Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was no traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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The Return of Full Slab

Introduction

This is the tale of how my late-nineties Guerciotti, which still holds the title for the most expensive frame I’ve ever purchased, became my commuting bike. It’s sort of a sprawling family saga charting my commuter fleet, its deaths and diseases, and the Guerciotti’s downfall, which, in a strange way, has also become its apotheosis. My Guerciotti is named Full Slab, and here it is with me on a high mountain road in Colorado back in 2005:

Here’s a quick quiz to decide if this post is for you.

Q-factor is:

a) A subjective judgment of how cute a bike is

b) A measure of the distance between a bike’s pedals

c) A measure of how quiet a bike’s drivetrain is

An Italian bottom-bracket shell is :

a) More stylish than American-market bottom-bracket shells

b) Larger in diameter than an English one

c) Enough to get this post an R rating

Sturmey-Archer is:

a) A grain and oilseed conglomerate

b) A once-proud English maker of internally geared bicycle hubs

c) A dashing rogue from a romance novel

The right answer in each case is (b). If you got at least two right answers, or are disappointed at scoring a zero or one on this quiz, read on. If your eyes glazed over immediately, go read something else or enjoy some television. If you’re somewhere in between, scroll down and look at the photos. There are lots of them.

A proper fleet

Everybody really needs about half a dozen bikes. First, your pride and joy, which is your racing bike. Then, you need to have your “rain bike,” which is a lesser racing bike that you ride in the rain or on your stationary trainer. Also, you should have a mountain bike for satisfying your dirt centers (and optionally a cyclocross bike if you’re into that sort of thing). Finally, you need two commuting bikes. One is a basic three-speed with a big basket and fenders and a chain guard. This bike is for commuting when you’re in a suit and/or in the rain and/or when you’re grocery shopping. The final bike you need is your fast commuter, which has a full 12- or 14-speed drivetrain, light wheels, etc. for going all the way across town.

Until recently, I was living the dream: I had all the bikes listed above, and our household bike total was nine (with only one car). But then, catastrophe struck.

Death comes to the fast commuter

One day this past February, I was sprinting all-out on my fast commuter, not a care in the world (other than being late), minding my own business, not bothering anybody, when all of a sudden, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, with no provocation whatsoever (all of these phrases, by the way, are part of the stock tale that a bike shop customer tells when asking for a warranty), there was a really loud sound like a snapping turtle breaking a broomstick in two, and my bike went from riding just fine to flexing like crazy, a weird springboard boinga-boinga-boinga action, probably a bit like an early ‘80s aluminum Vitus. Remarkably, I was able to get the bike off the road without crashing it. Check out how it broke:

It’s not unusual to break a frame on a fast commuting bike. All frames have a lifespan, and commuters get ridden hard and put away wet (to use an equine analogy). The first frame I built up as a fast commuter was a Serotta, which I got free in 1985 from a fellow mechanic at the bike shop. It had broken before I got it, and to teach himself the art of brazing this mechanic replaced a tube or a lug or something. That frame lasted three rides. I replaced it with a Maserati, a cheap Italian frame a pal gave me because he’d outgrown it. The Maserati lasted about five years, and then it broke as I dropped off a curb going from Sproul Plaza to Bancroft Way on a rainy night in ’91. I replaced it right away with a Bridgestone RB-7 or some such thing that I traded a headset for. That bike gave me nineteen years of trouble-free use. (The components have gone from frame to frame to frame; the rims are Wolber 58s that could withstand the Apocalypse.)

The Arseless

With my fast commuter broken, I’ve spent the last nine months commuting on the Arseless (named after an assassin's bike in a Roddy Doyle book), which is my old black Triumph 3-speed, from England (by way of Connecticut and craigslist). The good news with these old 3-speeds is that you never need to service them. The bad news is that you never need to service them. Bikes like these could really use a good overhaul, but you don’t dare. It’s common knowledge that if you go near one of these bikes with a wrench, they can go to pieces, parts sproinging out like some crazy Pandora’s jack-in-the-box. Every bolt you touch strips instantly. Each component is slowly rusting to death, held together only by habit or inertia—the pattern of is molecules is just barely stable. For years I refused even to take the rear wheel off this bike, fixing each inevitable flat by pulling out the punctured part of the tube and patching it. Keep in mind that I worked in shops for more than a decade: if I’m reluctant to work on a 3-speed bike, you can bet its previous owners were even more reluctant. Which means this bike has likely never been serviced in its life, and it’s older than I am.

