Selecting Bicycle Wheels - Part I

Introduction

It’s been said that the frame is the heart of a bicycle.  If so, the wheels are, like, the lungs.  This post describes my pleasure, and frustration, in purchasing bicycle wheels over the years, recounted on the occasion of a recent wheel purchase (a heady topic which I’ll get to next week).  For now, I think it’s important to lay the groundwork with a detailed character sketch of the athlete/consumer as a young man.  (I’m thinking here of all the expository stuff in “The Deer Hunter,” before the really gnarly Vietnam action.)  

More than anything, this post demonstrates my odd feeling of patriotism toward countries other than my own.  And it attempts to answer the question, “How do teenagers select a wheelset?”  (Or really, “How did the un-cool, iconoclastic, non-phone-addicted teen bike racers of yesteryear select a wheelset?”)

A quick note to burglars:  I’m well aware that you comb craigslist and even Strava looking for expensive merchandise to steal, and yes, I did allude just now to having bought some new wheels.  So I almost decided to tell a white lie about how I’m only borrowing these new wheels, just so you don’t figure out my address and come rob me.  But I don’t need to lie:  the fact is, my new wheels only cost me $700, and you could probably do better burglarizing any of my neighbors at random for their iPads, rare first-edition books, and objets d’art.  Heck, you’d have an easier time selling the stolen airbag out of one of their Priuses, or even their Priuses’ Clean Air Vehicle carpool-lane stickers.  Or better yet, just get one of us to hire you for some yard work, and overcharge us!

Rule #1:  Your wheels have to be cool (i.e., Euro)

Of course all consumers everywhere, or at least the male ones I can speak for, want their products to be cool.  But what is “cool”?  When I first became a consumer, cool meant Euro.  In the case of bicycle wheels in particular, cool meant French.

Naturally, I started out in cycling with cheap steel rims that must have been from Asia.  (I don’t remember much about the rims on my Fuji Junior except that they were 600C.)  The very virtue of affordability eventually made these wheels seem despicable to me.  My second bike started out with Araya rims that were probably fine, but which ultimately made me recoil.  Not only did they have the aura of sensible shoes, they weren’t even made very well.  The crooked decals visible in these easily googled photos attest to Araya rims’ haphazard construction.  Worst of all, Araya made BMX rims too!  ‘Nuff said.

Besides, as a budding bike racer I naturally looked to Europe as the standard bearer:  the glamour of their pelotons and famous races naturally slopped over to their bicycle manufacturing industry.  In fact, my lust for brands like Campagnolo and Cinelli easily preceded my interest in girls.  (And, given that cyclists in those days were pariahs, cycling ended up pre-empting dating altogether, to my eventual dismay.)

Getting back to the Arayas, and my need to rid my bike of them:  as soon as I’d saved up enough money, I bought some sweet new (well, used) wheels from my brother Geoff.  (Note how my limited options—i.e., my exactly one option—precluded endless research or agonizing indecision.)  These wheels had Phil Wood sealed hubs, Swiss DT spokes, and French Weinmann rims.  At least, I assumed they were French rims, because the crummy Weinmann brakes I saw around tended to be on French bikes, and I always equated crummy bike parts with France.  These brakes, in the flesh, were even uglier than they look in the picture.

I instinctively grasped that for the French to make good rims, while sucking at almost everything else, was just the exception proving the rule.  I’ve always thought of the French as the idiot-savants of manufacturing:  they can’t get anything right, except rims, at which they’re the best in the business.  (The other notable exception to their engineering ineptitude is the Simplex Retrofriction shifter, which I have discussed at length in these pages.)  So I loved those Weinmann rims, even if they were a step down from the Weinmann Concave model that I really wanted.

Have you been yelling at your computer monitor, telling me what an idiot I am?  Yes, of course you’re right, Weinmann rims aren’t French at all!  (Cut me some slack, I was just a kid!  At least I knew that “DT” stood for “Drahtwerke Tréfileries” which meant “wireworks.”  These modern kids don’t even know how to pronounce “derailleur” and wouldn’t know rim tape from bar tape, and—worst of all—wouldn’t even be ashamed of their ignorance.)

Indeed, Weinmann rims were actually Belgian.  Like Eddy Merckx!  Like the cobblestones!  Like Johan Museew!  Here I was, being only slightly arrogant about my supposedly French rims, when I was actually riding Belgian!  Man!  I was so money and I didn’t even know it!  (History has a way of repeating itself.  Years ago I bought a car that I thought was Swedish, but later learned it too was made in Belgium.  And French fries?  Yeah, they’re Belgian.)

