Welcome to the work week

The first thing that greeted me was a Cannondale full suspension 29er with a loose front derailleur. It's a direct mount, so I had to remove the crank and front derailleur get to the bracket.  Then I removed the bracket mounting screw applied thread locker and reinstalled it before remounting the derailleur with new thread lock on all its screws. Once the derailleur was tight, the fact that it was weirdly bent became much more obvious. I got it shifting adequately, but it should be replaced. The guy was hot to go ride it, so he took it as it was.

From there I moved on to a seriously underestimated repair. Never mind the details. It reminded me to post a note about adjuster tuning cheap caliper brakes.

Adjuster tuning is a lazy shortcut used by sloppy or inexperienced mechanics. They turn out the barrel adjusters on derailleurs and brakes rather than taking up slack at the anchor bolt. But on cheap bikes with wide tires (and expensive bikes with embarrassingly inadequate quick releases) adjuster tuning allows you to get the wheel out or in without deflating the tire.

Today's Raleigh cruiser was a good candidate for adjuster tuning on the brakes. It was a good candidate for a lot of other things, too, but the owner told us exactly what he wanted and was willing to pay. Whatever you say. I write a standard disclaimer on the repair form in those cases: No other work requested or performed. If something looks really deadly I'll note that, too.

The Phantom Menace

In the past several years I have had more of a problem discerning whether a vehicle was coming up behind me than I did when my ears had fewer miles on them. I have not yet failed to hear an actual vehicle when one has been overtaking, but I frequently glance back because I think I hear the first telltale shift in the wind noise that indicates the approach.

I hoped the Cat Ears would address this problem. Eventually they might. In the meantime, they may have made it slightly worse. Because I no longer hear a strong rush of wind noise, I hear lots of other noises that blend into a different steady rush in a slightly lower register. This lower register seems to match more closely the altered pitch of the old wind noise as a vehicle moves into the turbulence a few lengths behind me. I look back more than I did before, because I'm not accustomed to the new soundscape yet.

A mirror might help, but I don't like how any of them mount to the bike or rider. A rear-view camera with a monitor on the bars would be perfect. It would also be expensive and cumbersome. Well, maybe not too cumbersome, as a quick search of wearable video cameras will demonstrate. There's even the Owl 360, specifically marketed as a rear-view camera for bicyclists. It's sort of affordable, as such things go, at $179 - $199. I don't have a hankering right now, but if I developed one I would have to remove one other piece of nerd rigging for any new piece I add. So what can I stand to live without? Other than most of it, that is.

The Cat Ears have improved communication when I'm riding with someone else. The incidence of, "Huh?! WHAT?!" has dropped markedly. It's not like being in a quiet room together, but it is definitely better.

Support your local disease

Busy with a deadline on a difficult drawing, I have not had time to post anything about an upcoming benefit ride. The cellist and I are riding in the Seacoast Ride for PKD on June 8. If you have a few bucks to toss at a widespread and poorly publicized incurable, terminal disease, visit her page or mine to chip in.

Hopefully the weather will be as nice as last year.

The ride is not an epic. It makes a nice morning. Or, if the weather is crummy, it only abuses the participants for a couple or three hours. Donate or sign up. They've got the route, the permits and the police presence. And the New Hampshire seacoast is already a popular riding venue.

What's a little extortion among friends?

Specialized recently sent our shop a bunch of bottles as part of their 40th anniversary promotion.  Fortieth, right? So the bottles have reproductions of 20 year old ad slicks. The designs include photos of a rider in US Team garb with Bill Clinton's head pasted in (years before Photoshop), and another rider with Mikhail Gorbachev's head -- complete with birthmark altered to look like a Specialized logo. They were worth no more than a chuckle even then. Now few people even get the reference,  especially from a fuzzy print reduced to fit on a water bottle.

Today I thought of a serious drawback to the Clinton bottle:

Isn't it tempting fate to have a bottle featuring a picture of someone known to have had a notorious bit of trouble containing his fluids?

Maybe if you carry the Gorbachev bottle your bike comes apart. 

The bottles arrived unsolicited and unannounced. Then we got billed for them. We're not allowed to return them. We have to try to unload them at a high enough price to cover the cost we would never have incurred if it had been up to us. 