So you never tune up the 3-speed, and it just gets slower and slower as the bearings gradually destroy themselves. If you did take the wheel off, you probably couldn’t turn the axle with your fingers. Perhaps a one-speed would be manageable without ever being serviced, but a 3-speed is trickier. The English-made Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub is a feisty beast, known to turn on its rider without warning. One second the pedals are engaged with the rear wheel, and the next second the linkage is missing and the pedals spin uselessly, which can make you lurch as if dry-heaving, bash your leg on the bars, and/or crash the bike.

Every 3-speed I’ve ever owned has done this to me. Usually it’s when you’re in second gear and then, suddenly, aren’t. Here’s just one such tale of woe, which I described in a letter to my brother a few years back: “I was riding to the store on the Arseless the other day, in a hurry because dinner was waiting on whatever I had to buy, and the rear tire was almost flat so I was out of the saddle. I was in second gear, because that bike is so inefficient (and high-geared) that third would’ve been too hard. Right about the time I realized I was in second, and what that meant, it was suddenly too late—the Sturmey freewheeled on me and my knee bashed the bars with great force. I cussed up a storm, not realizing I was passing the new down-the-street neighbors’ house and their little daughter was within earshot. D’oh! My knee was really sore, and in fact that evening I could barely walk.”

The cussing theme recurred recently when, as a treat, I rode to my daughter’s school on the Arseless, riding one-handed so I could roll my daughter’s mountain bike along next to me (so we could ride home together). This two-bike arrangement meant twenty-plus pounds of extra weight, and that I couldn’t ride out of the saddle up Peralta, which is a steep hill. (It’s not actually steep. I could probably tackle it in the big ring on my Orbea. But the Arseless makes mountains out of molehills. First gear on a Sturmey is okay for the flats; second is fine for a downhill; third is only suitable for going down a ski slope. Either England is totally flat, or the Sturmey company saw an opportunity to celebrate that famous British stoicism and perseverance.) Struggling not to drop Alexa’s bike, I was weaving back and forth, barely able to continue pedaling, and let loose with a loud and serious curse, when I saw one of those nice old people who sit on their porches watching the world go by. She looked stricken. I felt great shame. It decided then and there it was time to build up another fast commuter.

Finding a frame

Having never shelled out any money for a fast commuter frameset, I set my budget at near-zero. I figured I could find a decent old frame, or even a complete bike, on craigslist for cheap. The 1980s was a golden era for good inexpensive Japanese road bikes; you see them all over the place, still going strong. Generally, a bike owner has little idea as to the value is of his bike, and this can work in your favor. But I was shocked to find people asking more money for an early ‘80s bike than the damn thing cost new! They seem to think the bikes are collector’s items or something. The worst ad was for a “"vintage Free Spirit road bike" for $125: “Bikes in rideable condition... Also would be a great frame for a collector to rebuild.” A Free Spirit is a department store bike, which is the bike equivalent of non-dairy creamer, or a cheap kid’s toy covered with lead paint, or a Costco frozen burger patty. No Free Spirit has ever cost more than $100 new, and would be a total rip-off at $5. “Great frame for a collector to rebuild” … is this guy crazy? I’d sooner buy used toilet paper.

Which brings us to Full Slab. The frame was just sitting in the garage, its parts having been looted to put on a new frame three years ago. The chrome on Full Slab was lousy to begin with, and as a result it had badly rusted during its four-year role as my rain bike. Three years ago I decided to get some Quick-Glo rust remover and restore the frame. Here is a before shot:

I did a web photo album of the restoration, and the above photo carried the caption “The Horror!” A friend posted this comment: “A more appropriate title for the photo is impossible. That makes me want to run from the room shrieking like one of my daughters.”