My brother Geoff had laced these wheels himself, and did the front radial.  I was the first kid around (and one of the only people, period, in those days) with a radially laced front wheel.  I took a lot of flak for that from other kids; being insanely envious of how cool that looked, my peers felt it necessary to warn me that radially laced wheels tended to collapse during hard cornering.  I never knew what to say, so I just shrugged, which probably made me look French, and thus cool, though I didn’t realize it at the time.  (My self-esteem was slight in those days.  Maybe it’s because my mom’s pet name for me was “Lambchop.”)

On the other hand, those were the lower-end Weinmann rims, and my bike was a robot-built Japanese one (a Miyata 310), so of course I had to graduate to better things, which I did.  My next bike, a handmade English Mercian with full Campagnolo, had Super Champion Gentleman rims.

There was something mystical about the juxtaposition of the bold (and, being redundant, clearly European) brand “Super Champion” and the understated model name, “Gentleman.”  They were glorious rims.  High polish, like chrome, and I never broke a spoke or seriously damaged the rims.  (Of course, I weighed no more than Chris Froome in those days.)

Rule #2:  Your wheels have to be legit (i.e., tubulars)

Still, my constant craving to be more like the pros meant I had to eventually get some real racing wheels—that is, tubulars (aka “sew-ups,” or “soaps,” the nickname we used).  It’s not that I was sold on tubulars’ superiority (being lighter, stronger, much less prone to pinch-flats, and better in corners, than clinchers).  It was just that the pros rode tubulars, so for my friends and me to continue on clinchers was simply out of the question.

Not that buying tubulars was an easy goal to fulfill.  You’ve probably gotten the impression that I was some kind of rich kid.  Not so.  Yeah, I did have a full Campy Mercian, but I didn’t have any snow boots at all, and at home we drank powdered milk, and the burgers my mom fed us were ground turkey stretched with oatmeal.  My spending money came from making minimum wage ($3.35 an hour) working for Eco-Cycle, a grassroots recycling program using condemned garbage trucks and worn-out, donated school buses.  To get the job I had to lie about my age.  They only had me come work when they didn’t have enough adults to get the job done.  (Most of these were dirtbags doing court-ordered community service to work off their DUI convictions.)  So it took awhile to scrounge up the $100 I paid for my first tubular wheels, which had Campy hubs and Fiamme Ergal rims.

These were Italian rims, and they were garbage.  Man, they would just not stay in true.  It’s not like I was hard on my wheels, being so light.  On the other hand, I’d bought them used from my brothers’ friend Dave Towle, who even back then was a pretty big guy.  And he probably laced them himself in a dim garage, squinting at a book, and they were probably the first pair he ever built.  Teenagers couldn’t afford professional builds back then.

It was with these Ergals that I learned how to true wheels, which is a little like Frankenstein’s monster trying to train a Chihuahua.  Maybe I got those wheels looking straighter, but I knew nothing about spoke tension.  Those rims were so thin and malleable, it was like clubbing Claymation figures with a meat tenderizer.  I can’t remember what I finally did with those wheels but they didn’t last long. 

What came next?  I have a vague memory of a brief fling with some Super Champion Arc-En-Ciels.  Tight little mothers.  I don’t remember much about them, nor what became of them (and truth be told I don’t really know what “tight little mothers” even means in this context).

Did I glue my own tires?  Yeah, I did.  Not only could I not afford to pay a shop to do it, but naturally I wasn’t a real cyclist if I couldn’t master this difficult chore.  The first time I did it I used this clear Wolber glue, and after letting it dry overnight I tested the tires to see if I could roll them off the rims with my hands.  I could, easily.  Sigh.  So I switched to the “red death,” the chewy, bright red glue made by Clément or Vittoria.  That glue was brutally effective, but unless you really knew what you were doing—which I didn’t—you ended up with rims and tires that looked like a murder scene.

It’s funny:  my wife and I are trying to decide if our twelve-year-old is mature and trustworthy enough to even ride by herself (i.e., road rides in the Berkeley hills), whereas by age fourteen my friends and I were lacing our own wheels and gluing our own tires … in other words, building our own time bombs.  (That said, I’ve never rolled a tire, and I’ve only had one wheel disintegrate during a race and even then I managed not to crash, though I must have caused half a dozen near-heart-attacks.)

