From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View - Part II

Introduction

My last post was part one of an old Daily Peloton story from my archives (it is alas, not in their archive anymore). This week I give you part two. I left off describing how a bike race announcer has the difficult job of amping up the crowd and making the complicated sport accessible to non-fans. Here I pick up that thread again.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View Part II – September 14, 2003

Michael Aisner, together with Jeff Roake, did a splendid job announcing the San Francisco Grand Prix from the finish line along the Embarcadero. It’s not an easy job, but they managed to keep the crowd engaged during the long spells between laps, explaining the tactics of the race as they unfolded, and providing interesting tidbits such as the role of the team car and of the Mavic neutral support. In what seems to be a tradition, they had longtime cycling fan Robin Williams get up on the stage for some impromptu comedy: “Look for me, riding with Team Viagra. You’ll see in the team poster that not many of the bikes have kickstands. There’s a reason for this.”

But the better race commentary gig was at the top of Taylor Street, where another announcer, Dave Towle, had his station set up. Here, the crowd was at least half a dozen deep all the way down the hill, and was curb to curb farther up Taylor beyond the point where the course turns left. The upward block of the street is like a natural set of bleachers, except that these spectators were content to stand for four and a half hours.

Dave and I go way back—we grew up together in Boulder, Colorado, where he still lives—so it was with particular enjoyment that I watched him stoking the coals of the throngs of fans. It sure didn’t hurt that his own enthusiasm was off the charts—I’ve never seen anybody yell into a microphone at a bike race before—but he also knew the right buttons to push. He sensed that the crowd’s awareness of its own power was one such button. “If I yell, ‘Okay, Taylor Street, let’s give it up for these racers, show ‘em what you can do,” he explained, “I can bring their volume from here” (hand held, palm down, at chest level) “to here” (hand above head). “Of course, you can only go to that well so many times.”

Dave doesn’t stop with the spectators: he also works to motivate the racers themselves. Lap after lap he led the crowd in cheering on Jason Lokkesmoe, reminding them that this was a young neo-pro from Oakland on Health Net, a local team. Dave was convinced that for Jason to hear his own name must have motivated him. “Think about it,” he told me. “When you hear your name over the loud speaker, time and time again, you start to believe that the entire crowd, the entire world, is focused on you. And how could you not dig just a little deeper, knowing that?”

Dave explained the need to gradually build a crescendo as the race develops. “If you’re telling them on lap three that you’ve never seen anything so amazing in your life, what are you going to tell them on lap six? There are only so many times in a day you can be the most amazed you’ve ever been in your life. These guys are going to think, man, this guy amazes easy. What, did he just get out of prison?”

The highlight of Dave’s announcing was when he spotted his fellow Boulderite Trent Klasna, who earlier in the race had done major work for his Saturn team, then had dropped out, and now had changed into street clothes and was strolling the course. (To even recognize a cyclist in regular garb is something of a feat; earlier in the day Lance Armstrong rode right through the start/finish area in civvies, having dropped out as well, and just about nobody noticed.) Dave jumped at the opportunity to collar Trent and ask him a few questions, to give the crowd some insight from a cycling expert who’d sized up this field from within less than an hour before.

“Trent, right now Saturn has two riders in the group: Chris Horner and Mark McCormack. Mark is the better sprinter. I predict that if it comes down to a bunch sprint, Chris will lead Mark out. What do you say?” Trent grinned and assured Dave that it wouldn’t come down to a bunch sprint. And indeed on the final lap, Chris Horner crested the Taylor Street climb all alone, on his way to a dramatic victory. Thousands of fans had just witnessed a prophet in action. Even off the bike, Klasna came off as a most impressive cyclist.

Naturally, any race announcer is subject to the limitations of his material. If a race isn’t tight enough, no announcer in the world can inject it with suspense. But when a rider tries something bold, a good announcer can help the crowd enjoy it. Today was an interesting one in that Horner’s victory was far from expected, even though he is by many standards the winning-est rider in the domestic cycling scene. For a time it really looked like Jason Lokkesmoe was going to sew up the race. He had an amazing ride, starting out in a group of five that dwindled until it was just Jason and the huge German Rolf Aldag, both clearly giving it everything they had. But the race was very, very long. Surely there must have been a point when Lokkesmoe’s s effort seemed quixotic even to himself. Maybe he stayed out longer, even when he knew he was doomed, just to put on a good show.