The rust cleaned up remarkably well, but all the same, my friend’s comment really made an impression on me. The phrase “my daughters” was particularly compelling; after all, I can’t help but descend pretty fast, even on my rain bike. So I’d decided I couldn’t conscionably keep using the frame for actual road rides, and replaced it with something basic but non-ferrous. (Note to burglars: as far as you know, I have a vicious attack dog who guards my house, and just the other day I trained him to chew the zipper out of a pair of jeans.)

Now, a commuting bike doesn’t have to be as safe as a road bike; I seldom break 20 mph around town. So, the rust wouldn’t be an issue. Yet, I hesitated to reincarnate Full Slab as a commuter because a) it seems a lowly occupation for what was once my primary road bike, and b) I actually never liked Full Slab that much to begin with.

I’d bought the frame online in August of 1998, sight unseen, for $881.94. The website provided most of the details of the frame geometry, but the head tube angle was listed as “proprietary.” Since the frame had a long top tube, I naturally assumed it would have a steep head angle, which is how to keep the wheelbase relatively short. But Full Slab arrived with a shallow head tube angle and a long wheelbase. I’ll never forget that first ride. As I left my apartment and rode up Polk Street toward Lombard, I immediately realized the ride was lousy. Like a damn mule.

(When I replaced Full Slab, I was determined not to take any chances with frame geometry, and designed my own frame. Here is a design that, in my opinion, totally rocks.)

Needless to say, I got over my misgivings about repurposing my old road bike, and set about putting the Guerciotti back into service.

The catch

The trouble was, predictably enough I couldn’t get the fixed cup out of Full Slab’s bottom bracket shell. The cup is made of (relatively) soft aluminum, and its design is the victim of dunderheaded nationalism. The British Standard for fixed cups is to have a left-hand thread, and for jolly good reason: as you pedal the bike, the turning crankset causes the bottom bracket spindle to rotate within the cups. Because of this rotation, a cup with a right-hand thread will tighten itself down endlessly until it’s too tight to remove for servicing.

But the Italians just had to be different, had to defy the British and their sensible design, had to throw their weight around and ensure incompatibilities that I imagine were originally meant to protect their GDP. The Guerciotti being Italian, it has an Italian-thread bottom bracket shell and thus was doomed to have its fixed cup tighten itself to death. The adjustable cup (threaded into the left side of the BB shell, where pedaling would tend to loosen it) came right off, but all I managed with the fixed cup was to booger the wrench slots up a bit. I brought the frame to my local bike shop, and the mechanic there took one look at it and said, in essence, “Sucks to be you.” He made a cursory attempt to remove the cup, and then threw up his hands. I can’t blame him; such an operation isn’t really a repair—it’s a fool’s errand, and cannot possibly be profitable for a shop.

Fortunately, I have some red meat in the house, and a garage with a big messy workbench, and a Dremel tool, and a vocabulary rich in expressions like “Sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.” So I used the Dremel to cut a new slot into the cup so I could get a really good purchase with a big screwdriver, to which I would apply, with extreme prejudice, great and violent pressure using a tool that at the bike shop we liked to call “The Persuader.” That is, a hammer. Here is the Dremel tool in action:

This scheme did not work. Actually, I didn’t really expect it to work, but I had to try. Then I sought advice from my brothers Geoff and Bryan, but subsequently decided that neither of their suggestions would work. This wasn’t necessarily a fair conclusion, but having been mocked by my older brothers during my teen years for not being “mechanically minded,” it was almost a matter of pride to pursue my own solution. I cut another slot in the cup, across from the first one, and widened the slots:

Why did I widen the slots? And why two of them? So I could fit a flat headset spanner in there, of course:

Once I had the spanner in there, it was just a matter of whaling on that bad boy with the Persuader. Like magic, the cup screwed out just fine, in one piece no less. The threads are perfect in the bottom bracket shell, and the new bottom bracket went in in a jiffy. The hard part of the assembly was over; now it was just a matter of moving the parts over from the Bridgestone.

The assembly

Fortunately, I had my daughter Alexa helping. It’s not like I couldn’t have done it without her, but involving her makes this less of a selfish bike project and more of a Quality Time With Dad scenario.

