and this incident is just one more.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, NH, an aggrieved boyfriend punched out his girlfriend while she was driving, causing her to run a red light and smash into two other vehicles. That's right, folks! Play out your personal dramas in any old inappropriate place. Don't just punch on someone. Do it while she's piloting a ton of steel, glass and plastic in traffic.

So you see you just never know what might be going on in those tins of canned humanity rolling by on the conveyor belt.