A Cure for Holiday Consumerist Bloat

Introduction

Do you ever feel glutted around The Holidays?   Not just by food, but by stuff?  I always do, whether I receive many gifts or not.  The sheer spectacle of all that commerce gets to me, and I know I’m part of the problem.  I try not to spoil my kids … I really do.  So does my wife.  And yet somehow, every year, the consumer habit runs away with us and we overdo it.

This year, I enjoyed a strong sense of catharsis, which came from a rather surprising source.  What was this source?  Here’s a hint.

The reluctant consumer

I hate Christmas shopping mainly because I hate shopping.  I guess it’s how I was raised.  My brothers and I never knew the value of the dollar—in the sense that we greatly overvalued it.  You know that famous L’Oréal slogan, “Because I’m Worth It”?  It would be a slight exaggeration to say my family’s version was “Because I’m Not Worth It.”  Our version (had it been verbalized) was more like “Because It’s Not Worth It.”  The “It’s” in this context meant “whatever you were considering buying.”  Nothing, it seemed, was worth its price. 

Buying gifts is, to me, the worst form of shopping because chances are you’re going to guess wrong and buy somebody something he doesn’t even want.  When I open a gift, I’m practically wincing because I can’t stand such misfires. As a kid I once bought my dad a mirror for his bike.  He tried to seem pleased with it but clearly wasn’t.  A few years later, when I was a racer, a guy on my team got a sheepskin saddle cover from his grandma, and would have to remember to put it on his bike whenever she came to visit.  And then there’s the colleague who shows up at work with his new canary yellow fleece vest, which he wears exactly one time (as a gesture toward his wife), before it disappears forever.  The whole process is so inefficient.

But that’s not even the worst part.  I can totally handle buying birthday presents for people, because then I have time to think.  In the weeks before Christmas, especially with the economy back on track, everybody is out there shopping together, clogging up the system.  My wife and I got stuck in a mall in Fremont this year (long, boring story) and when—due to gradual suffocation amidst the rest of the human cattle—we decided to bail, we were horrified to realize we couldn’t find the exit.  Honestly, I’ve had a better time getting a cavity filled.  (And don’t even get me started on the holiday-themed music.)

The next day I headed out to a local mall for stocking stuffers.  I pulled in to the parking lot and it was pure gridlock in there.  Nobody could even move, and they were just sitting in their cars, waiting for somebody to leave—but the way the cars were lined up, it seemed you could be waiting hours.  I drove out of there, parked a few blocks away, and walked.  After I got home, realized I’d been overcharged almost $20, and started to drive back.  The street traffic was completely jammed and I realized I was too angry to drive.  I drove home, got my bike, and rode there instead.  Even though the rain was coming down in sheets, I was much less miserable.

What about e-commerce?  Yeah, I did a lot of that, too.  I used to hoard boxes all year so I’d have them to wrap gifts in at Christmas time.  Now, I get so much crap mail-order, my tiny garage is overflowing with cardboard.  I feel like a cog in this runaway retail machine, or like human grist for the retail mill.  Disgusting.

A few non-solutions

Would it help if I paused for a moment and reflected on what Christmas is really all about?  No, because when I look around me, I don’t see a lot of people praying and going to mass—I see a lot of people shopping.  Practically speaking, giving and getting is what Christmas is about.  This is mainly true in the modern era, but don’t forget about the Magi who gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  As a present, gold is alive and well (in its modern configuration, the gift card), but you have to wonder how well the second two gifts were received.  (This was before gift receipts, after all.)

On a bike ride this morning I passed a church with one of those little marquees, which read, “THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T THINGS.”  As platitudes go, this falls a bit flat.  (I don’t like it as much as “He who dies with the most toys STILL DIES.”)  And though the sentiment is probably true, it’s not really that useful.  Am I supposed to tell my kids, “Instead of exchanging gifts this year, we’re all just going to hug a bit more”?  Yeah, right.  Should I tell them their Christmas wish lists have to include at least three items that aren’t physical objects?  (They’d dodge by asking for “shopping spree” or “trip to Hawaii.”)

Life experiences are a nice counterbalance to egregious buying.  What about a lovely, sunny day, or a beautiful sunset?  I enjoyed both on Christmas day, when I went for a long, slow ride in the Berkeley hills.  Check it out:

But those still l didn’t reverse the self-disgust I felt after all that commerce.  After all, between the shopping trips, the trip to Office Depot to buy more packing tape, the parking lot incident, all the time I spent wrapping gifts, and two afternoons of braving the long line at the post office, I figure I missed out on at least three or four rides, and as many sunsets.  This one ride wasn’t a Christmas gift so much as the end of my precious time being stolen.