One goal for this enterprise was to purchase as little as possible in the way of new parts. All I actually purchased was an Italian-thread square-taper bottom-bracket (which I was relieved to find mail-order for $20). Other stuff I got from The Box. Every cyclist should have a box like this in his garage:

The hardest part of the assembly was the brakes. I’ve got some nice Dura-Ace calipers in The Box, but of course I wanted to use Mafac cantilevers with bolt-on Moots Mounts. Here, Alexa removes the mounts from the old frame, being careful not to lose any parts.

Why the Mafacs? Well, for one thing, every bike should have some French parts on it, as a show of humility and a hedge against dogmatism. (All my bikes have at least one French component, except the Arseless, which would reject it like a bad organ.) By the way, look at the bright orange water bottle in the ground there. It’s an important part of the bike. It has a story: I had it on my bike when I lived in San Luis Obispo, and a local racer actually asked me to stop using it. He was very proud of being Dutch, and told me that an orange water bottle was kind of his trademark in the peloton. I thought his request was absurd and reeked of narcissism. I was working at a bike shop at the time, and happened to learn that Specialized was blowing out those orange bottles for thirty cents apiece wholesale. I ordered like two dozen of them and gave them out to all my friends. At the next race, they were all over the place. If anything, the orange bottle had become the trademark of the Cuesta Community College cycling team.

Okay, back to the bike. Because the Moots Mounts flex like crazy, my brothers and I fashioned some stiffeners out of old steel chainrings to improve the braking performance. Tough to set up, but the setup looks pretty cool, doesn’t it?

Note also the Campy shifters. These are the later-model engraved ones made in Milan; I used to have the even cooler ones made in Vicenza with the “CAMPAGNOLO” in raised letters. Also note the pink gear cable. I was determined not to buy any cables, housing, brake pads, or anything. (I’m not sure why I have this impulse; perhaps it’s a backlash against an industry whose goal, as with most industries, is to get people to replace perfectly good stuff with the latest version.) Replacing the chain would have been a good idea about eighteen years ago; now, with two decades on it, it’s too late—the chain has a special relationship with the cogs, which would skip with any other chain. So I put the ancient Sedisport back on there.

What’s remarkable, given the old chain, is that the “new” chainrings don’t skip. Not exactly new: I dug out my old (1983) Dura-Ace AX Dyna-Drive crankset, wondering why I didn’t have it on the previous incarnation of this bike. Then it dawned on me that when I built up that Bridgestone commuter, I still had the Dyna-Drives on my racing bike! (In fact, they earned me the nickname “Dana-Drive” at UCSB.) These cranks used a wacky pedal—you can see a pair of them in The Box, above—that had no axle, and whose axis of rotation was actually below the end of the crank. This gave me the equivalent of a lower bottom bracket, lowering me a bit on the bike so I could get a better draft behind the others. Very cool stuff. In 1984 Alexi Grewal, though officially riding Suntour, used this same model of crank when he won the Olympic road race. Also in this photo you can see the beat-to-hell old Campy front derailleur.

Traveling exhibit

There seems to be a real fad of turning old road bikes into “fixies” by removing the derailleurs and such. Why anybody in hilly Berkeley or San Francisco would want to do this is beyond me. Not only are gears nice to have, but shifting is fun, and keeping your drivetrain intact provides the opportunity for more exhibits in your rolling museum. Look at this sweet Dura-Ace rear derailleur, circa 1980:

Locking up your bike’s wheels is a hassle, so I have these sweet bolt-on Suntour cartridge-bearing hubs. Of course it would be even cooler if Campy made bolt-on hubs for road bikes. I had to make do with using my Campy “peanut butter” wrench to install them. You can see the Arseless in the background. Note also the DT spokes the wheel is laced with. Life is good!

I’ve always hated those clunky little clamps for the Kryptonite lock, and have had the pleasure of not needing them, thanks to my Fisher twin-strut handlebars that accommodate the lock perfectly. Note also the brake lever condoms, bar-ends, and even a Dura-Ace headset—the height of decadence on a humble commuter bike!

