We provide...leverage

Trust the bike industry to create a compatibility issue in something as simple as a front shifter.

A customer had us build a bike for him for the Mount Washington Hill Climb back in 2003. He used it in the race every year until last year, when he asked us to convert it to a flat-bar road bike.

The frame was a Trek 5900 SL. The carbon fiber road frame uses a bracket for the front derailleur rather than a derailleur with its own clamp. This was irrelevant on the original build, because we did not mount a front derailleur. In fact, the frame had no derailleur bracket when he had the bike delivered for its road conversion. Finding a bracket to fit a frame that was nine years old -- prehistoric in current bike industry terms -- was a treasure hunt. It was easily resolved once we found someone who knew the right part number at Trek. So we were all set, right?

Come on. This is the bike industry we're talking about. The business that's been killing the wounded and eating the dead since the 1990s. The group that puts its elderly out on the ice floe to die before they're even out of grade school.

Our customer wanted grip shifters. He also believed that the road conversion would be a simple matter of adding the parts the climbing bike had done without. It's a reasonable assumption if you don't work with this machinery all the time. Even I felt that the front shifting would be the least of our worries once we rounded up a very basic array of parts. A ratcheted front Gripshift is a simple device for pulling cable. A front derailleur is a simple device for pushing a bike chain toward a chainring with which you want it to engage.

Trigger shifters and road brifters only pull a specific amount of cable. A compatibility issue there is no surprise. It's expected. The customer's request for the closest thing to a friction shifter seemed to get us around that. But the shifters we use technically come from the "mountain" category and the only front derailleur that would work with this frame mount and gear range comes from the "road" category.

The shift to the middle ring on the triple crank went well enough, but that last little twist to make the big ring was incredibly stiff. And no matter how much cable tension I put in the system, the arm on the Sora FD-3503 is too short, and angled in such a way, that it barely swings far enough to clear the ring. The shifter never manages to pull it all the way to its limit screw.

With no alternative parts, I had to make these work. Introducing the Cafiend Leverage Enhancer.

The arm of the derailleur is extended with part of an old brake cable adjuster. It's bolted to the arm, where it braces against the cable routing flange to keep it from rotating downward when the cable gets tighter.

At the shifter end, the diameter of the grip seemed a little small too. We've had older riders complain that they have trouble with that. Lacking anything more elegant, I built it up with several layers of inner tube. If he likes that but wants something a little zootier I'll get some of that black foam insulation they use on air conditioning lines, and snug it on there with some super-fat shrink tubing. He won't be back until next summer, so we'll have to wait and see.

The system works. Shifting is easier. I have one more brake adjuster that's a little longer if he wants that, but we start to get a little close to the rear tire then. If the rider wanted to put on something cushier than a 700X23 things could be tight.

Profiting from the government shutdown

This morning a couple of guys who had been furloughed from the Kittery Naval Shipyard (FKA the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard) bought an inner tube before taking advantage of their unscheduled time off on this beautiful, warm , sunny day to get a road ride.

That's one more inner tube than we would have sold if they hadn't found themselves with the day off.

So much for our exciting lives here.

The off season

In our area there are really two off seasons, although the demise of winter is blending everything from Labor Day to Memorial Day into one long off season. For the moment, enough people still want to believe in the coming of ski season to keep it gleaming somewhere below the horizon, a mythical land of promise.

We get our odd jobs this time of year. What they are and when they'll arrive is completely unpredictable. This year it's been a handful of repairs, some rentals to people who specialize in vacationing when other people don't, and assembly of three weird tandems for an adaptive sports program.

I get an extra day off during this period, because the shop closes on Sundays. While I love the extra time for my own use it actually crowds the work week when someone does need service. They see how quiet things are and nudge for quick completion, but I have one less day to get parts I need for them and complete their job. It's better than sitting around with nothing to do but sweep the dirt from one side of the floor to the other and try to figure out why our air compressor acts so weird. It's just funny how it's all or nothing.

I made the transition to the park and ride commute a little earlier this year. Things I had to do on various evenings made the full distance inconvenient. Shortening daylight makes me a little concerned riding the highway, even with my great light system. So I've retired to the forest. I'll have to dust off the old helmet cam and take a few videos of the rides as the foliage gets brighter. The file videos I tried to post from last November didn't work for some reason.

Musing on a quiet day

The nice thing about working with a guy who has traveled to many distant countries with sketchy sanitation is that you can produce the worst fart in the eastern North America and he doesn't even bat an eye. He's hard of hearing, not hard of smelling. But experience has brought him worse olfactory experiences.

I would worry about offending customers, but there are no customers. The day turned sunny, but no one has even rented a bike. We've done about $2.50 in business. Okay, maybe more than that. But dayamn is it slow today.

I'm waiting for a tool to arrive from Stromer for an electric bike I've been working on since August 29. Two of the e-bikes arrived that day in boxes for assembly. One was good.The other was cursed. They both seemed ready to go by Friday that week, but the cursed one barely got a couple of miles (if that) before it went dead. The two sisters who had ridden out on the bikes walked back.

Thus began a long diagnostic process. I had already replaced a main power cable in a bike of the same brand for another member of the Seasonal Resident E-bike Society. He used to be number 368 on the Forbes list of richest people in America, although I did not see him on the list last I checked. Suffice to say he has the funds and corporate clout to get results. We get parts shipped overnight-Saturday delivery for e-bikes belonging to the S.R.E.S. I say this not to brag, merely to marvel at the level of attention enjoyed by the rich and powerful. It's not US they're shipping the parts to. It's the agents of the former #368, who just happen to be us. Us be them. Take that, grammar!