The catharsis

My catharsis came in the form of some Me Time, which I spend building a Me Thing:  specifically, a replacement for my dearly departed commuter bike, Full Slab.  Its frame broke last summer after five years of loyal service (and a few years as my road bike before that).  For the last five months I’ve been commuting on the Arseless, which is very cool old English 3-speed which I do love, but which I hate to ride:  not because I’m keeping it nice or something, but because it rides like crap.  It’s heavy, the bearings are pretty much shot, and it routinely slips out of second gear (not for lack of adjustment but because an internal part has rounded-off bits that are supposed to be sharp).  On top of that, the fenders rattle so loudly I can’t hear myself think.  Could I try to fix these things?  Yeah, but painful experience tells me that when a bike is fifty years old and has never been properly maintained, it’s best not to go anywhere near it with a wrench.

Why not just buy myself a nice commuting bike for Christmas?  In general I consider that a fine idea, and something I’d recommend to anybody with an income.  A good bicycle is about as virtuous a purchase as I can think of.  But as a really bike-y person with a bicycle shop background, I’m way beyond traditional retail.  Buying something stock would be polluting my pure bike experience by blending it with that same consumerist spirit I’ve been deriding throughout this essay.

You see, part of what kills me about being stuck in traffic, or in a parking lot, or at the mall, is the anonymity of the experience:  the sense of being swept up in some mob, immersed in a mindless group activity.  Within that shopping mall is a finite variety of things to buy, with a seemingly infinite number of people buying them, and each item carefully calibrated to appeal to the highest number of consumers.  (The king of that effort must be Apple, who sold 75.5 million iPhone 6 units in one quarter.)  I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that many people actually care what the most popular gifts are, and will purposefully seek them out.  American consumers start to seem so much alike, I start to forget which one of us I am.

So for me, to imagine buying a new bike at the Christmas sale is to imagine hundreds and hundreds of these bikes being churned out on an assembly line.  This train of thought brings me to “Pink Floyd The Wall” and those school kids going down the conveyor belt to the meat grinder.  I don’t want something marketed to the buying public; what I want is a bike that is not only fast and light and cheap, but unusual and cool.

Think of the new car Max gets in Mad Max.  Remember the scene in which his cop buddies are unveiling the car to him, singing its praises, to lure him back to the force?

      “You can shut the gate on this one.”  “It's the duck's guts.”  “Yeah, she's the last of the V8s.”  “Sucks nitro.”  “Phase 4 heads.”  “Twin overhead cam.”  “Tell him about the blower.  The blower, man!”  “She's meanness put to music and the bitch is born to run!”
      “How the hell did you get all this together?”
      “It just happened, Max, you know?  A piece from here and a piece from there.”
      “So easy?”
      “Yeah.”

Except it’s not easy, not with my bike at least.  I procured the frame months ago (online, Chinese, about $120 which—given the biking circles I run in—is practically nothing).  The problem was, this frame wasn’t compatible with most of the components from Full Slab, so instead of a bike I had a Project.  And I just didn’t have the time or energy to fight with the thing.  Months ago, I got as far as sanding off the thick powder coat paint that, due to a programming error, some robot neglected to mask during the frame’s construction:

Finally, this week, with some time off from my job, I managed to log some serious hours out in the garage, figuring out what old parts to use (“a piece from here and a piece from there”), fighting with the wacky French steerer tube springy thingy, looking for half an hour for a cable housing ferrule I dropped on the floor (costs maybe 25 cents, but of course the bike shop’s closed for the holiday), and basically making glacial progress—until, amazingly, the whole menagerie of donor organs suddenly turned into a real bicycle, with a smooth clean look that largely belies its Frankenbike heritage:

It’s kind of the bicycle equivalent of decorator crab:  you just use what’s available, and in the process achieve total uniqueness.  The fork on this bike is from a friend who traded it for a lunch—he refused to take money for it because it flexed like crazy and gave him the willies.  (It was on my rain bike for a while before something better came along).  The bars and stem came with my older daughter’s mountain bike (it was the spare set I got when I bought the bike used from a friend).  The crankset and bottom bracket are hand-me-downs from my backup road bike (which got an upgrade due to compatibility issues with my current race frame).  The seat post is from an old (dearly departed) Orbea.  The saddle is one that I got ages ago from a friend to put on my younger daughter’s mountain bike; I reclaimed the saddle before passing the bike along to my niece.  The rear derailleur—freakin’ Dura-Ace, baby!—is from like six road bikes ago.  The brakes are from my older daughter’s new road bike (off-brand Tektro, which work fine but which on principle I had to replace right off the bat).  The shifters, bottle cage, and freewheel seem to have been spontaneously generated by The Box.  (“I can't remember where I got 'em, but I got 'em, know what I mean?”)