So here is the bike, all ready to go. My main impression of it, when it was all done, is how huge it is. Lindsay noticed it too, the first time she got a ride on my top tube (a regular occurrence). She pointed out that nobody would want to steal the bike because they wouldn’t be tall enough to ride it. At first I thought the bike gawky, but you know, at the end of a long workday, it’s actually kind of nice not being bent so far over the bike. In fact, for a mere commuter bike, this thing rides like a dream. It is certainly the best commuting bike I’ve ever had, and I must say it’s nice to finally feel complete respect for Full Slab. This bike has finally come into its own. It’s like the mediocre football player who went on to be a great coach, or the so-so racehorse who found a glorious second career as a stud.

But wait, there was one final change I had to make after I’d taken this photo: the Concor Light saddle just didn’t belong. For an old-school bike like this, I really needed the Turbo. So here it is, all 450 grams of it, mounted on one of the sweetest seatposts ever made: the Campy Super Record.

Just in case you were thinking of ripping this bike off, rest assured I put it in a locker at Bart now. As for breaking into my garage at home, did I mention my killer attack dog?

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Big Red - Letter to a Young Gearhead

NOTE: this post is rated R for mild strong language and thematic elements.

Introduction

Awhile back, I sent a photo around to the guys on my bike team. The photo was of a very cool bike, with incredibly large wheels, that my brother Max recently acquired. Here's the very photo of the very bike and the very brother:

Just recently a pal on my bike team e-mailed me about it:

This was such a loaded subject that I wasn’t surprised when my response ended up being rather long-winded. I suppose the popularity of Twitter, with its ultra-short, off-the-cuff, breezy messages, should dissuade me from assuming anybody has the patience anymore for a lengthy discussion of bike parts, bike lore, shop talk, personal history, and such, but just in case I’ve lucked out and you’re a bike nut or at least an aficionado of machines and/or blue collar matters, I’ve decided to post my letter here, with some more or less appropriate photos.

In the photo below, Jan is on the left. In the middle is our friend and EBVC teammate, Mark. As may be evident from the photo, Mark and I are old enough to be Jan’s dad. That said, Mark and I are still idealistic enough to cling to youth, fight off age and the aura of responsibility, and generally try to pretend we’re still Jan’s age. The limitations of that approach are represented throughout this post.

My response

Jan,

Sorry for the delay in answering your question about the bike with huge wheels. It’s impossible to broach such a loaded topic briefly, and if I tried to keep this brief it’d take me even longer. But you’re a young, unfettered guy, looking to take on a hearty mechanical project, so you won’t mind a long-winded response, I’m sure. (Myself, I dare not take on any bike projects, lest I end up out on the curb with the Floor-Mate and the old armchair and whatever else Erin decides is cluttering up the garage. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that I’m a lot older than you, whatever my self-delusions try to tell me.)

The photo I sent around is of my brother Max’s bike, which he calls “Big Red.” I haven’t ridden it yet—I haven’t been back to Boulder to visit Max since I got the photo. A very cool bike it is, and perhaps all the cooler for being kind of pointless. The wheels are indeed a stunning 36 inches in diameter. Max says 36 inches is a standard size for rickshaw wheels so it’s easy to get tires for Big Red. He says the ride is smooth as silk—“You can just roll over a curb and not really feel it.” He said it’s a great bike for getting noticed, too.

That’s the good news. I asked Max if the bike is hard to steer; he admitted that it really is—“Like the Exxon Valdez.” There’s also the issue of gearing; you really want gears on a bike like that but good luck finding such a thing. The previous owner (more on this later) retrofitted the bike with a Shimano Nexus 7-speed internal hub, which wasn’t at all easy to do.

I suppose I should say a few words on the subject of internal gearing. I’ve encountered enough youngsters like yourself, who have never ridden a bike with friction shifters or toe clips, to know there’s a good chance you’ve never dealt with internal gears. There’s nothing like a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub for a proper commuting bike. So much more dignified than a “kicky, fun” “commuter bike” with “grip shift!” Of course, the Sturmey will turn on you, time and time again. I’ll be riding along on my old Triumph 3-speed, a black beast I call the Arseless, a proper English bike with an upscale bike license from Connecticut that expired in the ‘50s or ‘60s (the decal is no longer very legible), with my heavy work bag and u-lock in the basket, humping it up some 2% grade that feels like Alpe d’Huez, and suddenly the drivetrain will just give, no longer engaging the rear hub, and my body will heave forward, my knees crashing into the bars and stem, and I’ll almost go down. There’s no way to adjust the Sturmey well enough to prevent this; there are little gears and pawls and whatnot in there whose corners get rounded off over time. Second gear is the scariest. My brothers Geoff and Bryan could take a Sturmey apart and overhaul it but I never learned; those hubs are like clocks inside. Geoff had a 5-speed that was a nightmare; he got so fast at field-stripping it, he’d give it a complete overhaul every few days, as naturally and fluidly as a chain-smoker lighting up.

