COVID's killing Specialized

 Specialized Bicycles is dumping small dealers like a centipede shedding injured legs, in a desperate attempt to save itself from the mess that the bike industry started making for itself back in the 1990s, when technofascism combined with outsourcing to create the repeated waves of obsolescence poured on consumers from factories in distant lands.

When the pandemic hit, it wiped out production first, because the factories were all in areas close to the source of the disease. Because of the nature of the disease, and the inertia of human greed, the illness managed to spread rapidly around the world, taking down all of the systems of the global economy. Then the guidelines of social distancing led to an unprecedented surge in outdoor activities, including biking. Shrunken supply met voracious demand.

I don't know how many -- if any -- of the other major companies, like Trek or Giant, are also shriveling under the strain. Specialized was our last major line. Major or minor, we have had no bikes to sell since the spring of 2020 anyway. Almost none, anyway. We received the odd token here or there as supplies dwindled.

Specialized thinks that it is acting in its own best interest, but how are the hundreds of customers who have bought Specialized bikes from us over the years supposed to get the proprietary parts that the industry has made the norm since the epidemic of "innovation" that hit us in the 1990s? Maybe consumers will be able to order directly from Specialized and then go to a derelict dealer like us to have the work done. Maybe the era of the independent bike shop is truly over, and customers with a bit of mechanical inclination will become their own mechanics, under the tutelage of online video experts.

Many more people are trying to do their own work now, bringing them face to face with the obsessive changes forced on them by an industry interested solely in pumping complete bikes out of massive factories, year after year. Maybe consumers will achieve what beleaguered shops had no hope of doing. Maybe they will rebel and vote with their wallets for technological stability and real product support.

It's a long shot. I tried to wise people up when the whole mess was getting started in the 1990s. Instead, they lined up in hordes to lap up the sweet bait that the industry poured out for them. Because riders in a boom don't generally last longer than the brief lifespan of an abused bike, most of them were gone too soon to have to deal with the ephemeral nature of the innovated bicycle.

Most of the innovation has gone into how to make mid-level and entry level bikes reprehensibly flimsy. A year or two ago I was saying that a good $500 bike was a thousand dollars now. Recently I had to revise it to at least two grand, and even then the $500 bike of the 1990s has much more solid basic componentry. It may not have all the moving parts and modern look, but it has a better shot at longevity.

Longevity is out of fashion. Indeed, as we screw up everything from the environment that supports all life to the democracy that supports diverse cooperation, longevity may be an unrealistic goal. Live hard! Die young! Have nothing but fun and go out in a fireball.

In the end, Specialized probably won't die from the pandemic. It will probably shrink to a manageable size, as other companies that have been in its shadow grow to similar size, and serve whatever there is of a riding public in smaller, more regional ways. One can only hope that this leads to some standardization of componentry and simplification of design so that riders are confident venturing beyond the reach of their specific brand's kingdom.

 In the 1970s and early '80s, bikes were simple enough and used enough similar standards to allow small shops to serve riders at all levels at least well enough to keep them riding. The first edition of Sutherland's Handbook was about a quarter the thickness of the tome by the turn of the century. Simplicity allowed for a broader base of support, spread among more manufacturers and independent retailers.

Delta dawn

 Checking my email this morning, I saw a "heads up" from the chair of the zoning board on which I serve. These usually involve pending applications, but this time it was to let us all know that she'd gotten a positive test for Covid-19 when she was getting ready to travel to Canada. She was vaccinated in April, and is asymptomatic. We don't sit close together at meetings. No one sneezed, coughed, guffawed, or shouted. But the case we concluded most recently was the toughest one we'd ever faced, and required multiple continuations lasting more than two hours each time.