There’s a long tradition of recycling your old junk to make a cool, weird, serviceable bike out of it.  I believe this is the basis for the fixie culture that has become so popular.  That’s part of the joy of bikes:  they’re easy to work on (compared to a car, anyway) so almost anybody can cobble something together.  On his latest album, Eminem raps about doing this as a kid:  “I bike ride through the neighborhood of my apartment complex on a ten speed which I've acquired parts that I find in the garbage, a frame, then put tires on it.”

Of course it was only a matter of time before the bike industry rose up to capitalize on the fixie thing, offering brand new stock fixies (like these or these) which—don’t get me wrong—have a right to exist, but don’t satisfy my yearning for a bike that’s cool, weird, and cheap—like the one I just built. 

Yeah, my bike has got gears.  I’m not into fixies, because I like cogs and shifters and derailleurs, and I like being able to go up hills, and I like the basic process of shifting.  A single-speed drivetrain would give me about as much enjoyment as my car’s automatic transmission—that is, no enjoyment at all.

Check out the finishing touch:  a head badge a friend made me like ten years ago, when my kids still looked like this.  I’ve been storing this badge all this time, just waiting for a worthy bike to put it on.

To sum up, this bike is what’s given me great relief and satisfaction after the predictable, perennial, and bankable excess of The Holidays.  All that quality time in the garage, messing about with tools, solving little problems, sighing with pleasure when stumbling on cool stuff that had lain dormant in The Box for like two decades, and ending up with the flyest, dopest commuter I’ve ever had … it all gives me such a gratifying feeling of redemption.  Despite having added to my possessions, I feel I’ve thrown off the shameful mantle of passive consumer and—in this instance, anyway—become more of a designer or creator.  Ah, the goodness of bikes!
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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Dyna-Drive - Letter to an Old Gearhead

Introduction

Recently, I got into a long, rich e-mail exchange with a guy named Kevin, who is my friend John’s older brother.  I know almost nothing about Kevin because back when we all lived in Boulder, we were teenagers, and no teenager ever has anything to do with his kid brother’s friends.  But Kevin is restoring a 1983 Team Miyata, which instantly provided enough rapport for us to practically become pen pals.

That’s where you, vicious reader, come in.  (You didn’t think I was going to call you “gentle reader,” did you?)  Because I don’t know Kevin, he could be any 40-something collector of excellent old bikes and their paraphernalia.  If that’s you, read on.  If that’s not you, what’s wrong with you?  Racing bicycles of the early eighties are far cooler than fantasy football, online gaming, etc., and the sooner you realize it the better.  (If you love old bikes but are a young dude who can’t stand the thought of anybody being in his forties, click here instead.)

Dyna-Drive – Letter to an Old Gearhead

It’s been awhile ... maybe you thought I forgot about your Team Miyata restoration and the parts I offered you.  Not so.  And even if I did forget, my wife would’ve reminded me.  I told her about the project, explaining it in a way that would interest her (“I’m giving away some bike stuff”) and she asked, “Does this guy need any whole bicycles?”

So, I finally went out to The Box to find out if I really do have the parts I promised you.  Sorry it took me so long, but hauling out The Box is no small matter.  It’s buried under a bunch of other stuff in the garage, and the garage itself (a small one, built to accommodate a Model-T Ford) is like a jack-in-the-box, where when you pull out one thing, the top pops off and suddenly there’s crap everywhere and it looks like the home of a hoarder, so you can barely thread your way through it and then there’s a TV crew out there in the driveway wanting to film an installment of “Filthy Hoarders Bay Area:  Bike-Induced Squalor.” 