The Shimano Nexus 7, though, truly represents the impending ascension of the Eastern world. (After decades of prominence, Sturmey-Archer almost went out of business before being bought up by a Taiwanese company.) True, the Nexus has a grip-shift thing, not nearly as cool as the lousy Sturmey Speed-Switch shifters, and true, Shimano makes fishing reels, and true, Shimano has disgraced itself and its customers with electronic shifting for road bikes, and true, “Nexus” sounds like the model of a cheesy Nissan, totally lacking the coolness of “Sturmey-Archer,” but man, the Nexus shifts beautifully. I had one on Erin’s Bianchi Milano, rest its soul. When Alexa was in day care, Erin would go to work really early, riding the Bianchi to North Berkeley Bart and leaving it in the locker. I’d get Alexa fed and dressed and drive her to El Cerrito to day care, then get on Bart at Del Norte. Erin would get off work early, Bart to Del Norte and find the car, and I’d get off work late and ride the Bianchi home from North Berkeley Bart. Except one day the bike wasn’t there: the locker door would sometimes spring open spontaneously if you didn’t test it after locking up by kicking the daylights out of it like you were trying to kill it. Erin just didn’t kick hard enough, I guess, and some douchebag stole the Milano. Here’s an old photo of the bike, with my brother striking a pose:

Back to Big Red: its previous owner wanted it to have a Nexus 7 hub, which of course doesn’t have the same flange diameter as whatever the bike came with, so he had to have spokes custom made for it. I can’t imagine how hard he had to look for a shop with the special tool that cuts and threads spokes. It’s hard enough to find a shop with a decent wheel builder, what with the popularity of these new-fangled pre-built wheels.

(Now, lest you think I’m going to go into some impassioned sky-is-falling defense of old-school hand-built wheels, think again. The modern wheels are lighter, stiffer, and more aero, and anybody who denies their superiority should be ignored, just as you should ignore anybody who denies that there is sex after marriage, like this guy I used to work with who assured me of this marital sex myth the moment I got engaged—it was one of his pat lectures, he’d just blather on and on, wasting my time, and when he finally stopped talking and I’d start to say something curt like, “Noted,” he’d check his watch as though I’d buttonholed him, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him there probably just wasn’t sex after marriage for him because he was so annoying. But I will say I miss the days of expert wheel builders, like my brother Geoff who, without fail, could reach into a box of spokes and grab exactly 16 of them, without looking.)

Even with stock spokes, getting the right length is always, and has always been, a difficult process. At the greatest bike shop ever, the High Wheeler (or Thigh Feeler as we called it) in Boulder, there was a homemade card catalog where you could look up different combinations of hub, rim, number of spokes, and number of crosses. Whenever you built a combination that wasn’t in the card catalog, you had to make a new card. There would be comments, like “Worked OK, just a tad short, one thread showing.” Years later, working at a lesser shop, I’d often throw my hands up at their techniques—a chart you’d hold the rim up to, a Casio calculator program—and call my old Thigh Feeler boss, JB, and just ask him. Half the time he’d know the length off the top of his head.