Showmanship is not only a matter of riding fast. I well remember the Killians team in the Coors Classic who (unlike their sponsor) hailed from Ireland. I was a young fan, by no means an expert on the rules of the race, but had been convinced ever since the early 1980s that these guys were cut some slack on the time cuts because they were so popular with the crowds. So today I challenged Aisner on this point. “It might have been,” he said cautiously. “I don’t remember what the circumstances were but it wasn’t just at face value ‘we let them back in  [after missing a time cut].’ But they were crowd pleasers, they did all sorts of stuff. [Killians rider] Alan [McCormack] had a ... squirt gun, he would shoot other racers in the pack. There was one year when Paul [McCormack, Alan’s brother and teammate] was off the back of the criterium in North Boulder Park and he had an umbrella that had ‘Killian’s’ on it. He had it open, he was racing with an open umbrella over his head. But these guys weren’t just for show either. Alan won, he won a ton.”

I asked about Davis Phinney, who had enchanted me as a kid through his pantomime of a clerk punching the “SALE” button on a cash register every time he won a prime. Aisner replied, “Davis was flavorful and he was a double whammy because he also delivered and he had this huge sense of self-confidence, and though many loved it, others liked to see him lose, but either way [these fans] were out there.... A sport thrives on the combination of both of those, those who simply excel and those that can bring more than just cycling to the table.”

Oddly, American cycling may be, from the standpoint of spectacle, a victim of its own maturity. There was an unpolished, youthful exuberance to domestic cycling in the 1980s that at its best was Phinney’s cash register and at its worst was Alexi Grewal tearing his 7-Eleven jersey down the middle as he crossed the finish line in first. Either way, it was a wild show. Since that time the phenomenon of the American cycling professional has steadily developed. Lance is now expected to win the Tour de France, whereas Phinney’s first Tour stage win was a shock to everybody. As they have adapted to the European sport, these American riders seem to have adopted its culture and tradition, which isn’t given to theatrics (beyond the traditional victory salute, of course). This modern professionalism may make it harder for the American spectator to connect with the cyclists.

For example, this morning I watched the women’s field assembled a couple of hundred feet behind the start line. I could sense the tension in that group, especially in the half dozen front-runners waiting about six feet ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly they understood the importance of this race. Handled properly, this excitement can be a huge benefit to a racer, but there’s no benefit to showing your competitors how nervous you are. I know from my own racing days that when my head was right, the pre-race feeling was one I think of as “frothy”—my own coinage, based on the image of a champion racehorse that is literally champing at the bit to start a race, has whipped itself into a lather of sweat, and must be calmed by the jockey or the trainer. To feel frothy, but not to show it, is  admirable—a result of experience and discipline. The problem is, to the untrained eye it just looks like somebody who just isn’t taking the race very seriously.

The women I watched today didn’t just have poker-faces; they were joking around with each other like this was a social event. If you saw this on TV, you wouldn’t have felt the real tension there. But there was an odd moment when the announcer had just run down the impressive bio of Mari Holden, and was about to announce her name to summon her to the line, when his microphone suddenly cut out. For several awkward seconds, all was silent. Then I heard Mari whisper to Jessica Phillips, “He forgot his lines.” Jessica laughed loudly, but it wasn’t the hearty laugh of somebody truly amused; it had the tense quality of somebody laughing to bleed off nervousness, a venting laugh, like that of someone watching the tasteless over-the-top comic violence in “Robocop.” Eventually the crowd got tired of waiting for the announcer and yelled out, “Mari Holden!” and she pedaled to the line.

There are other ways a non-savvy spectator can misread a bike race. For example, a strong performance made as a sacrifice to a teammate can make a good rider look bad. A cycling aficionado knows that when a great rider crosses the line in fiftieth, it’s probably because he led out his teammate and his job ended 200 meters from the line. But to the casual spectator, it just looks like a guy who isn’t that strong. I looked for Tim Larkin in the main bunch at the top of Taylor Street on the last lap today, and while he was still in contact, he was right on the back and looked pretty fried. Afterward, I asked what happened and he explained that a group of eight made it off the front of the main pack before the Taylor Street climb, and because his teammate was climbing better than he was today, Tim gave everything to drag him up to the group. As so often happens, this move galvanized the rest of the pack, and everything came back together, making Tim’s work for naught. But had he not done it, that group may indeed have stayed off. Tim likely changed the outcome of the race, but not in any way that made him look good. How many similar scenarios played themselves out today, unappreciated by the fans? Probably dozens. And when a rider blows up badly enough to lose contact with the group, there is nowhere to hide.