I also have to be braced emotionally for such archeological projects.  I start to get sentimental because whenever I blow up the garage, I come across relics of my daughters’ recent past that remind me how fast they’re growing.  I’m chucking aside new winter boots, winter boots that won’t fit anymore, little coats they barely got to wear, and then the rag bag, which is actually a box, which is always overflowing and is 90% kids’ garments.   I guess there’s some guilt there because we could have given these garments to the Goodwill, except they’re all stained because my kids are, apparently, slobs.  So I’m like, “Dang, Lindsay was wearing this dress only a month ago.”  The way the years have flown by, it’s like the kids just got here, but they’ve already got one foot (each) out the door.

Below the rag “bag” is the New Bike Stuff Box, which is a Huggies diaper box, so I feel guilty about that.  Should’ve used cloth.  In the New Bike Stuff Box are gobs of new cogs, new chains, new cleats, new Conti 4K tires, and little-used 4Ks I took off my bike so I could put on new tires for Everest Challenge but then afterward was too tired to put the old tires back on, and all of this is enough to make me drool over how well equipped I am for all the miles I have yet to ride, but of course there’s some guilt there, too, because I have so much, and there are people in this world riding Forté (i.e., house-brand) tires, or fricking Ultegra, or low-end Campy, or worse, some of them are on cobbled-together mixed-part mixed-vintage bikes like all those poor Europeans had who dropped my ass on Alpe d’Huez despite my big fancy American equipment and attitude.

So then I get to the second diaper box, which is The Box itself.  The Box is fricking heavy, with the accumulation of decades of bike stuff, and I dreaded hauling it out because my back is currently in the thrown-out state.  I don’t know how it got here.  I sat down too quickly, or got up too quickly, or sat too long, or blasphemed too many times, I have no idea.  A buddy of mine threw his back out putting on a sock.  It sucks being old, but I guess the alternative (i.e., being dead) is no better.  I wish you could have heard the wounded-animal noise I made hefting The Box onto a rubbish bin so I could rifle through it.  (Did I say “rubbish bin” instead of “trash can” just to sound British?  Of course.)

The stuff in that Box ... it’s just amazing.  It’s like the parts are copulating in there.  I always come across stuff I cannot account for, like (in this case) an extra Dura-Ace Dyna-Drive crankset.  I know I promised you some chainrings off this crankset, but since then I verified with my brother Bryan that I had actually put my extra Dyna-Drive crankset on his old Team Miyata a couple decades ago.  (My original Dyna-Drive crankset is on Full Slab.)  So I thought Bryan was going to have to send you the chainrings you need, which means you’d almost certainly never get them, because he has more kids than I do and doesn’t even have time to read his e-mail—and hasn’t, in fact, even read any of our glorious Miyata restoration e-mails, hasn’t even stumbled across the link you included to the treasure trove of old Miyata catalogs online where he could drool over the very catalog that once hawked his very bike.

But lo and behold, I do have a Dyna-Drive crank from which to cannibalize chainrings.  Sweet!  And that’s not even the weirdest thing I found in The Box.  I also found a cadence transmitter for a Polar bike computer.  How is this in here?!  I’ve never owned a Polar device in my life, and I’ve never been a big fan of measuring cadence.  I do have a cadence mech now—I couldn’t outrun such nerdy technology forever—and it’s kind of depressing sometimes when I’m slogging up Lomas Cantadas in my lowest gear, which is shamefully low due to the unholy combination of a compact crank and a 27-tooth rear cog, and my cadence is in the 40s.  At that point can I even call myself an athlete?

I’ve got a slew of corn cobs in The Box, even a Regina which is weird because I’ve never owned a chain that’s even compatible with Regina.  Just all kinds of stuff and it takes a mighty, mighty long time to go through it all looking for specific stuff, especially since I keep getting sucked in, inspecting this or that part closely, not just because it’s cool-looking (which of course it all is), but because time after time the picture gets all wavy, like how old TV shows used to indicate that a dream sequence or flashback was beginning, and suddenly this isn’t just a 53-tooth Mavic chainring, this is the chainring off Pete’s old Rossin, the chainring we all called “the working man’s chainring” because it was so manly, so Sean-Kelly-like, because at that time having a 53 was unusual and was the equivalent of an amp that goes up to 11.  If you were willing to fork out big bucks for that extra tooth, it meant you really cared about going fast.  (As juniors, we had gear restrictions, and the 53x15 was actually still legal, whereas a 52x14 was not.)  This led me to ponder whether or not it’s pathetic that as teenagers my brothers and friends and I talked enough about any specific chainring to have to name it.  Well, maybe we were, but at least we were disciplined, sportive teenagers who weren’t glued to screens all the time.