Anyhow, the problem with spoke cutter/threader tools is that they attract the wrong element to a shop. You get these total gearhead types who show up, drool over the spoke machine, describe in great detail the project they’re working on, and proceed to chat up the mechanic for the rest of the day. My brother Geoff worked at a place in San Luis Obispo and I hung out there a lot, and they had the spoke cutting machine, a really fancy thing with a leather cover and all, and it was just a time sink. That was a shame, too, because the whole time my brother worked there, the place was slowly going under. The head mechanic was this big fat bearded guy, and though his weight wasn’t in and of itself a big problem, he had these amazingly spindly stork-like legs that barely held him up—he’d have to lock each knee while walking before it could support his weight—so he couldn’t test-ride any bikes, and obviously was useless on the sales floor. What’s more, he was really lazy, just sat around on his stool chewing the fat all day on just about any topic. He had this friend who was supposedly a porn star, “The Tripod” they called him, who would come by and they’d just shoot the shit all day. One day I watched for about ten minutes as this head mechanic used the vice to pop a whole mess of bubble wrap, patiently feeding it through bit by bit.

The owner had a soft spot for the mechanic, who it was said had a heart of gold. The owner had a soft spot for just about everybody, actually. He would have loved to hang out and eat pizza with the guys after the shop closed, but he had a wife and family at home, so he’d secretly call up and order a pizza, and leave enough cash by the register to cover it. Geoff and I would be hanging around tuning up our bikes after work and suddenly the pizza guy would be there, and we’d panic until we found the money waiting and pay the guy. Then it was good times. Nothing, I mean nothing, stoked us out like free food in those days. The pizza was always Canadian bacon and pineapple, which we kind of got tired of, but of course complaining would have been utterly ungrateful, and it was a far cry better than nothing. Now when I have that combo it’s nostalgic. I wish I had some right now.

Eventually the owner’s generosity, and myriad other factors, began to seriously erode the fiscal foundation of the shop, and paychecks started to bounce. I well remember one warm summer evening when Geoff got paid, and we jumped on our bikes to race over to Geoff’s bank. We well knew that only one or two of the payroll checks would be funded; the rest would overdraw the shop’s account. We were closing in on the bank when one of the other mechanics, our friend Garrett, came roaring by in his VW bus. He had an account at the same bank. Geoff cried out in protest—“He cheated!”—and lamented the loss of income, not to mention the fee he’d have to pay when his paycheck bounced. Later he learned to buy expensive Dura-Ace bike parts for me on the shop’s account, to be deducted from his paycheck, so that I could pay him for the parts and he’d have real money for a change. (I worked at the young upstart shop across town, Broad Street Bikes, which had been The Moped Emporium until the day I started work there. It was a good shop, and though it didn’t have a spoke length card catalog or anything, my paychecks never bounced.)

Getting back to the custom spokes on Big Red: the wheel came out fine, but the frame lacks the braze-ons that a proper bike, like the Bianchi Milano, has, so the original owner had to cut some corners. For example, he had to bolt something to the braze-on for the coaster-brake, and whatever assembly he codged together wasn’t quite working out. Max has some pals at a local machine shop, and after inheriting Big Red figured he’d have a fitting custom-made for it, but the man for the job was pretty out of it when Max went to talk to him. “He’s a diabetic,” Max explained, “and a few nights ago while he was asleep in bed he suddenly went into convulsions and basically beat the shit out of himself. His teeth are all broken up and he’s totally out of it. His roommate found him. He’s back at work but still messed up, so my custom fitting is going to have to wait.”

So here’s how Max got the bike. It’s a pretty predictable story, doubtless one that’s been told in various versions since time immemorial. He has this friend he says is “basically a gazillionaire” who painstakingly assembled a glorious fleet of bicycles, each as unique and cool as Big Red, but who subsequently got married. The guy’s wife was put off by the sheer number of bikes this guy owned, and made him liquidate most of them. It’s hard to justify the existence of so many bikes, especially in terms a non-bike-crazed woman could understand. (I had a similar challenge promoting Wells Fargo, my bank, over BofA, Erin’s, when we merged her accounts. She cited more ATMs; all I could think of was “western stagecoach motif,” so I lost.)

Imagine, finding a sweet cruiser with 36-inch wheels, then finding a Nexus 7 hub, having the spokes made, the wheel built, dealing with the braze-on problem, getting it all going, only to have to get rid of it. I feel the guy’s pain. I was minding my own business one day when Erin asked me to help put the Arseless in the back of the car. “What for?!” I asked. She announced, rather casually I must say, that she was donating it to the preschool for their yard sale. “But it’s my bike!” I protested. “You can’t do that!” She pointed out that I never rode it. “Well of course not, is has a flat!” I protested. But it’s no good explaining to a woman why a simple thing like a flat tire can sideline a 3-speed for so long. I have no problem overhauling the Dura-Ace 7701 non-cartridge bottom bracket, with its over eighty moving parts, because it’s a precisely machined mechanism. But a 3-speed?