Rule #3:  Eventually, your wheels have to be tough

As a teenager, I really wasn’t a weight-weenie.  I mean, sure, I cared whether my bike was heavy or not, but I never had that Manifest Destiny experience of today’s dentists and stockbrokers, who simply seek out the lightest stuff and buy it.  I knew Reynolds 753 was lighter than 531, but I couldn’t afford it; ditto the Campy Super Record titanium bottom bracket and pedals.  On the way up, as I tricked out my Miyata 310, I only hoped that the secondhand stuff I was putting on would eventually make it a light bike.  For example, the MKS pedals had to be lighter than the original ones because the original ones had reflectors.  And the Stronglight crankset must be both strong and light, right?  Ending up with a light bike was just a hope, like the hope that one day I’d be a strong cyclist.

But eventually it wasn’t just money that determined which (cool, French) rims to buy.  After my bad experience with the Fiamme Ergals, and many friends’ bad experiences with light but cheap rims, and as my weight began to increase until I weighed more than most grown-up women, I started caring more and more about how tough my rims were.  (And my spokes:  I went to 14-gauge, not because I was breaking 15-gauge spokes, but because the 14-gauge were so totally masculine.)

So around 1985 I finally stopped screwing around and got my first set of Mavic GP4s.

I remember the first time I ever saw a pair of those, a pair taped together in a shop, labels gleaming.  I’m pretty sure I made a mess in my trousers.  Has any man-made product ever come so close to achieving the Platonic ideal of anything?  These rims were absolutely beyond reproach.  I never met a soul who didn’t respect them, not for being the flashiest or lightest thing out there (which they weren’t), but for being utterly reliable, a steadfast ally in our war on potholes, rocks, crashes, other riders, anything the world could throw at us.

Did I ever ruin a GP4?  Sure.  I crashed on a prime lap in a fast criterium in Denver and totally potato-chipped my rear wheel.  But then, in that same crash I bent my crankset, destroyed my saddle and seatpost, and even knocked the rear triangle of my frame out of alignment (and went to the ER for stitches).  No wheel is invulnerable.

That about finishes the history of my wheels as a teen.  The GP4, and its kid brother the MA40 (its clincher version) were so reliable, they carried me into adulthood, and even fatherhood, and I didn’t start grappling with the really complex questions—“What should I buy now that money is practically no object?” and “Is it cool to buy these new-fangled ‘factory-built’ wheels instead of choosing hubs, spokes, and rims?”—until later.  Tune in next time for a portrait of the consumer/athlete as an old man….

Corn Cob

On a recent ride with my bike club, I got some ribbing about this blog from my friend Marty. (Marty can give me all the flak he wants, because the first words I ever spoke to him, back in’88, were “I have no respect for you,” in a heated moment after he beat me in a bike race.) Apparently referring to my tendency to blog at great length on trivial topics, Marty suggested I write a blog about corn cobs. Corn cob, in this context, refers to a rather small bicycle gear cluster in which each cog is just one tooth bigger than the next. This gives a racer great precision--but no range--in choosing a gear to pedal in.

"You could write an essay about each cog," Marty teased, "or better yet, you could write a sonnet, an ode to the corn cob!" So, here it is.


Ode to the Corn Cob

When I was nine I had a ten-speed bike.
I loved it, though it suffered from the curse ooooooooooo2
Of tires not as thin as I'd have liked,
And of a spoke protector, even worse.

We didn't call them spoke protectors though,
As "pie plate" better mocked how big they were. ooooooio6
They caused the largest cog to seem to grow--
A mean illusion, awful to endure.

A bigger cog meant lower gearing, see;
The stuff of weaker boys, embarrassing. ooooooooooooo10
We longed for smaller clusters, finally free
Of pie plates. Lack of metal was our bling.

At age eighteen I realized my dream:
I ran a straight-block corn cob, plate-less, clean. oooooo14


oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 
Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1: Bike

I got the bike when I was nine. It was a Fuji Junior, bright red, and it’s still on the road today, now piloted by my nephew Jake. That’s him (with his mom), on the very Fuji of my childhood, in the photo above. This was my first bike: my brothers and I were unique in a) being pretty late in getting our first bikes, and b) getting ten-speeds long before any other kids. What a glorious day that was when I had my very own bike to ride and no longer had to run alongside my brothers and their friends as they rode up and down our neighborhood streets.