I made immediate arrangements to get a swab rammed up my nose this afternoon. Because I've technically been exposed, I have to take the long form test, which takes 2-5 days to give results. What does this mean for our shorthanded shop? I haven't heard back from upper management. However, because I have invested in shop-level tools for years, I can do a lot of work from home. That being said, there's a few things I don't have. Bleed kits, for instance. And I don't have the spare parts, lubes, and cleaners in shop quantities. If I were to be pinned down here for an extended period, the business would have to recreate the main shop as much as possible here at the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

In case anyone reading this has been lulled into some degree of the false sense of security permeating the nation right now, let me suggest that we should all return to a higher defcon immediately. At the shop we are all vaccinated, and had relaxed mask requirements in keeping with the public mood and the state's relaxation of vigilance. However, noting the surge in cases not only in the hottest spots of sociopathic unconcern in the name of "freedom," but in our own relatively protected state, we'd been discussing whether to tighten things up.

Whatever the results of today's test, I'm covering up again and avoiding any place where people don't. Given the national laxity, that means avoiding any place with people in it. Can't avoid the grocery store, but I'll be back to shopping like I'm trying to retrieve essential items from a building filled with toxic gas.

Maneuvering against a disease that exhibits such a wide range of results among its recipients is a lot harder than dealing with a tangible foe, or even a disease that has a smaller range of clear-cut symptoms. If Covid made everyone who got it start bleeding through their eyeballs within hours, and coughing up actual chunks of lung within a couple of days, we would have had less trouble convincing people to take it seriously. Sure, there would have been holdouts, but they would have helped to weed themselves out much more quickly.

The tired point bears repeating, that disease prevention goes further than individuals protecting their individual selves from infection and whatever damage it brings them. My friend is fine. She had no inkling that she had been spooged. She just got the test as a routine part of getting clearance to travel. Her result also bears out the wisdom of testing everyone before allowing them to put others at risk. We've settled on certain categories that qualify as riskier, for which we're grudgingly "allowed" to test, by the freedom fighters who safeguard our liberty to be sociopathic assholes.

With power comes confidence

 As I rolled into town one day this week, I saw three riders coming toward me on Center Street.

Center Street is also Route 28 coming north out of Wolfeboro. Thus, it channels not only local traffic, but through traffic as well. Because Wolfeboro is off the direct line to much of anywhere, the volume of things like truck traffic and through travelers is fairly small, compared to a hell run like Route 25 on the other side of the lake. But Center Street is one of Wolfeboro's arteries. I do not ride it northbound to get out of the downtown area, because the slope, the lane width, and the temperament of the drivers make it one of the more stressful and unpleasant stretches, and it can be avoided. The Cotton Valley Trail lies to the right of the corridor, easily entered and exited when headed out of town. For anyone who doesn't want to ride the trail and can handle a bit more of a diversion, a road route goes out Route 109A to Beech Pond Road to Trotting Track Road, which intersects Center Street/Route 28 North just beyond the narrow bendy bit.

When I see riders coming out on Center Street, I always want to explain their other options to them, but I never can. We're both in the flow, paying attention to our survival. They're virtually always roadies or the odd occasional misdirected mountain biker. 

In the shop, I hear from many people that they avoid the road at all, let alone intimidating stretches like that part of Center Street, because they're afraid of motor vehicles. That's probably the biggest deterrent to riders. Imagine my surprise then when the riders I saw tooling merrily up the slight grade, taking the narrow lane in a chatting, amorphous formation were three women on upright comfort bikes. But they were on e-bikes. They were not blazing along at 30 miles per hour, but they had considerable assistance to maintain a speed that looked to be no higher than the low 20s. They felt like they were moving well, so they didn't worry about going at about half of the average motoring speed through there. Their demeanor might have changed if some irritable asshole had harassed them. But they looked completely at ease in that moment. Motorists were handling it well, for the brief time in which I could observe.

I will get glimpses of other smokeless moped riders on Main Street, which is also a state highway, and Wolfeboro's other artery. Most of them probably have summer homes outside of the downtown area. Some of them used to ride bikes powered by muscle alone, but age or convenience have persuaded them to accept assistance. The people best able to afford a car alternative around here also can afford -- and do own -- multiple cars. The e-bike is only a baby step toward a future that actually has fewer full-sized motor vehicles in it.