Whether this experience is mortifying to the struggling athlete all depends on the crowd. This sport has the unfortunate characteristic of looking far easier than it is, so the uninitiated onlooker may not sympathize with the rider. But if the energy is right, a bicycle race brings out the best in people: the crowds that turn out cheer on every guy, even the ones who get dropped, because after all they’re out there pedaling their hearts out.

It’s a wonderful thing about cycling: even though it’s very much a team sport, it’s not just two teams, one of which you hope wins. No riot ever broke out at a bike race because CSC beat Telekom. Ages ago, I watched TV coverage of unruly Denver Broncos fans who pelted their own team with snowballs because they were losing so badly. These were not people who stumbled onto a football game in progress—these are people who paid good money for a seat. They’re supposed to be the loyal ones! I can’t imagine such an attitude from bike race spectators, who are watching for the entire spectacle, not out of a tribal instinct to support their home team. This is true of seasoned fans as well; consider all the French people who camp out a full week in advance to watch the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France, even though a Frenchman hasn’t won there since Bernard Hinault in 1986.

Granted, such devotion to the sport is far greater in Europe than in the U.S., but in San Francisco today it was easy to imagine that gap quickly decreasing. Today the magnanimity of the spectators was on full display. They didn’t have to be experts on race tactics—not when they were watching on Taylor Street. They recognized extreme depths of human suffering when they saw it. Lokkesmoe ended up struggling over the Taylor climb solo, well off the back, today, but the crowd hadn’t forgotten his earlier glory, and screamed their lungs out for him.

Of course the fans cheer on the superstars like Lance Armstrong, but perhaps no more enthusiastically than they cheer for the poor sods who are way off the back and just trying to keep their bikes going. You can see how the cheering animates the riders, too: about half way up a climb, just as one of these guys is about to grind to a halt, you see a little sheepish grin appear on his face, maybe he shakes his head a little, then gets out of the saddle and shoves a little harder. The crowd responds to this, cheers louder, the process repeats, and like a slow-motion hockey puck the guy is gradually buoyed up the hill, lap after lap. It’s like watching a butterfly smash against your windshield, and then—like a cartoon of some kind—unfold itself, try its wings, and fly off again.

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Simplex Retrofriction

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I just installed Simplex Retrofriction shifters on Full Slab, my commuter bike.  It’s been way, way too long since I’ve had them.

Other websites, like this one and this one, provide technical information about these legendary shifters, but they don’t tell the whole story.  To capture the full mystique, you need a little history.  Personal history.  This post unravels the mysterious flow of this schematic:

(Maybe you stumbled on this post because you’re a fan of the Simplex tea kettle from England.  Well, I am too!  Even though these are different companies, you should read this post anyway because if that kettle were a shifter it would be Simplex Retrofriction.)

If you couldn’t care less about bike shifters, read on, because you should care, and maybe this will help.  Meanwhile, anyone with a love of bike lore and nostalgia for cycling in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and a fascination with this improbably wonderful French bike component, will find here many nuggets of gratuitous trivia.  Zut alors!—it’s lore galore!

Simplex sucks

Simplex sucks, for the most part.  The Retrofriction shifters are the exception that proves the rule (and proof that even a  blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile).  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my brothers’ first bikes had Simplex shifters and derailleurs, and they were made of fricking plastic!  They didn’t shift for beans, of course—the chain was just dragged across the cogs like a clattering crab trying to get traction on a polished tile floor.  These components were also hideous to behold.

Working at a bike shop in the late ‘80s I came across a plastic Simplex derailleur on a ‘70s-vintage bike that was in for an overhaul.  I didn’t try very hard to make the derailleur work; I simply replaced it.  I told the customer, “I noticed that your derailleur was Simplex, so I replaced it.”  She said, “Simplex?  What’s that?”  I said, “It’s a brand.  It’s French.”  She said, “Is that bad?”  I replied, “Oh, yes.”

