Find Your Solution in a Bottle

Like many creative people, a lot of alcohol goes into my work.  This is particularly true when cleaning rims and brakes.  Many cleaners leave residues that are slippery or cause brakes to squeal. Alcohol makes everything better!

Be sure to use a clean rag.  Find a fresh section of it if the rim has a lot of aluminum oxide and other grime on it.  Otherwise you just smear the dirt around.

Alcohol dries quickly, leaving a clean (and sterile) surface.  It's also good for removing frog guts and drowned worm residue from brake arches.

Rational Cycles

How would one finance a company that offered simple platforms on the basic frame types and wheel sizes to knowledgeable shops where the technical staff could customize them for individual riders' needs?

Would it even be worth it?

In the olden days, the early 1990s, bike companies already offered too many models, but the models they offered were all based on simple and similar configurations.  Road bikes received little attention, but in the mountain and the emerging hybrid category you got a lighter, more precisely made version of the same basic bike as you went up in price point.  A rider could buy in at their chosen price level and have the shop fine-tune the setup from there.  It did not provide instant gratification, but a good shop could make a lot of changes quickly if the rider so desired.

Mountain biking rode the crest of its popularity right then.  It was a bike for the people in an inclusive culture far removed from the perceived snootiness of road riders or the obsessiveness of tri-geeks.  The mountain bike's simplicity and durability made it appealing.

Racing's warlike qualities brought down the inclusive culture along with the simplicity and affordability as hyper-competitive cyclists and sponsors formed a military-industrial complex with the bike industry to push the frontiers of engineering far away from the happy doofuses riding their fat-tired steeds on streets and trails like carefree children.

The industry will argue that the cheap mountain bike of today has many more features than the pig iron of 1990-'92. I have to agree, progress has been made.  But not every sweeping change has been real progress.

I digress, as usual.

To introduce a line of rational bikes, a business would need more buying power than a single shop can muster.  I've tried using Surly frames and bikes, as well as used frames and bikes as a basis for customization with only limited success.  Even with access to wholesale pricing on product, I can't glean enough margin to make a bigger play. Real custom bike customers are looking for more impressive products, as a rule.  The people who could benefit from the gradual enticement of an upgradable bike often can't get their heads around the initial investment.  Surly and similar offerings seem affordable to those of us who have been involved a while, but we're already hooked.

In Resort Town, our year-round cycling community is too small to support much of a shop anyway.  We have our knowledge and tools, but don't generate enough revenue to support a lot of inventory.  Using cross-country skiing as a winter line is just masochistic, given the way the winters and the ski industry have been treating Nordic.  High-zoot Nordic shops get sucked into stone grinding, but how many Nordic skiers really want to pay to have their bases surgically removed and then expensively rewaxed?  Drugs are the best analogy to that kind of commitment to speed, but drugs are more available, less weather dependent and, on the whole, less labor intensive.  That explains the larger number of drug addicts than performance-obsessed Nordic skiers.

Nordic is actually another sport with the fun technologized out of it.  It seemed so timeless and simple in the 1980s...a little wider ski, a little more rugged boot might make my exploring experience more fun.  What's this skating stuff? Hmmm. Wish the trails were wider and more uniformly smooth.

The bike industry has been groping for years for a product that will excite consumer interest as much as the mountain bike did.  We have production versions of all the variations shops used to configure for their customers, as well as motor-driven cycles in various guises for those who don't really want to pedal.  Maybe the thing to do instead is reinvent the mountain bike in its appealing simplicity with only a few genuine improvements, like better brakes, and a return to top-mount shifters.  Maybe all you have to do to get lightning to strike twice is put up the right lightning rod.

Frog Guts and Motor Oil

Hard to believe after a night of downpours that any oil remained on the road surface, but the way my bike started to cross up as I cranked onto Route 16 I could tell the pavement was slick and greasy.

The torrents had also lured many frogs to their doom. Their flattened white belly skin made a pattern of laminated patches where groups of them had been smashed by the fat tires of cars and trucks during the night.

This morning I turned back to save a red eft that had ventured onto the warm blacktop after the wet night. They often don't appear real, these strange little orange crawlers. Lethargic from cold or dehydration, if not outright crushed by a motor vehicle, they look like they're made of gummi candy rather than living flesh. The one this morning was fairly lively when I picked it up, and larger than the ones I usually see.

The red eft is the terrestrial phase of the red spotted newt. They're cute little buggers.

Drivers have seemed just a touch more aggressive as summer winds down. I observe this every year. Maybe it's me, maybe it's a seasonal shift as drivers lose patience with cyclists after the peak of riding season, but they seem to start passing a little closer, a little faster this time of year.

Most motorists probably believe they're doing you a huge favor simply by not crushing you. Any sample of the comments after a news report of a car-bike accident or motorist harassment of a cyclist will include plenty of throttle-monkeys declaring that an injured cyclist only got what they asked for, and that "roads are for cars."

They're not too bad just yet. They get worse in September. Just deal with it.