From a motorist standpoint, it matters little whether the pedaler in their lane has electric assistance or not. The riders are no more maneuverable than someone relying solely on their legs. A bike moving faster up a hill actually takes longer to pass, making it marginally more inconvenient for drivers to get around. Someone in the mood to go faster than 40 mph will find 25 just as aggravating as 20. They might even find 12 or 15 more acceptable, because they can get by more quickly.

With motor-assisted riders occupying a bicyclist-shaped space on the road, all riders gain as more motorists get used to dealing with more riders. It backfires if too many of the riders blaze around like no laws apply to them, but if the increase is mostly riders behaving more or less vehicularly it might serve to shift the balance of power as a beneficial but unintended consequence.

If the percentage of riders to motorists shifts in favor of riders, the pressure to have separated infrastructure drops, because pedaling on the existing system becomes more of a norm. If pedalers become the majority, all infrastructure becomes bike infrastructure. Then we will no doubt end up fighting among ourselves based on who goes faster with less effort. You could have some little old lady beating you with her umbrella as she paces you on her pedelec. It's a bright future indeed.

Endless weekend

 We've reached the part of summer where every day feels like Saturday. Saturday doesn't mean the same thing in a bike shop as it does in the normal world, especially in a resort town. Saturday is peak intensity, the opposite of a day of leisure.

A particular day might seem like a slow Saturday or a busy one, but any summer day can bring in a sudden crowd of people with the day off, looking for something fun to do. It's a very different pattern from winter's ski business, in which the peaks are solidly on the weekends, or on designated short vacation periods.

Particularly now, in the Summer of Denial, a population restless after a lost year is ready to push the limits of safety and gather with their naked faces, as case numbers spike in some regions and crawl gradually higher in others. Our particular part of New Hampshire has notched up to Moderate, while an adjacent county has reached Substantial transmission. We're seeing more masks, and wearing our own again much more of the time, but it's not general. 

Last week, a local man came in for some repair work. In conversation it emerged that he had never masked and he refuses the vaccine. He told us that all you need is hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and that masks clearly don't work because the guidance on them has not been consistent from day one. He is always affable, even when he can see that we disagree completely with his position. He's the same guy who wouldn't buy a Fuji Wendigo fat bike because it was named for a demon and he believes in God. And yet his regard for the gentle savior does not extend to such small gestures as wearing a face mask. He's a member of the Superspreader Church of Christ, down the street, where they gathered throughout the early rise of the pandemic until they spawned their very own cluster.

The shop remains shorthanded. It's always hard to find competent help, because we need someone smart enough to do the work and dumb enough to do it for a living. Failing that, we at least need someone who can show up on a regular basis and perform many of the basic mechanical tasks that confront us. We have no new bikes to sell, but repair demand is still high. Parts can be hard to get, but enough come through to keep us going. We're getting killed on freight, because we have to pounce on things as soon as they are available, rather than waiting to fill out larger orders at longer intervals.

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.

Century-hopping again

If it has pedals and still rolls, sooner or later we get asked to fix it. I'm waiting for someone to bring in a stone wheel with a wooden crankset mounted through the center of it. At the same time, we're expected to keep up enthusiastically with the ever more costly and less durable offerings of the bike industry to its hostages customers.

One day recently, the leap was directly from about 2011 to the late 1940s.

This beast has had maddeningly imprecise shifting since it was new. Its owner was told several years ago by another shop that the only chain it should ever have was a particular Shimano model that had just been discontinued. They didn't tell him it had been discontinued, only that our shop had put on "the wrong chain," and that he should only ever use the magical CN7900 or something. His bike had Dura Ace ten speed, from when ten speed was the top of the line. Now it's middle class. The magic chain has been gone for a long time, and his particular specimen is totally thrashed. The bike shifts sluggishly, severely handicapped by the internal cable routing and forced use of 4mm shift housing, due to the configuration of the cable stops. This bike was never going to shift well, and now it shifts worse. The customer told us to leave the worn out chain and cassette on there, because he is emotionally unready to let the talismans go, even though they clearly do not work anymore. Maybe he'll score some artifacts on eBay or someplace, to eke out a few more years of acceptable mediocrity. We'll install whatever he asks us to.