With a bike that’s more than fifty years old, you really have to choose your battles. Every bolt you touch with a wrench could spontaneously strip out; non-metal stuff like tires and tubes can dissolve in your fingers like a dead moth. And that Sturmey-Archer … it’s just made to fail. Look at it wrong and the cable will instantly fray into oblivion, like blowing on a dandelion that’s gone to seed. The cable pulley is as old and brittle as a tooth you’d find in a dry skull. If you were trying your hand at telekinesis, you could do a lot worse than trying to bend, with only your mind, the tiny, frail chain that links the cable to the workings of the hub. But Erin would never understand; her eyes would roll at the word “wrench.” So instead of trying to explain, I just grabbed the bike from her and took it back into the garage and, on the spot, finally fixed its flat tire. We haven’t discussed it since. I think this kind of marital scenario is responsible for the existence of the strong, silent type.

When you’re married, your available wrenching time dwindles quickly almost to nothing, like the picture on a black-and-white TV when you turn it off. I can prove this objectively: when I got engaged, I was still working my bikes over all the time, for fun, and pulling the occasional shift at the bike shop just to help out the owner, so I had fairly meaty hands, the kind a man can be proud of. Ours was a short engagement, but even so, I became so neglectful of my bike-mechanic roots I had to have the wedding ring resized so it would fit my atrophied finger on our wedding day. But the terrible erosion of my manhood didn’t stop there; the decline continued, and with all this office work my fingers have become so slender and wussy—like the woman’s in the Palmolive commercial—that I have to wear my wedding ring on my right hand or it’ll fly off.

Not that I’m completely spineless and pathetic: at least I still keep my favorite bike here in the house, where it belongs. I was shocked and dismayed to learn that some of my married friends—guys on our bike team, for crying out loud!—keep all their bikes in the garage. I consider bike storage to be a good litmus test for the proper balance of power in a marriage. If all the man’s bikes are in the garage, his wife has been given too much leash. On the other hand, if all his bikes are in the living room, or the bedroom, he’s seized too much power and is headed for trouble. I think one bike in the spare bedroom or office is just about right, especially if there are kids around who need to spend as much time as possible in the presence of a fine racing machine.

It’s funny; just last night Erin said to me, “There are all these inner tubes in the garage.” I nodded. “What should I think about that?” she asked. I told her it would be better not to think about them at all. “What are they for?” she asked. Finally I broke it to her: “Those aren’t inner tubes. They’re sew-up tires, worth about $50-60 apiece, handmade of Egyptian cotton.” She asked if I would ever use them. I told her, “No.” For now, she has dropped the subject. But it’ll come up again, I’m sure.

I guess what I’m ultimately getting at is, you really need to seek out and acquire that 36-inch-wheel bike now, while you have the chance. Hell, get yourself a track bike, a cross bike, a rain bike, a 3-speed, a fast commuter, a general-purpose f*ck-all bike, just build yourself a fricking armada, so when you get married you can give in and ditch, say, half of them while still maintaining a respectable fleet. I confess, to my shame, that I have just four bikes (and one more on the way). I have tried to gain points with Erin by having her interview my biking friends about their collections, but she’s obstinately unimpressed that I lack both a track bike and a cross bike. Of course she has a point; there’s a time and a place for a real two-wheeled arsenal, and kids come with their own endless stream of accessories that clutter up your life. But for now, your living room ought to look like this (each photo is of one wall of the place I shared with my brother Geoff and a couple other guys):

So how many bikes is enough? Well, consider my friend’s blog post on the subject: you need N+1, where N is the number of bikes you have now. But be selective: any schmuck can have too many bikes, and it takes a connoisseur to assemble a tasteful collection. So don’t jump on the silly fixie trend—it’s vulgar. A monster cruiser with 36-inch wheels would be just the thing to show the world your discerning taste. I can’t wait to ride it!

Dana dana albert blog