For some reason we don't seem to get real overbearing wealthy snobs in here. The rich we do get, while prone to occasional outbreaks of unbecoming chiseling, have largely learned that we don't respond well to that, and we do provide competent, conscientious service. The ones who just want to sling their money around never bother to come in here. What do they need from a bike shop anyway?

There are some riders in town who simply must own better bikes than we sell. We are but yokels after all. Some of those riders we only see when we chance to look out the window at the precise moment they ride by. Others of them might come to us to get a shift cable or have a flat fixed.

I've learned one thing about e-bikes from my encounters with them over the years: Every part of them is heavy. And you will have to lift the heaviest parts over and over in the process of figuring out what's wrong and fixing it. The Stromer rear wheel, with the motor in the hub, weighs 23 pounds. I know that because I just installed the new one Stromer sent after we isolated the problem that kept the bike from working at all. It had other problems we fixed en route, but that hub motor had definitely stiffened right up. I had not been looking forward to muscling that thing around, but you do what you have to do.

Now I'm waiting for the special freewheel tool required to change the gear clusters, because the replacement wheel came with a 9-speed and the shifter on the bike only goes to 8. We didn't have an appropriate 9-speed shifter hanging around, and it should really be on Stromer's dime, not the customer's, so I called the hot line one more time. The tool is on its way. At least I hope so. I'm looking forward to taking this hot rod for a derby once it's fully functional.

Congratulations on your purchase

You've just bought an expensive, high-tech bicycle component. Thanks for your business. Now here are all the ways YOU COULD DIE!!

Packaged with the handlebar stem for the recent bar-and-stem change I did on a customer's titanium Serotta was a thick, black booklet with the word "WARNING" in distinctly unfriendly letters on the cover. When I photographed it I noticed that camera motion had given the images a nice jangly, alarming look, so I made a collage of a sequence of them.

Inside the black cover was the same information in about 27 languages. There was about a page and a half of fine print covering all the ways you could mangle or kill yourself, and about three-quarters of a page of warranty information.

The makers of the carbon fiber handlebar took a more low-key, upbeat approach. You had to pay attention to see them tell you that the bars you just paid $250 (US) for should be replaced every three years. If you race a full season on them, they should be replaced after one year.

To be fair, even in the days of aluminum alloy the manufacturers recommended replacement every three years. After about 17 years I started to wonder about my old Cinellis when they started to creak a tiny bit, so I swapped them out for a new pair. I've been running those for probably a dozen years now.

No manufacturer wants to take a chance and recommend a customer grind their product down to a nub. They'll gladly use the story of such long-term endurance in their advertising, but it's never official policy.

When you're talking about a material like carbon fiber, known to fail abruptly when it finally goes, you may want to abide more closely by the manufacturer's recommendation.

Feelin' No Pain

The rider who brought this bike in has added not one but TWO gel seat pads to the original saddle on her Schwein.

And I didn't even know that La-Z-Boy made bike seat pads. If they're in the bike biz, where's the adjustable recliner recumbent? I would totally ride one of those, especially on the way home from work.

Hamfisted stupidity or crash damage?

A customer requested new "wing" bars for his trusty Serotta road bike because the top section is more comfortable on long rides. When I unwrapped his old handlebars I discovered that either some muscle-headed idiot had graunched down so hard on the anchor bolts that he'd cracked the lever bodies or the levers had been damaged in some kind of crash. I would hate to have been on the bike in an endo that would damage the levers like that. Maybe it was a roof rack crash into a low overhang.

The levers are nine-speed Dura Ace. Ancient history. You won't find a nine-speed road brifter of equivalent quality.

I hate waste. I also hate the expensive scavenger hunt to put together a working drive train after the untimely death of one crucial component. This bike could have continued to work for many more seasons with proper care. The owner is meticulous. That made this hidden damage more of a surprise.

The owner decided to go with Ultegra 10-speed. I thought at first I could make it work using his existing rear derailleur, but now I'm afraid I won't really be able to get it to work around the 12-30 cassette. We didn't discuss gear range, but I liked the idea of getting a little lower low for the hills around here. His other bike is a very recent Felt, which probably has a compact crank. It would have a 34 inner ring, automatically providing a lower low gear than his current 39-27, even if the Felt has a low cog of 25.

There is apparently only one Ultegra 10-speed rear derailleur in the entire eastern United States. I may or may not have successfully ordered it.

We may have another compatibility issue with the crank. The narrower 10-speed chain might wedge between the rings on the 9-speed crank. I thought I had a perfect work-around there with a discarded Dura Ace crank from another customer's bike, but it would mean replacing a 172.5 with a 170. My other candidate, an FSA similar to the older model on there, has 175mm arms. To do better than that I would have to order a crank from one of our suppliers.

The cost mounts. The customer can afford it, but that's not the point. I did not go straight to a worst-case estimate when I laid out the problem for him. Because I've had some success getting Shimano crap of different generations to play nicely together I gave way to foolish optimism. I should have known that the Big S almost always wins. And the rider's wallet loses.

I'll never convince the cycling population to refuse complex technology and stick to what works, year after year, mile after mile. And that disturbs my peace of mind if I let myself think about it. So I try not to. I just keep doing my best to keep the tricky crap running, while the industry feverishly produces trickier and crappier crap.