Appendix B - More on Presta Valve Locknuts, aka Valve Rings

Introduction 

Obviously, just about anyone would read an essay of almost any length about Presta valve locknuts, aka valve rings. Even so, I deferred last week to the presumed minority of souls who are intimidated by vast tracts of text, and I actually shortened (!) my post. I achieved this via two means: a) moving a tangential discussion of tubeless setup to an appendix, and b) saving a second digression for this week. So, as a counterpoint to last week’s post and its Appendix A, I herein provide Appendix B. I had originally intended to use this post to present my brother’s input on the topic and my response—and I will get to that. But first, I’ve already received lots of reactions to the first post and I’ll tackle those now.

Feedback on the first post

It goes without saying that my first essay on valve locknuts generated immediate and impassioned responses. First was this commentary (from Anonymous) below the post itself:

Deep analysis of an important topic. I have shared with all my friends. I expect to have fewer of them shortly.

Next came a written apology from M—, who started this whole thing 13 years ago when (as recalled in last week’s post) he called my use of valve locknuts “a sign of novice nerd-dom.” In an email last Thursday he announced that he’d read my last post in its entirety—something he almost never does, but in this case, as he explained, his wife “was watching some PBS program about British royals so I had some idle time.” He went on to say, “ I apologize for the stinging remark about your moronic use of stem nuts.  I can be frightfully insensitive at times.” (And as you have seen, I can be frightfully moronic.)

Subsequently another member of our bike club, K—, emailed the group, “Dana, thanks for sharing the valve rings / valve stem nuts article. We chatted about it at the Sibley stop on today’s ride, then lo and behold what should B— spot but a valve ring in the wild!

I replied to K— and the group, “I hope somebody grabbed it for his or her stash, or maybe even valve, or at least to clean up litter,” to which K responded, “I did not grab it Dana. One of my valve stems ( the wheel in the picture) was unthreaded and the other … had a valve stem ring on it already! Also, I think the group’s feeling was that this was now a ‘wild’ valve stem ring, and it was best to leave it to its hard-earned freedom.” Fair enough!

That same day, another teammate, D—, wrote, “After reading your post I added valve rings and caps on the short stems in the low profile Mavic MA40 wheels on my 1970s Frejus — in support of ultimate loser dorkitude — certified M-approved.”

Look at that! Actual valve caps! Seeing those certainly throws you for a loop, don’t it? Unlike valve locknuts, these caps are so universally eschewed that actually seeing one is as unexpected as seeing a dog washing itself, or viewing an AI-rendered drawing of a person with three arms, or encountering a schoolgirl with sideburns (though none of those exemplifies dorkitude, I hasten to add). The first photo of this post, of the capped crooked valve ... ugh. Just ugh.

The next response was from L—, who inquired, “OK, but what about a bling driven setup where I have the nut and the cap because they are from Hope and bronze anodized to match my hubs?” He included these two photos:

I think in the case of extreme bling, a special dispensation should be granted. Nothing wrong with a little flair. L— has mentioned that he used to mountain bike in Hope, a place in Derbyshire near Sheffield (though Hope is also, confusingly, a manufacturing company in Barnoldswick, Lancashire). I shall hereafter always think of L— as The Man From Hope. (Well, okay, the other man from Hope.) Now, I’ll bet I know just what you’re thinking: wouldn’t one of those amazing gold anodized valve caps make a fine addition to M—’s collection? L—, if by some chance you’re reading this: you have been warned.

And now, I shall move on to my original topic, the invaluable input on valve rings from my brother. (If more responses to my previous post come rolling in, I’ll have to address them in another appendix or two.)

Uncle Bryan weighs in

When I originally solicited opinions about valve locknuts via email, I really wanted my brother Geoff to chime in. After all, it was my impasse with him that got this whole debate going, 36 years ago. Plus, he’s one of the best bike mechanics I know; his nickname when he was the mechanic for the Cal Poly Wheelmen was “Dr. Shimano.” I was known, to the members of his team and mine, as his loyal sidekick, Tecnova, named after the really shitty Panaracer tires that tended to come on Japanese road bikes in those days.