Extortion. Part of any good long term business relationship. We've been a Specialized dealer since the 1980s. Don't think for a minute that this earns us any respect from the Big S. You're only worth as much as your last order. 

Celebrating your business anniversary by forcing dealers to pay for questionable promotional materials is like telling the people you've invited to your birthday party how much they already spent on the present you bought yourself. 

Nerd rigging

 The other day I rode my bike to an appointment. As I was talking to the person afterward, right before I pedaled off again, I suddenly thought about how I must look with all the nerd rigging that has gradually accumulated on my helmet and my face.

Every piece has a reason beyond mere geekdom. That's what I tell myself,  anyway.  The outlandish sunglasses provide excellent protection and hold a prescription insert. Yes, they're weird looking,  but they do their important job well. I only wear them when riding.

The fuzzy fake sideburns are the Cat Ears I've been testing. In theory,  the less wind noise you hear,  the more you should be able to detect and interpret traffic noises. They should help with conversation between riders, too, but only if both riders are equipped. Still cheaper than helmet radios. Talk about nerd rigging! "Breaker, breaker, good buddy!"

The helmet cam functions as my dash cam: the silent witness to events on the road. I wouldn't mind if it was smaller, even small enough to mount inside the helmet vents, but I wonder if its visible presence suppresses some motorist misbehavior. People are increasingly aware of the power of video and the Internet. I've been getting a fair amount of room from drivers this season. Is the camera sticking up there like a propeller on my beanie functioning as a protective threat?

The shiny mess on the front of the helmet is black duct tape to reduce the flow of cold air into the front helmet vents until the weather warms up. Comfy nerd.

Nerd rigging extends to my bike, too. See my dynamo hub and light system? Cooooool. And my full fenders keep me from getting all splattered when the roads are wet. Got a rack. Got a pack. I carry stuff: tools, spare tube, shift cables, things that might save a ride. I've even saved other people's rides from time to time with my nerdy tool kit.

I try to go by fast enough to leave only a fleeting impression on the observer. That may not be very fast at all, as long as I move steadily into and out of the scene. Don't let anyone get a good look. If you get caught, act natural. Escape as soon as possible. Pedal away with as much dignity as you can summon.

Experienced Misinformation

I've been watching an idiot riding in shorts through the last weeks of wintry temperatures. He's also mashing big gears, further straining his naked knees. I'm sure his friends know him as a big rider. It got me thinking about the effect of experienced misinformation in any activity.

Years in the bike and cross-country ski business have given me a valuable perspective on inside information compared to the wide variety of uninformed or partially informed speculation.

The first bike shop I worked in had the mechanics in the basement. I left that comfortable lair to try to sell some better bikes up on the sales floor so I wouldn't have to work on so much crap. I always intended to return to the mechanics' cave as soon as I had started the Ride Better Bikes Movement, but instead I moved on from the bike biz for a few years. In my current situation the workshop is accessible from the main shop floor. I get to hear every Loud, Confident and Wrong blowhard who brings his friend in to learn about bikes.

Mind you, just being in the bike business does not automatically confer full and complete understanding of how the machine and rider work. But the retail shop puts you in the center between producers and consumers. Much of their communication channels through you.

Magazines, websites, forums, books, films and gossip throw out clouds of information, knowledge, wisdom and fantasy, often completely undifferentiated. Riders and potential riders come in with opinions already shaped by these influences.

Even with good inputs, the learning rider needs to sift and sort for what applies in the individual case. Do you need to train like a top category racer or load like a transcontinental tourist to enjoy our particular type of riding? On the other hand, can you get away with being a haphazard slob with the amount of mileage you're putting on your bike and body?

The nice thing about human-powered vehicles is that very little is outright wrong, However, misapplication of technique or technology can be very unhelpful and occasionally distinctly harmful.

Big gears at slow cadences can -- but don't necessarily have to -- blow up your knees. If you have sufficient strength, augmented by diligent off-bike training, you can grunt around in the big meat all you want. You should set up your riding position for grunting rather than spinning as well, and accept the fact that you will have no snap and little tolerance for changes in cadence. And if your riding position and preparation aren't right, you will cause joint damage.