Then I found myself looking at a Suntour Sprint rear mech, which was on the Sanwa I bought in 1986 from this Brazilian twerp whose goal in life was apparently to go as long as possible without actually working, no matter how much freeloading this required, and no matter how many belongings he had to sell.  He tried to sell that Sanwa to me for months, and my bartering tactic—“I don’t need another bike, and I don’t even like that bike, get it away, I don’t want it”—was so ruthlessly effective that I finally got the bike for like $140 and gave it to my brother Max, who, years later, was sprinting all-out on it, on the Broadway bike path, when the frame snapped in half and he stacked so hard he got a case of whiplash that bothers him to this day.

So, yeah, I’ve got original Dura-Ace Dyna-Drive chainrings for you, but oddly the inner chainring is a 39, which definitely was not stock on that crankset.  Nobody was using 39s until about 1987 or 1988.  That crank is a 1982.  Oddly, even though it’s newer than the crank, that 39 is really, really worn.  Kind of a wave-shape as well.  Very likely to skip.  Look:

See that chainring next to it?  It’s practically new.  It’s got at least 10,000 miles left in it.  Also, being a 42, it’s more appropriate for your restoration.  But though it’s Dura-Ace, it’s not Dyna-Drive, so in that sense it’s not very authentic.

So what else did I find?  The Dura-Ace AX pedals are in better shape than I remember.  Pretty smooth, actually.  You’ll have to furnish your own toe straps but those  aren’t hard to come by.  But the thing is, you need to get past your fear of these pedals and actually install and use them.  Get yourself some old-school cycling shoes, in plain black leather, some old Vittorias or Dettos or something.  Why?  Because clipless pedals on your old Team Miyata is just not right—it’s almost a crime, really, particularly when the Dyna-Drive pedals are arguably the most distinctive thing about that entire era of Dura-Ace componentry.  

Besides, you have to honor these pedals, given the good long while I spent staring at the right one, recalling the cool old machine shop I took it to after stripping the threads during one of my many overhauls (back in my college days).  These were the little threads on the inside of the pedal, where the spindle would be if these crazy pedals had a spindle.  The machinist installed a HeliCoil for me, which worked like a champ, but he also got a gleam in his eye and offered to modify the pedals to use cartridge bearings, and even a special setup for races that would involve mineral oil instead of grease, for maximum efficiency.  I almost went through with it (but was too broke).  Anyway, I raced for years on those pedals and never had a problem.  That yours exploded was probably just God punishing you for doing a triathlon on a pure road racing machine like your Team.

Alas, though I did find a Dura-Ace bottom bracket, in the original box no less, it ended up being the spindle, one matching cup, and another random cup from a totally different era of BB.  The one Dyna-Drive cup is 36x24, which (needless to say) is the Italian thread and size, totally useless to you, though a BB with only one cup is pretty damn useless anyway.  The spindle is pretty badly pitted, as you can see from this photo (note also the close-up of the worn-out chainring teeth):

But the spindle being pitted doesn’t really matter,  because it cannot be used with non-Dyna-Drive cups anyway.  Recalling that incompatibility has been less than enjoyable.  My 1986 Team Miyata broke (well, the fork broke) during the 1990 Collegiate National Championship road race, and after a brief stint on an Orbit (painted orange with a spray can) I bought the steel Guerciotti, Bomb Pop, that was my favorite steel frame ever.  As Bomb Pop was Italian, I had to figure out a new Dyna-Drive-compatible BB and went through half a dozen different combinations of spindles and cups, getting most of my parts from Peter Rich over at Velo-Sport, who was cool enough to let me return one part after another when it didn’t work out, which was every time.  I was working down the street at Square Wheel and one day I looked through the (non-online, paper-bound) Euro-Asia wholesale catalog and discovered you could still order a new-old-stock Dyna-Drive BB, which I did.  I have no idea what happened to my old English-thread Dyna-Drive BB.  Could still be in the Orbit.  I will never know, because I managed to actually lose that Orbit (or did I sell it to Max?) along with the 1986 Team Miyata which really only needed a new fork, but which is definitely lost forever (possibly in my ex-stepfather’s attic).