Immediately following this 21st Century marvel of engineering was this BSA Streamlight in pretty rough shape:

The customer wanted to restore it to rideable condition. It hardly seemed possible for less than several hundred dollars, but when she described her intended use I agreed to the most basic repairs as long as she understood that the bike would not be very safe for extended riding or steep hills. It's nice to bring it back from complete oblivion to limited use.

Bikes can be hard to date accurately because records are often lost or incomplete. This is true of even a seminal brand like BSA. It's "just a bicycle." Starting at the back of the bike, I saw the Sturmey Archer hub, blackened by a coat of greasy dirt, and wondered if the bike was a latter-day knockoff. They're still made in India. It seems like a strange bit of nostalgia for the British Empire. However, the obvious age of the bike overall favored its authenticity as an original. But did it predate the TI buyout in 1957? The Sturmey Archer hub would say no. But when I scraped away the grime I found a date code of 1979. That indicated that this was a replacement wheel. The trigger control on the handlebar was also much later than the rest of the bike, having a plastic lever. This rear wheel and control had been added later.

Everything forward of the rear hub moved back in time.

The fully enclosed chain case has access ports at the rear dropout and around the crank itself to provide sufficient access for routine work like fixing a flat tire or replacing a chain.

Rod brakes are weird. I guess they're a step forward from a spoon brake that presses on the tread face of the tire (tyre?), but it still seems like a heavy, cumbersome rig compared to cable-actuated brakes. The way they meet the rim is interesting, too. They're less affected by a wheel knocked out of true, but they're less powerful overall. Then again, compared to early caliper brakes on steel rims, the difference in braking power isn't that large. Brakes were something you used to slow yourself down before the inevitable impact with something solid, especially in wet weather.

The rear brake is in really rough shape, but it not only still worked, it was still adjustable. I would not have thought that penetrating oil would recover the rust-encased lumps that vaguely resembled threaded connections, but it not only did so, it did it quickly and easily.

The trim on this bike would have been very pretty when the chrome was new.

The dynamo hub really set the date range for the bike. 

 

This style appears to have been made from the late 1940s to about 1950. The lights are gone from the bike, but the hub came in handy for research.

You can even find brake pads for the rod brakes, though not from any of our usual suppliers. The sun truly never sets on the British Empire. Some, but not all, parts seem to be available for the linkages, too. Meanwhile, the pads that the bike has are adequate for the kind of short-hop, mild terrain riding the owner wants to do around the village and the campus of a private school.

The bike was actually much easier to work on than any modern marvels from the 21st Century. It was from back when people were so stupid that they built things to last, and to be maintained. I guess that's why the old companies either went out of business altogether or sold their names to modern managers who would milk the image of tradition and slap the label on modern dispos-a-bikes at all price levels. Durability does not help cash flow. Stuff that lasts and is repairable satisfies demand too thoroughly. 

Remember: the business model for modern consumer goods is cocaine. It's expensive, addictive, and creates a compulsion to replace it even when you know it is ultimately destroying you. That's true of just about anything sold in the last 40 years. Sometimes there's an evolutionary excuse for it, as when personal computers and mobile phones went through their early development. Even that technology has reached a point where it can't drive forward as aggressively, because too many users are lagging behind, and the industry can't afford to burn them off. But still it tries. In the bike world, a slowing effect accompanied the near stagnation that had settled over the general industry before COVID, while specialty areas catering to addicts continued to dangle enticing offerings before them. And smokeless mopeds have continued to grow based on the dreams and illusions of a large susceptible population.

The difference between culture and subculture

 When mountain biking boomed and took the bike industry with it, to levels of social popularity really never seen in the industry's entire history, it made biking -- particularly on mountain bikes -- part of the general culture of the country for almost a decade. Mountain biking was accessible, affordable, and widely appealing.