The French aren’t known for great bike parts, or great engineering in general.  At one shop I worked at, one of the mechanics liked to sneak up behind another guy and suddenly whisper in his ear, “French … nuclear-powered … submarines.”  The guy hearing this would, according to an unwritten script, scream in terror.  (The exception is rims.  The French are really good, perhaps eerily good, at rims.)

My first Simplex product was a front derailleur on an ancient Schwinn commuting bike I bought at a police auction.  Oddly, this derailleur was operated by a handle, not a shifter and cable.

It didn’t say “Simplex” on it, by the way.  Schwinn was in the business of fooling patriotic Americans into buying foreign stuff by putting their own label, “Schwinn approved,” on whatever parts they provisioned for their bikes.  (I had another Schwinn with a Huret derailleur; also French, also terrible.)  Needless to say, that front derailleur shifted terribly, and also tended to get caught on my pant leg.  In fact, that’s how it met its death—it got snagged so hard it was torn from the bicycle, after which I shifted the front chainwheels by hand.

My historical components of choice

Prior to owning my first pair of Simplex Retrofrictions, my bike component choices were determined mostly by economics.  My first ten speed, bought by the ‘rents, had cheap Suntour , as did my second.  By 1983 I was ready for some real racing components and, like almost everybody, coveted Campagnolo but, on my paperboy’s salary, could only afford Suntour Pro Superbe.  In 1985 I finally got my dream bike, an English-made Mercian with full Campy Super Record.  I was perfectly content with the Campy shifters, which I’d also had on my previous bike, because they were affordable and looked cool.  Over the years I somehow acquired several pairs, the oldest of which were made in Vicenza instead of Milan and had raised, rather than engraved, lettering.  My friends and I made keychains out of our extra Campy shifters.  We should have had girls throwing themselves at us for this reason alone, but oddly did not.

The only non-Campy component on my Mercian was the brakeset.  For some reason, Modolo was really popular at the time, despite being ridiculous, and I got swept up in its popularity.  (One of the features of these brakes was that each brake caliper was stamped with its own unique serial number; this should be a case study for business majors in the difference between a feature and a benefit.)  When, in 1985, Shimano came out with its totally revamped Dura-Ace line, on a lark I bought a new Dura-Ace brakeset and liked it.

A year later, my brother sold me his Team Miyata frame and begged me to build it up and ride it.  This was when the dollar was really strong against the yen, so for $400 I bought a full Dura-Ace gruppo from Colorado Cyclist.  (Back then, Colorado Cyclist was a garage-sized outfit in Estes Park; they’d recognize my voice when I called them.)  So now I had two bikes, one with Shimano, the other Campy.  Living the dream, really.  This was a bit unusual:  bike people are often fiercely loyal to one manufacturer over the other, so this was like being a member of two different religions.

I became disillusioned with Campagnolo when they came out with their disgraceful first-generation indexed shift levers, which were called Synchro.  We called them Stink-ro.  The click-action was awful—it felt like you were breaking glass inside the lever—and the whole system was a miserable failure.  I might not have cared except for a traumatic experience involving them.  I was at the big bike industry trade show in Anaheim with the Coors Classic director, Michael Aisner, a diehard Campy fan, and delighted in showing him, in the giant, gorgeous Campagnolo booth, how bad Stink-ro stucked.  On a stationary trainer, pedaling a slick-looking bike with a gleaming white disc wheel, I could make the derailleur mis-shift at will.  (With indexed shifting, of course, it should be impossible to miss a shift.)  Mike told me “wait right there!” and disappeared. 

I instinctively started trying to make the Stink-ro shift properly, and was still fighting with it when Aisner reappeared with a small, swarthy fellow in a beautiful chocolate-chip-ice-cream colored suit.  They watched for a minute as I continued to mash away with the gears.  Finally I dismounted and walked over to them.  Aisner turned to the gentleman and said, “This here is a big fan of yours.”  Turning to me, he said, “Dana, meet Valentino Campagnolo!”  It was indeed the company’s president, who was also the playboy son of the company’s founder, Tulio Campagnolo.  I shook his hand and mumbled something bland and hoped he didn’t speak English.  After he left, Aisner said, “If you had any balls at all, you’d have told the man to his face that his stuff is shit!”

What you can’t have failed to notice through all this history is that (except for the police auction bike) I never considered buying Simplex.  But why would I have, given the horrible plastic crap on my brothers’ first bikes?  What happened instead is that the Simplex Retrofriction shifters found me.