But wait, you’re asking, what’s that other BB spindle in the photo?  That’s a ’99 Dura-Ace Octalink spindle, probably left over from the Italian-thread BB I bought for Bomb Pop, which I later installed on Full Slab, and eventually had to cut up with a Dremel tool.  But what’s important here is that the Octalink spindle is no wider than that old Dyna-Drive spindle.  This suggests that, modern Q-factors being what they are, you could probably find a low-profile BB for your Team Miyata that would work a lot better than that goofy sealed sumbitch you got in there now. 

Which is good, because I had a long, fun chat with Bryan and have determined that he never did have a Dyna-Drive BB for his Team Miyata, so he got away with a Campy, though his chain line wasn’t perfect.  You could make him an offer for that Campy BB, but you’d either rip him off or pay dearly because those were sweet.  They had these so-called “labyrinth seals”—not a rubber seal, but just a carving into the aluminum rim of the hole in the cup where the spindle went through.  It always seemed to me that such a design would do nothing to keep water out, but it really did work.  After the Steamboat Springs road race in 1983, which was a miserably rainy affair, I actually took my bike (an ’83 Pro Miyata) into the shower with me, and didn’t even need to overhaul the BB afterward.  Smooth as glass, those Campys.  Damn it, maybe I’ll make Bryan an offer myself.  I’ll conjure up a bike to go with it!

By the way, see that grubby red Cinelli handlebar plug in the photo?  That’s the last part I have left from the Mercian I wrote about recently, my second-favorite steel bike ever.  Those were cool plugs because they were squishy, so at high altitudes (e.g., Mount Evans at over 14,000 feet), they popped out slightly.  I dreamed of going down to sea level and reinstalling them to increase this effect.  It’s kind of sad that the bar plug is all I have left of that Mercian.  I mean, a pair at least would have been nice.

Okay, so the last thing:  you’re probably wondering what those Superbe Pro brake levers are doing in the photo.  They have nothing to do with your Team Miyata!  True, but as we’ve discussed, neither do the more modern Superbe Pro brakes you’ve got on your bike now.  And these levers are the right era, and are beautifully made, and let’s face it, aero levers have no place on your ’84 Team.  They just don’t.  Look at that catalog photo:  the brake cables come straight out of the top of the lever, like they should for that vintage.  Sure, aero levers existed back then, but the Team Miyata was a no-nonsense racing bike and aero levers hadn’t earned their place on it yet.  (Miyata was a pretty cool company:  starting in 1982, they finally acknowledged that no Japanese company could produce a good rim, and switched to Mavic GP4s.  On the other hand, that aero water bottle in the photo is pure nonsense and is painful to look at, especially against the backdrop of such a sweet bike.  It’s like if Natalie Portman had tattoos on her face, or those plug-style earrings.)

Of course, the problem with these Superbe Pro levers is that the hoods are gone.  Isn’t it strange how even rubber is higher-tech than it used to be?  Back in the ‘80s we had to replace our brake hoods somewhat often.  Everybody stocked replacement hoods.  You could even put Modolo hoods on your Campy levers and many did.  Or there were the A‘me  ones that came in every different color.  I even remember Armor-All’ing the Dia-Compe hoods on my Miyata 310, to extend their lifespan.  

And now?  Nobody ever needs new hoods.  Ever.  My 1999-issue Dura-Ace STI levers not only have the original hoods, but they’re in mint condition.  (Just the hoods, though ... the levers are beat to hell, the decorative caps busted off, big Phillips-screw exposed, and I even had to file them down after a crash because the scraped-up plastic—plastic!—was so barbed it could have cut my lily-white fingers, though those barbs would never present a risk to a professional bike mechanic, who it is said bleeds on the inside.)  Anyway, you can still find replacement hoods, as these take the same ones as old Campy levers.  (Click here, for example.)

So, this stuff is yours for the asking:  the Dyna-Drive era chainrings; the 42-tooth chainring; the awesome old Dyna-Drive pedals; the non-aero brake levers.  I’ve even got a couple rolls of brand-new Benotto tape in white (with albeit yellowed plugs) you can use if you like.  But I’m keeping the spindles and the Cinelli bar plug.