Riding in shorts in cold weather will lead to long-term knee damage and short-term muscle injury. You need to keep working muscles and joints warm enough to stay flexible and well lubed. Cyclists generate their own wind chill. Riding 15 miles per hour at 40 degrees you are pushing the old kneecaps through an effective 32 degrees -- freezing. The same speed at 50 degrees only gets you up to 36. A lot of riders in northern climes are tempted to show off their gams at 50 degrees. The venerable CONI manual said a rider should wear tights below 70 degrees. Personally I have pushed that to 60 degrees since I moved north, but I still tend to be more conservative than a lot of the aggressive riders and their uninformed disciples around here.

Aggressive riders may sidestep the consequences of their clothing choices by quitting the activity when they can no longer pursue it aggressively. They put in a few hard years and move on, believing when they finally get arthritic knees and quads that feel like dried-out rubber bands, that these are normal symptoms of aging. The "right" thing to do never would have mattered to them because they were not interested in longevity.

Unfortunately, observers equate speed and competitiveness with overall knowledge. This person must know what they're doing because they can always drop me on a ride. That's right. A V-8 is lots smarter than a 4-cylinder.

You might even see bare legs sticking down below a fairly bundled-up torso and arms. Far better to average out the coverage over the whole rider. I cover the legs first, add layers over the core and finally add sleevage. Since I'm older and more sluggish now the transitions may come much closer together. I admit I overdress more often than I under-dress. Having been caught far from home with too little clothing I don't want to repeat that misery. I can always peel a layer and tie it or tuck it.

Older beginners will suffer the consequences sooner. If you're already on the threshold of age-related frictions, and especially if you came from an abusive sport like running, you need to take care of what you have left if you want to continue to use it.

The unifying quality to all experienced misinformation is oversimplification. In this the misinformed get little help from the bike industry, because in any selling situation if a short distortion will get the buyer to fork over, why waste time with a longer, nuanced education? The only time someone focused on the sale will slow it down to address a point the buyer did not expressly introduce is when the consequences have bitten the seller on the ass enough times to make it worth the trouble to try to prevent it. Otherwise, let the mechanics deal with it down the road.

Humans are great at creating one problem to solve another. To some extent this is just how mutation and evolution work. But we tell ourselves we're better than that. Yeah? Prove it.

All the uncorrected impressions and sloppy explanations ripple outward through the world, crossing and recrossing in waves that wash back into the repair shops or stagnate in the corners of garages and basements.

Nipple Alert

The tune up was going smoothly. Too smoothly. The owner of the bike is a big guy who rides a lot. How was I breezing through this toward my fast-approaching deadline? I'll just pop these wheels in the truing stand, even though they look pretty good.

I'd noted that whoever built the wheels had used alloy nipples. Don't get me started on alloy nipples. I've seen a lot of them sheared off over the years. But I began to wonder if alloy nipples might be the safety valve to take some of the strain off of heat-treated rims that fatigue and crack.

In the stand, the rear wheel looked pretty straight, but I saw a tiny waver I could reduce to nothing. I set the spoke wrench on the flats of the nipple and barely shifted my fingers. The nipple crumbled to powder. It took no force at all.

On an older wheel I check for cracks in the rims. On eyeleted rims I look for loose eyelets. So when I surveyed the wheels for more deterioration I marked bad nipples with red tape on the spoke and bad eyelets with a bit of tape on the rim.

I can't say for sure how close the wheels were to catastrophic failure, since the spokes still held even after the nipples had crumbled under exploratory pressure, but they weren't being ridden over rough roads by a large guy right then, either.

Particularly disturbing was the number of bad nipples in the front wheel. If eight spokes decided to let go at the same time in a front wheel I think you'd stop pretty abruptly. And that's in a conventional wheel with 36 spokes. Do the math. Reduce the number of spokes, correspondingly increasing the load on each one and then subtract a bunch all at once. A rider I know lost ONE spoke in a Mavic wheel on a fast descent and it almost locked up the wheel completely. He was able to bring the bike to a controlled stop, but it was a scary few seconds.

So, my weight-conscious friends, examine your wheels very critically if you have had them a few years. These wheels had a lot of miles, so fatigue is not unreasonable, but if no one had checked they might have announced their retirement at a surprise party they threw for themselves.