A note on those tires: I spelled the name wrong in a previous post. I’d put “Technova” but just learned it’s actually spelled “Tecnova.” So sue me. Anyway, here is a photo. Just look at how shitty they are:

This  probably won’t surprise you, but I had ChatGPT help me chase that down that photo. Have you ever noticed how when the chatbot is done servicing your request it always suggests something else it could do? It just doesn’t want to let go. It should be called ClingGPT. In this case it asked if I wanted it to provide a “high-resolution, clean copy” of the tire photo for me. I said sure. Here’s what it created:

Look at that! It bears no resemblance to the real tire! John Keats would be turning in his grave. (He’s the one who wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”) What’s kind of frightening is that ChatGPT could have corrected my spelling but instead reinforced it. It even claimed that there’s disagreement about “Technova” vs. “Tecnova” and cites this very blog as precedent for “Technova,” even though the GPT knows I’m albertnet’s author. When AI ultimately replaces human companionship, nobody will ever be kept honest again. But they’ll be so cozy and satisfied with their sycophantic digital pals!

OMG, where was I? Oh, yeah, I’d reached out to Dr. Shimano for input on valve rings. Alas, I couldn’t get his attention, but I did get a nice response from his evil twin, Uncle Bryan. (Is Bryan evil? No, of course not, he’s just Geoff’s twin. But “evil twin” has such a nice ring to it! In reality “evil” applies instead to Geoff, because he is known to all his nieces and nephews as “Evil Uncle Geoff,” just as I’m known as “Evil Uncle Dana.” And are Geoff and I evil? Yes, definitely. Now, moving on to the “Uncle” bit, it just seems to me that as my brothers and I age and try to embody the gravitas we’re expected to have as full-on mature adults, we should have some kind of honorific to extend and embellish our names. I would enjoy being called Captain Dana, or Master Dana, or even Lord Dana, but of course I haven’t earned any of these. In certain contexts I get to be Coach Dana, but that doesn’t transfer very well to my everyday life, so I generally have to settle for Uncle Dana. Somehow among my brothers and me this “easy honorific” has become completely standard, to where it’s actually rare to leave off the “Uncle,” even if we’re just talking to each other without a niece or nephew in earshot.)

With no further ado, here is Uncle Bryan’s commentary.

First, the against. Do they really work? It’s hard to say if they work or not without knowing what it is they are supposed to do. I’m not prepared to answer that question at the moment. So the answer is yes, I think they do work, so that’s not really an against, except that some believe that they don’t really work. I’ll address that conundrum later. 

The other against that I can think of: weight. They add weight to the bike. I don’t care about that. The weight is negligible and if I were concerned about weight, well... there are other areas where that could be addressed with orders of magnitude of difference. Didn’t you once thread many valve rings on an opponent’s bike to add weight and annoy? And also fill his frame tubes with ball bearings? And was this the kid who would stop what he was doing every few minutes just to walk over to his bike and heft it, just to remind himself how light it was? At the Joke on the Hill? 

There is one real problem with valve rings that I can think of, though, and that’s that they often come loose. It seems to me that they rattle and annoy, though now I’m so deaf that I can’t hear if they are rattling, so maybe they don’t ... but I remember that they used to, but then again can I really remember anything? Am I just imagining all this? It’s like Dad when his front derailleur would be rubbing and driving us all mad but we were too shy to mention it most of the time. I did see a front derailleur that was ground almost all the way through, leaving this knife edge in the metal... was that Dad’s? He couldn’t have ridden enough to do that, could he have? No, it was Dad’s! I can totally see it in my memory! But then there’s that memory problem again... No, I’m sure it was! Now the tables have turned, of course. I was riding with [his son] John, maybe even when we did the STP, and he pointed out that my bike was making a clicking or ticking or popping sound, mostly in first gear, or at least in the lower gears where the tension was high and the wind noise low. I know it does this but can’t figure out what it is, so I just pretend it’s not happening. If I do that I pretty much can’t hear it anyway. I’m just too tired to care, and what can I do? So maybe the valve rings do rattle, and maybe that’s a problem, but not for me. The other problem with their coming loose is that they’re probably not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, whatever that is, if they’re loose. 

So what are the benefits of valve rings? Let’s see, I know there are some benefits, some reason that I “like” them, or at least use them. Okay, firstly, they keep the stem from disappearing in the rim hole when you shove the pump head on it. That’s handy, but of course there’s the down side that if you don’t shove the stem into the tire body before inflation you might end up with the tube next to the stem lifting the tire beads and blowing the tire off the rim as you inflate, and it’s hard to shove the stem in there with a valve ring blocking the way. I seem to remember that happening like fifty years ago, but I don’t think it happens anymore, or maybe it was all in my imagination, or a theory as to why the 500 PSI air compressor at the gas station blew my tire up in two seconds and the explosion right next to my head ruined my hearing. Either way I’m going with the rings. 