Another bike I didn’t need

Though I was perfectly happy having just two pro-quality racing bikes, a third one came sniffing around.  It was just a frameset, actually, and my friend Dave Towle (whom you might have heard announcing bike races) was trying to sell it.  It was a Panasonic team issue Raleigh that he bought from a friend on the team.  I sure didn’t need that Raleigh, but it was so damn cool I couldn’t resist.  It looked like these bikes:

Besides how cool those bikes look, what do you notice about them?  That’s right:  both have Simplex Retrofriction shifters!  Now, this is actually kind of remarkable.  You’ve got a Dutch pro team riding English Raleighs, and the team’s component sponsor  is the Italian company Campagnolo, but their guys are using French shifters made by Simplex.  I don’t know if all those Raleighs had Simplex shifters, but those two clearly do, and so did mine:  though it was otherwise a bare frame, the shifters were already mounted on there, so Dave threw them in.  I built up the rest of the bike with a mishmash of parts, just to have it on the road, and that’s how I became introduced to the Retrofrictions.

Instantly I realized they were the greatest friction shifters ever made.  They have a spring in them that works against the spring in the derailleur, so they don’t require so much friction to keep the chain from slipping out of gear.  This has two benefits.  One, the action is glass-smooth.  Two, the shifter doesn’t work its way loose, a chronic problem with friction shifters that you often don’t discover until your bike jumps out of gear.  Remember in “Star Wars” how Darth Vader, in the final dogfight sequence, keeps fiddling with these knobs on his Tie-fighter’s joystick?  Racers used to do the same thing with the D-rings on their Campy shifters toward the end of a race, just to make sure they didn’t have any unpleasant surprises.

Simplex was the first company to make a spring-loaded shifter, but not the only one:  Suntour had their “Power” shifters in the early ‘80s:

I had these on my second road bike.  The problem with the Suntour Power shifters was that in addition to the spring they had a ratchet, which was pointless and noisy.  Plus, they were cheap and pretty ugly, whereas the Simplex Retrofriction are beautifully made.  I can’t figure out how a company as generally lame as Simplex managed to produce such an excellent product.  I’d be no less astonished if Burger King introduced a grass-fed Kobe beef burger with prosciutto and imported Gruyere on an artisanal semolina bun.

My second pair of Retrofrictions

Alas, it was too good to last.  My best friend, Peter, won a Rossin frameset in the Red Zinger Mini Classic and—being on a paperboy’s salary himself—built it up with Suntour Pro Superbe.  I can’t remember if he begged me to sell him my Retrofrictions, or I just took pity in him for his terrible Superbe shifters, but suffice to say I felt honor-bound to help him out.  In retrospect, I’m surprised I felt that magnanimous, given that if it hadn’t been for him, I’d have won the Mini Zinger and that Rossin!  Then again, this was his flagship racing bike, and I barely rode the Raleigh.  (By the time I got it, that bike had been all ridden out.  I’d describe its road feel as “cadaverous.”)   So Pete got the Retrofrictions, and by the time I bought the Rossin off him five years later, he’d worn them out. 

(The Retrofriction springs have a lifespan.  I have it on good authority that you can replace them, but am warned that “the spring is a tight fit around the central shaft and its removal and replacement will test your ingenuity and patience!”)  I didn’t need the shifters anyway; I was firmly committed to indexed shifting by that point.  (I was the first guy around to have the new Dura-Ace 8-speed drivetrain, because the shop my brother worked for was gradually going under and his paychecks tended to bounce, so he paid himself in components, which he ordered via the shop’s line of credit and then sold to me.)

Not needing any more shifters didn’t stop me from getting another pair of Simplex Retrofrictions when I got the chance.  While working at a bike shop in Berkeley I stumbled across a pair in a box in the office.  They weren’t for sale; oddly enough, these shifters never seemed to be available in any shop or mail-order outfit.  After the demise of the Peugeot pro team, I don’t think any team officially used them (though at least a couple of teams used Mavic-branded Retrofrictions).  These shifters I found in the shop, provenance unknown, were just sitting in the box doing nothing.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I held them out to the shop owner and said, “Do you know what these are?!”  He said oh yes, he was well aware of what he had there.  I looked him right in the eye and said, “I’m taking these.”  I had no plan for them, other than to own them.  My boss didn’t object;  perhaps he knew, as I did, that you can’t stand in the way of destiny.