As the activity evolved, its tributaries exerted their influence and ultimately narrowed its focus, turning mountain biking into a subculture.

Culture is inclusive. It draws from social connections outside of itself to weave a discrete activity like riding what was then considered an off-road bike into the general lifestyle of a majority of people. Only a minority of participants actually spent a lot of time on technical trails, but the bikes were affordable and fun to ride, with a popular configuration. They were simple enough to modify readily to suit an individual rider's preferences. The bikes were everywhere, along with a general sense of belonging at least to some degree to a vast and accessible community.

Subculture is exclusive. It develops its own language and customs, designed to exclude the masses in favor of the qualified. Anybody with the money can buy the equipment, but it takes knowledge and experience to become a recognized member of the group.

Fragmentation is inevitable as personal styles gravitate to each other. Tribal affiliations form around specific types of riding. Within these tribes, hierarchies develop. In mountain biking, rank depends on exposure to personal injury. Whether it's overuse injury or crash injury, the group is isolated from the main stream of society by its adherence to technical off-road riding, and further narrowed by its adulation for participants with no sense of personal safety. The biggest risk takers are the most admired. Below them are the riders of lesser skill and daring, who may be completely content at their level. Some of them may pose or aspire to higher status, but many of them just enjoy their personal best and are happy to be part of the scene. It's safer than riding the road, while at the same time perceived as ballsier because of the public spectacle of stunt riders performing sick tricks and even releasing the videos of their spectacular failures. How else will the audience appreciate the extreme risk involved in being a true master of this thing that doesn't need to be done?

Not every category of biking forms a subculture. Mountain biking and BMX are strongly subcultural. Recreational path riding isn't subcultural at all, except to the extent that not everyone in our general culture rides a bike at all. But path riders and urban transportation cyclists don't have the special clothing and conscious pursuit of fitness and technique that other disciplines of riding have. Any category that uses special shoes and pants is a subculture at this point. At the height of mountain biking's cultural saturation, bike shorts and shoes were darn near mainstream, but they aren't now. Whether you wear tight, shiny shorts with a chamois or proudly display your disdain for aerodynamics and crotch padding with your off-road attire, it's generally tailored to riding. And flat shoes for shin-gouging flat pedals are still "biking shoes" just as much as pointy little hard-soled things with a cleat on the bottom.

Mountain biking now depends on constructed courses. The better ones offer trails with varying degrees of difficulty, in order to attract and maintain the interest of riders who will inject money into the subculture's economic sector to help support the interests to the minority of elite performers. This is much more vulnerable to economic fluctuations than the old exploratory style of off-road and dirt road riding that we pursued in the early years. We had to worry somewhat about land closure, but one's vulnerability was directly proportional to one's addiction to a certain kind of terrain.

When I gave up mountain biking near the turn of the century, it was to build a bike that would get me through just about any public right of way depicted on a map, before anyone had decided that "gravel" was a category and tried to exploit it as a profit center for the struggling bike industry in the wake of mountain biking's collapse. I'm still riding the same bike more than 20 years later, on the same type of publicly accessible right of way. Some of them are too deteriorated for regular practical passage, but most are useful connectors, and I don't concern myself with whether they are paved or not. I also don't have to worry about whether they will be too muddy. Most of them are kept clear and passable at least half the year by some government entity at the state or local level.

The Surly Cross Check was eminently practical. Naturally, it generated very little interest. In that way it was similar to the Pugsley -- ancestor of the fat bike movement -- in the way that it languished for many years, developing a slowly growing following before hitting a critical mass and contributing to the birth of a category that the industry could claim suddenly to have invented. I wouldn't ride it slam-bang down rough trails, but it gets me around on a lot of interesting roads less traveled. It used parts that could be mixed, matched, and substituted, for ease of maintenance and better odds of repair if you happened to need it somewhere far from home. It would fit nicely into culture, if culture should embrace simple bikes again.