The other thing it does that I can think of is that it keeps the stem perpendicular to the rim, which is of utmost importance. There’s nothing dorkier than a valve stem that’s all cockeyed. I’m sure we used to argue that it was a safety issue as well, but then we argued all sorts of stupid stuff. And if you’ve got the tube misaligned with the tire too much the valve ring just isn’t going to save you, it can only do so much. 

Now it seems that there’s more... oh yes, if you don’t have a valve ring it’s like the stem is naked and you can see past it into its more modest regions, that place where it’s not polite to look. If the rim has a big valve hole this problem is even worse, and it also exacerbates the issue with the stem’s angle to the rim. Maybe back in the day we’d use a valve ring to cover up the fact that the rim was made for Schrader valves (or worse, reamed out for Schrader, by you!) and by extension you were a loser. You may as well have steel rims. So yeah, a valve ring can do that. It also looks like it’s protecting the stem somehow, maybe from getting broken off if it got bent too far in one direction. I don’t know how it would do that, but that’s the feel it gives. It just looks better, okay? Like a fork crown with a Dura-Ace brake on it, not naked; clothed, armored, even. 

One more thing... it’s just more stuff, more intricate parts, more little things to make the bike cool. Like those caps we’d solder on the cables, or cable goodies, or the Shark fin, or the little sack for the Suntour... what was that, power cam? Yeah, the power cam brake. I actually feel the same way about presta valve caps, but I guess valve caps are another blog post—probably your next one, in fact! 

My responses

So, starting with Bryan’s first question—what are these locknuts even for?—I think it’s remarkable that he even asked. I will assert (at the risk of antagonizing some readers) that most people form opinions without really bothering with the step of wondering. Instead they quickly discern what position their tribe has taken, and unquestioningly align with it.

Bryan is right, of course: valve locknuts do indeed hold the valve straight, though any competent mechanic should be able to get this right, and the crooked valve problem is more with Schrader valves on low-pressure tires because these valves are common among cheap-ass commuting bikes that get very little maintenance. I am convinced—and I’m happy to argue with you about it—that riding your crappy commuting bike with underinflated tires causes the valves to gradually get pulled crooked. So if anything, more Schrader valves should have locknuts. (I have only seen one such tube.)

Bryan’s memory of my threading “many valve rings on an opponent’s bike” is accurate; as described here, I once stacked like ten of these locknuts on each of my opponent’s valves. My opponent was of course was our evil brother Geoff; this was part our valve locknut war. But filling a frame tube with ball bearings … that wasn’t me. That was this kind of annoying guy I worked with at The Spoke, or (as my brothers called it) The Joke. It wasn’t The Joke on the Hill, though; it was the lame Joke in the Table Mesa Center. The Hill was the college community and that was The Joke’s flagship shop. Not only was “my” shop the lesser one, but I wasn’t even an hourly employee … I was just a lowly assembler, paid by the bike. My brothers scorned me because the shop we admired (and that we eventually all worked at) was the High Wheeler, or Thigh Feeler as we called it. It didn’t matter that my brothers didn’t even work there at the time—they could still mock me for my lesser affiliation. (As you can see, these twisted parasocial relationships actually predate social media.)

I distinctly remember the guy at the Joke whom Bryan referred to. He looked exactly like Jahn, the creepy, developmentally arrested ringleader of eerie children in the 1966 “Star Trek” episode “Miri.” Jahn, as you’ll surely recall, led the kids in calling the Enterprise crew “grups” and in ultimately attacking them, chanting, “Bonk, bonk on the head!” So uncanny was this bike shop guy’s resemblance, I felt nervous working around him. (I don’t remember his name, not that I’d give it to you anyway.) Where my memory fails is that this guy was either the perp or the victim of the ball bearing prank and doggone it, I just can’t remember which.