Maybe the rise in aggression is early because school is starting very early this year. The formal end of summer comes too soon. I always see more broken glass and angry driving at the start of the school year. This year proves the rule. I rode through several minefields around shattered bottles that have blossomed on what had been beautifully pristine new pavement. During the brief summer we can pretend we live in a tropical land where dinner is always grilled and boring or annoying tasks can be put off until manana. The regimentation of school totally blows that.

Mechanical work has tapered off at the shop. It's a good time to seize a week of the actual summer for myself.

The Rails Run Parallel and the Parallels are Interesting

Members of the Cotton Valley Rail Trail Club found my post about injuries on the trail and started chewing on me in the comments.

One point in particular stood out. The aggrieved rail car operator pointed out that bicyclists could ride in a great many places, but the rail car drivers can only operate on a couple of lines in the entire region. Enthusiasts drive hundreds of miles with their rigs on trailers to run the Cotton Valley line.

While I'm no fan of recreational burning of fossil fuels, I have an open enough mind to accept that not everyone will see the sense in that point of view. People like what they like. I don't know what went into the negotiations when the trail was conceived, but it seems generous of the rail buffs to try to accommodate other classes of user.

Viewed in this way, one must describe the Cotton Valley Trail as a rail line that pedestrians and bicyclists get to use rather than a bike-ped trail strangely hindered by vestigial rails. It's the rail club's separate but unequal piece of rail because they CAN'T go play on the big-boy tracks with the real trains. They've been run off to a segregated venue where they won't interfere with the real business of transportation.

There I was with a bike in one hand and a chihuahua in the other...

...and my phone started ringing. Isn't that always how it goes?

I let the call go to voice mail while I finished my business with the chihuahua and the bike. The owner of both had come in to get a basket for the dog to ride in. It was part of a mass-casualty scenario that had overtaken me hours earlier. At the height of it I had three jobs open and checked in two more.

The dog and his charming owner passed the time nicely. Max is a half-grown long-haired chihuahua with a beguilingly shy manner.

A dog should either be small enough to transport easily or big enough to take care of itself. Max fits the pocket-sized niche. We had a nice visit before I returned to the rest of the docket.

The bike on which I did about $500 worth of conversion work for the Mount Washington Hill Climb had come back to be turned back into an ordinary all-Ultegra Trek Madone. That job kept going on and off the stand as the other crises came in. I'll finish it tomorrow when I have someone to intercept many of the interruptions from the floor.

It felt like lunch time early, but didn't really get to be lunch time until late. It was the good kind of busy day. I didn't spend a lot of time spinning my wheels, trying to figure out how to work around the lack of some vital tool or part or waiting for a call back to authorize some major item overlooked when the bike was checked in.

I enjoy the hot summer weather. The temperature this morning was perfect. By mid day I'm sure the heat was brutal. That can be fun in its own way. But on the morning commute it was in the low 70s, perfect for jersey and shorts. A day with a mid-day high like that would start much colder and probably be shorter.

Inside the house right now it is still and steamy. Even with all the windows open, the heat built up through the day takes hours to flow out. Tomorrow begins a series of three fixed-gear days with an increasingly showery forecast.

A couple of good jobs wait in the queue. More will arrive once I call a couple of people to tell them the parts they ordered have come in.

Cyclists Checking Each Other Out

When you meet another cyclist do you automatically look down to check out leg musculature and whether they're shaved?

August 20 Clarification: I posted this in haste during a work day after several riders had walked through the shop in civilian clothes. Their manner revealed that they were familiar with bike equipment and comfortable in a shop. They moved with quiet confidence.

Looking at legs is a racer habit. What might this competitor have under the hood? Because a cyclist is both driver and engine, you can take your best guess based on the parts you can see.

In the lower licensed ranks, hairy-legged riders used to get crap from those who had shaved, even if the shaven ones had to chase down the hairy one to deliver their insults. Add a hard-shell helmet and you could find yourself shoved into a parking meter because the smooth-legged majority assumed you were a dangerous geek. At the very least, as a privateer you would not get anyone to work with you if you didn't look serious.

I make no judgments about a rider based on leg hair and muscle tone. Cycling is much bigger than that. I just thought it was funny that I still had the reflex urge to look.

I am a hairy geek on a heavy bike now. That hasn't kept me from dropping a few riders on titanium or carbon fiber when I meet them on my morning time trial to work. But I have no illusions about where I sit on the scale of absolute speed. And who really gives a rat's chamois anyway?

Without Warning

A rider came in today because "her gears suddenly started skipping."

"It made me swerve so suddenly I veered into traffic. I thought I was going to get hit," she said.

Something was clearly loose in the hub and cassette area. The freehub body had fractured at the lock ring threads, causing the cogs to detach from the splines. The whole mess was afloat. The chain could not possibly stay on one of them when nothing would stay in place.

The wheel was a first-generation Rolf from the mid 1990s. I believe those were Formula hubs. The freehub bodies were supposedly replaceable, although they could be difficult to detach from the hub shell.

I had never seen a freehub body fail in this way. If it happened while sprinting hard a crash would be almost inevitable. Fortunately, this rider was only hopping out of the saddle for a couple of quick pedal strokes to close a gap to her companion close ahead.