I really did love that Fuji, and defended its honor passionately when my brothers called it the “Fudgie” and told me that it was made by “Fuji Heavy Industries.” My brothers also loved to tease me about my bike being called “Junior,” as opposed to their coolly-named Motobecane Nomades. It’s hard to imagine why I was so ashamed of “Junior,” but clearly I was, because at some point I actually painted over the decals with red touch-up paint. (As for Fuji Heavy Industries, they don’t make bikes. They make Subarus.)

The bike 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., Honda Acura Integra Basilica XLS, Sport Series). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

Missing from the Fuji now are the toe-clips. I know I had them because—like everyone—when I first got them I kept forgetting to loosen the straps, tipping over again and again.

Line 2: Cursed

The bike was not cursed—I was. I wasn’t alone, of course; also cursed was every other kid who was painfully aware of the uncoolness of his bike based on its not resembling a pro racing bike in every detail. Kids—heck, humans—make a lot of trouble for themselves scrutinizing everything and placing it within a rigorous, heartless hierarchy like this.

Line 3: Tires

The original tires were 24 x 1¼ inch. (The small wheel diameter made it possible for the frame to be a reasonable 18 inches while still allowing me to straddle the bike.) I dreamed of tires that were only 1 1/8 inch wide, which is what my brothers had by then. Oh, how they lorded that eighth of an inch over me. I became fairly obsessed about it. Eventually my brother Geoff crashed his bike (I believe he was riding at night and hit a brick) and totaled his front wheel. Unable to find a replacement 24-inch wheel, my dad bought a 600C, which had an aluminum alloy rim instead of steel and was thus much better. Not wishing to reward Geoff for his foolishness, my dad put the 600C wheel on my bike and Geoff got my old wheel. This was all well and good until the mandatory bike shop safety inspection a couple weeks before my first bike race, the Red Zinger Mini Classic, in 1981. My bike failed the inspection due to worn-out tires, and the shop only carried the 600C tire in the 1 3/8 inch width! Man, that is really fat. The mechanic lectured me at length about how tire width really doesn’t matter and skinny tires won’t make you go faster. His unspoken assumption was that aesthetics shouldn’t matter to a kid—but why not? I guarantee his tires were nice and skinny! To my great relief, my dad found a 600C x 1¼ inch tire in Denver for me.

Line 6: Mockery

Not all the mockery was in the direction of pie plates in general. Much of it was directed at my pie plate in particular, which my brothers convinced me was even larger than theirs. That my bike was different from theirs singled it out for all kinds of contempt. It didn’t matter that their French bikes had those awful plastic Simplex shifters and derailleurs. To this very day, despite having spent his teen years as a bike mechanic wailing about the awfulness of French bikes, my brother Bryan won’t concede that my Fuji was better. “Are you kidding? Never!” he says. “The Motobecanes were elusive, romantic French bicycles, with light-weight derailleurs and wedge-shaped tires! I remember loving that Nomade like it was a girl. Your bike was made by a Heavy Industries factory in Japan, mine by French people, who made racing bicycles, and knew about love and stuff.” My dad had bought the Motobecanes at Basque Sports in Boulder, and every time we drove by the store in the car, we’d all chant its name, both in homage and because it was such a hard name to pronounce. The “–sque” butting up against the “S” in “Sports” created a hissing effect that, since we couldn’t avoid it, we ultimately accentuated: “Basques-ssk-ssk sports-ssk-ssk.” (Nobody ever knew or cared where my Fuji came from.)

Line 8: Awful to endure

It wasn’t just the size of the pie plates that rankled us. I couldn’t find room within the sonnet to address the issue of pie plate rattling, so I’ll mention it here. Mine didn’t give me much trouble, but my brothers’ pie plates rattled like crazy. Finally Geoff couldn’t take it anymore and figured out a solution: he took a length of surgical tubing, maybe half a centimeter in diameter, sliced it lengthwise down the middle, and ran it along the edge of the pie plate, so it was held in place by the spokes. This worked for awhile, though the tubing tended to peel off eventually. He solved this by sewing it on there with kite string or dental floss or something. Eventually the tubing turned yellow and brittle in the sun, making the pie plate look more ghastly than ever. As you can see from the photo above, the pie plate on my old Fuji is going strong. I doubt it has ever occurred to Jake to despise it.