Anyway, the story is, somebody at the Joke (possibly the Jahn lookalike) had a beautiful Mercian road bike made with Reynolds 753 tubing, which was a really big deal in those days (this being around 1982). The thinnest part of the tubing wall was just 0.4 mm thick, and a mechanic with strong hands could actually see the tube compress if he pushed hard enough on it with his thumbs (or so it was said). This frame was built up with the lightest stuff, even the actual Campagnolo Super Record pedals with the titanium spindles (as opposed to the cheaper steel-spindle Superleggeri most of us had). Despite belonging to the employee, this bike was always on prominent display on the showroom floor. Its owner, who wasn’t even much of a cyclist, was in the habit of walking over to pick it up end enjoy how light it was. He did this multiple times a day and it drove the rest of us nuts. So finally the perp (possibly the Jahn-lookalike) waited until the bike’s owner went to lunch and then pulled out the bike’s seatpost, and filled the entire seat tube with ball bearings. He put the post back in and then we all went back to our posts and waited for the owner to get back from lunch and lift his bike again. When he did, he just about had a heart attack, and the rest of us almost died laughing.

Moving on to Bryan’s memory of our dad’s front derailleur rubbing constantly to the point it was destroyed … is that accurate? 100%! I remember it very well, because I felt so lame about being too timid to bring it to our dad’s attention. That’s how little rapport we had with the guy. His reward for being so aloof and unapproachable is that not only did the chain eventually grind all the way through the derailleur cage, turning the remaining piece into practically a blade, but eventually when he went to shift, that scalpel-like protuberance peeled the side plate of his chain like a damn can opener, as though the front derailleur had taken revenge! No, I wasn’t there when this happened, but for some reason my dad loved telling people all about it. The way he regaled his friends, colleagues, and probably even complete strangers, it was like he thought it a heroic tale!

Regarding Bryan’s next observation, “if you don’t have a valve ring it’s like the stem is naked and you can see past it into its more modest regions, that place where it’s not polite to look,” this is beautiful, deathless prose and I have nothing to add.

“Like a fork crown with a Dura Ace brake on it, not naked, clothed, armored, even.” He’s referring to the modern fork of a bike with disc brakes, so the fork crown is totally naked, no cool-looking brake caliper like we’re used to seeing.

Now, the Power Cam brake he mentions was a total disaster invented by Suntour. It really should have been featured in road.cc magazine’s feature on Design Blunders. The brake had these little rollers and a specially shaped cam that was supposed to give you great braking power without tight pad/rim tolerances. There were three main problems with this. One: it was a pain in the ass to adjust properly given the variety in rim widths and the weirdly shaped cam. Two: as the pads wore down, the wrong part of the cam would engage, so the brake worked poorly. Three: the brake was mounted to the underside of the chainstays (supposedly because they flexed less than the seat stays), so it tended to get packed with mud, which would gum up the cam rollers and foul up the brake further. In response to this third issue, a company called Overland made an after-market ballistic nylon jacket for the entire assembly. This was pretty hokey, although arguably more important than a valve locknut and certainly more beneficial than a valve cap. Evidenly Bryan actually liked this little jacket; I guess he just had a weakness for all the little bits you could add to bikes.

Speaking of little bits, he misremembers soldering little caps on the end of cables. There were little caps, which fell into the category of accessory we called “cable goodies” at the bike shop (which category also included little rubber donuts that a brake cable gets threaded through to stop it from dinging on the frame tube). We did solder the ends of cables, with a little torch, which I will never forget because one day Bryan let a blob of molten solder drop right off the end of a cable onto the head mechanic’s bare toe, causing him to howl such a powerful stream of profanities to make a man’s blood run cold. But the caps Bryan is evidently recalling were these cool little cable caps that Shimano included that were actually made of solder, so all you had to do was hold a flame to them. Clever, huh? And then there were the little aluminum caps you could just crimp on there, still prevalent today, which we called cable titties.

And the Shank Fin? That was a chainstay protector that had a little fin on the front to keep your chain from getting sucked into the tire. I recall these fins working pretty well and I don’t know why they no longer exist, other than to say the chain is more prone to getting sucked up from the bottom. A skilled mountain biker can hear and/or feel when this is happening and quickly backpedal, just a quarter turn, to release the chain; with e-bikes there’s no such feedback and the chain ends up breaking, which is why you see e-bikers on the side of the trail peering into their smartphones to try (usually in vain) to learn how to fix a broken chain. O brave new world!

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this plunge into bike arcana. I know I strayed pretty far from the point here, but isn’t being beside the point kind of the point? (It is for me, anyway...)

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