I didn’t have a bike to put them on and considered acquiring one just for that purpose.  (It’s a testament to the glory of these shifters that I can’t even remember which friend of mine had expressed the same idea.  I think it was John Pelster, my old UCSB and current EBVC teammate.)  Alas, I had no money, and as a starving student could no longer afford to buy another bike just because I felt like it.  But I ended up using those shifters before I expected to.

Simplex saved me!

That year—it was 1990—my Team Miyata vas the victim of a car rack accident (follow that link and look closely at the first photo and you’ll see the broken-off fork tip and caved-in top tube).   So I bought a new frame from a buddy; he’d been given it years before from his team, and hadn’t ever built it up.  It was a Guerciotti, with old-school Campy dropouts, and I think the derailleur hanger was longer than what had been on the Miyata.  What’s worse, my rear derailleur was slightly bent, which—combined with the longer derailleur hanger on the Guerciotti—meant my indexed shifting wouldn’t work right.  I had just moved to the Bay Area, had  run out of money, and was trying to earn a spot on the UC Berkeley cycling “A” team, all with a bike that wouldn’t shift right, and I was so overwhelmed and frustrated I almost quit the sport.  I mean, if a seasoned mechanic, who’s down to just a single racing bike, can’t even get it working right, what hope does he have in life?  But the Retrofrictions saved me!  I slapped those babies on the Guerc and everything was fine.  After five years of racing with indexed shifters, it was actually fun going back to friction.  I ended up using those shifters for the next eight years, until a freak bike tune-up accident ruined the right lever.

Here’s the sad tale.  I don’t know if this is a French thing or what, but the little socket where the gear cable’s head sits is a bit small on these shifters.  In other words, the cable head has a snugger fit to begin with, and—unknowingly compounding this—I had, somewhere along the line, installed a Campy cable.  Campy cables had a slightly oversized head, and it must have worked its way into the shifter over time.  So when the cable wore out, I absolutely could not get that cable head out of the shifter.  I finally clipped the cable off at the head and tried to drill it out, but I aimed poorly and did terrible cosmetic damage to the shifter without accomplishing anything.  I was so bummed out at the loss of the shifter, and the inability to replace it (this was before eBay), that to cheer myself up I bought a whole new gruppo, 9-speed Dura-Ace with STI shift levers (i.e., shifters built into the brake levers).  See?  There is some benefit to finishing college and becoming a working stiff!

Back on Retrofriction

Recently a friend, who is restoring an old Campy-equipped road bike, asked if I had any Campy shifters I could sell him.  Well, I couldn’t lie:  I had a pair on Full Slab, my beloved commuter bike. 

Actually, my friend offered to trade a crankset for the shifters, which is a pretty sweet deal.  The only problem, of course, is that I use Full Slab regularly and would need something to replace the Campy shifters with.

I knew my ruined Retrofriction shifters would be waiting for me, buried in The Box where I’ve been accumulating cast-off parts for decades.  It’s always a little scary cobbling together something from The Box, and I wasn’t looking forward to reliving the torment of the Retrofriction shifter I so stupidly ruined.  Sure enough, I found it right away.  I also found Pete’s (i.e., Dave’s) old Retrofrictions, and wondered if I could possibly move the (good) guts from my badly-drilled shifter to the handle of Pete’s worn-out one, and thereby cobble together a perfect shifter.

But I’m an adult now, with a career and a wife and two kids, and my hands have gone soft from decades of office work, and when it comes right down to it I’m just not a good enough mechanic to tear into anything that’s both a) French-engineered, and b) bound up with a spring.  So I charged up my drill and had another go at the old cable head.  This time I started from the flip side of the shifter, and though I missed the original hole completely, I ultimately (re-)created a good hole to feed a cable through.  Note that in the process I came up with a valid use for a phone book, of which I’d been previously convinced there was none.  The yellow pages provided an expendable surface to catch the drill after it finally burst through the back of the shifter.

The result?  Life is good!  Full Slab has never been so smartly attired.  The left shifter is perfect.  The right shifter ends up being pretty worn out after eight years and some 50,000 miles, but it still works.  Best of all, just riding that bike to the train station and reaching for one of those levers is a trip down memory lane, a sped-up review of everything you just read here along with about a hundred more things I couldn’t manage to fit in to this story.  Ah, the splendid nexus between bikes and memory!

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