Line 9: Gearing

It seems intuitively obvious to me, as it did when I was a kid, that a larger cog indicates personal weakness. When I really think about this, I see that math is involved, and it wasn’t until I read my sonnet to my wife, Erin, that I realized how much I take for granted when it comes to the proportions of bike components. Imagine: she can look at a large freewheel and not pity the bike owner at all! But then, she didn’t have, as a pre-teen, a gear chart taped to her stem, showing which front/rear gear combination represented the next highest or lowest gear. Bryan, at fourteen or so, actually wrote a computer program to plot the gear inches on a logarithmic scale. Gear inches refers to the number of teeth on the chainwheel up front, multiplied by the wheel diameter in inches, divided by the number of teeth on the rear cog. Any teenager I rode with then knew by heart not only that, say, 52 x 13 was a 108-inch gear, but exactly how fast that gear would propel him at top cadence. Bikers were nerdier then, I think.

When I started racing, my brothers helped me strip down my bike, ditching the reflectors, replacing the stem-mounted shifters with down-tube ones, and removing the so-called “chicken” or “suicide” levers, those brake-lever extensions that made it possible to brake while riding on the tops of the handlebars. I distinctly remember Geoff, at age thirteen or so, sawing off the chicken-lever stubs with a hacksaw so the bolts would sit flush. We/they also removed the chain-guard on the crankset, which now strikes me as a step down aesthetically (it was a giant, pretty, chrome thing, and I remember well how often I had a grease print of the chainring on my pant leg after the chain-guard was gone). The rear mech is a Suntour V-GT Luxe, which my dad installed along with a larger freewheel to give me—you guessed it—lower gearing, which of course was a bit humiliating. Why me? Was I such the runt that I alone needed lower gearing? Oddly enough, the larger freewheel actually made the pie plate look smaller—but just try telling my brothers that. The bike never did shift very well after that “upgrade,” which is why in races I’d often get dropped in either the highest gear or the lowest. This doesn’t mean I didn’t get dropped when using other gears—I mostly used those two gears, and always got dropped.

Line 14: Straight-block

When I upgraded from the Fuji to my first Miyata, I went from a 32-tooth large cog in back to a 28, and I was thrilled at the sleeker, racier look. It still had a pie plate, but it was aluminum, and not as shiny, thus less conspicuous. A couple of years later I bought some wheels from my brother Geoff that had the same 28-tooth cog, but with no spoke protector. That was a huge step forward; I think my ego doubled that day. At age fourteen I started racing in the United States Cycling Federation races, where your smallest cog couldn’t be smaller than 17 teeth—far lower maximum gearing than I’d been riding in the Mini Zinger. (The idea was to save the youngsters’ knees.) It was practical to run a straight-block freewheel with that limitation; even with only six cogs, you could do 17-18-19-20-21-22, with 22 being a totally reasonable gear for getting up just about any hill in the Boulder area.

The next year I moved up an age group and was allowed to have a 15-tooth cog, and I went to the new Suntour 7-speed freewheels, and had an almost-straight-block of 15-16-17-18-19-20-22. Still, a 22 was the freewheel cog equivalent of sensible shoes, and I wanted something more bold. Finally, I switched to Shimano gear cassettes and for the first time could easily create custom combinations for specific races; for example, if I was racing with the adults I could use a 12-tooth cog. At last, I could build the highly impractical gearing combinations that fully satisfied my vanity: for criteriums or bike club photo-shoots I’d set up a 12-17. (Shimano wasn’t doing 7-speed yet.) What a rush that was as a teenager, to look down and see not a giant cluster with a humiliating pie plate, but this tiny little freewheel, a man’s freewheel, a svelte cluster fit for a real racing bike, and above all a highly visible manifestation of my strength. It was like the bicycle equivalent of giant muscles. It never occurred to me that to most people, perhaps even to you, it’s just a bunch of damn sprockets and whatnot that don’t really mean anything.

So did I outgrow all this macho nonsense? Of course not. I still snort at pie plates (though they’re made of plastic now). After a couple of months of dating Erin (back in ’92) I quietly removed the pie plate from her mountain bike. (She never noticed.) As for gearing, the modern-day equivalent of a giant rear cog is of course the triple front chainwheel, which accomplishes the same thing (i.e., addresses the same weakness). A triple requires a longer derailleur cage, which I equate—with a shudder—to that old V-GT Luxe on the Fuji. If a friend, new to cycling, asks me about triples, I’ll tell him they make sense given the hills around Berkeley. But a triple for my own bike? Are you kidding? Never!
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