Epilogue

I got a great reply to this letter from Kevin, which proves that it is humanly possible to make it through a long, dense spew of text like this.  There is much of his reply that I’d like to include here, but of course I have to draw the line somewhere.  I particularly enjoy and appreciate the perspective he finds for all this lore:

The curse of a passion like this is the almost impenetrable gulf it puts between you and outsiders who have no idea what you are talking about and hardly see anything of value in a decades-old box of copulating bike parts.... That Cinelli bar-end plug doesn't speak for itself, it needs an interpreter. Wherever its mate ended up, we can be pretty confident that it is not the crowning centerpiece of a memorial shrine to the long-gone days of Mercian-riding bliss. It’s probably floating in one of those swirls of trash in the Southern oceans. It’s the human component that makes objects into what they are, if that isn’t too obvious to state.

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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Zen Drivetrain

Introduction

This post is about when bike parts fight.  If you like bikes and bike gear, and enjoy accumulating bike lore to carry around in your head like kids’ school pictures in your wallet, read on.  If, on the other hand, you can’t be bothered with worldly stuff like consumer products and bike repairs, and prefer to think about the human spirit and how to calm it down and give it respite from the more-more-more, faster-faster-faster wheel of life, well then, read on.  This post is about both—or, rather, the unlikely nexus of the two.  Sort of, anyway.

Bike noises

Bikes often make weird noises that are hard to track down.  When the noises become chronic, you’re in a bind.  If you’re a teenager who loves wrenching, you tear everything apart and rebuild it all—lather, rinse, repeat—until the bike quiets down.  (My brothers and I used to spend hours trimming cable housing and grinding the ends flush until the action of our brakes was glass-smooth.  But it’s been decades since that decadence was possible, and now even my best bike has crunchy cable action.) 

If you are an adult, have money, and are heartless, you take your noisy bike to a shop and make it the mechanics’ problem.  In my bike shop days the “weird noise” was a curse—the scourge of our industry.  It can take forever to tease out the cause of a noise, and you can’t exactly charge $100 just to make a bike quieter.  The unlucky mechanic would often give up and ask the others for advice.  A common response?  “I say we take off and nuke the entire bike from orbit.  It’s the only way to be sure.”

So what do I do with a noisy bike now, being too cheap and proud to outsource my repair, but too busy to worry about every little sound?  Well, I differentiate between harmless and harmful. 

The really familiar noises are often harmless:  a tinny thwick once per pedal revolution can be as simple as your shoe hitting the front derailleur cable end, or a shoelace hitting the bike.  A clicky noise you hear when you ride out of the saddle could be spokes rubbing together like a cricket’s legs.  A creak that presents itself under hard pedaling can be a bottom bracket problem.  A loud creaky click when you’re in the saddle is probably your seatpost where it clamps the saddle, or where it goes into the frame.  A clickier creak than this, that you hear in the saddle and out, can be a loose chainring bolt.  Squeaking during pedaling can be your cleats (one friend fixes this with Chapstick).  A loud once-per-pedal-revolution click, like a metronome, can be invisible grit between the shoulder of the pedal axle and the crankarm.  These are generally annoying but non-dangerous problems.

Any noise involving a tire is potentially dangerous.  And any sound that’s unfamiliar to you and your riding pals should be investigated.  I’m particularly suspicious of the duller, deeper sounds, that to me suggest the underworld.  And if you ever hear a strange deep crunchy clunk, like one beat of a rumble, which you can feel in the drivetrain as you pedal, and you’re on an old bike that has a freewheel instead of a cassette, be afraid.  Be very afraid. 

Freewheels

To me, the freewheel is the part of the bike that was never perfected.  Rather, the technology was scuttled entirely during the early ‘80s when Shimano invented the cassette freehub.  For the newbies out there who have only ever known freehubs, the freewheel was its own self-contained deal, with its own bearings, that screwed on to the hub body.  The design was terrible because the rear wheel hub’s bearings, on the right side, weren’t at the end of the axle.  They were closer to the middle, to make room for the freewheel.  Thus, dudes broke rear axles all the time.  And the freewheels were just never made very well.

Freewheels used to explode here and there, seemingly for no reason.  When I was bike touring with my mom and my brother Bryan in Canada in 1983, we came upon a fellow tourist stranded by this affliction.  Bryan recovered all the ball bearings he could—there are gobs of them, and they’re tiny—and screwed the thing back together with some grease he happened to have in his pannier.  Grease makes freewheels nice and quiet—so much so that this guy called it “good as new.”  Bryan said, “No, don’t be fooled.  Get to a bike shop as soon as you can—that thing is a time bomb.”  (A friend of ours from the shop once repacked a roadside cyclist’s freewheel with a banana.  Presumably that guy didn’t need the time bomb lecture.)

A freewheel has pawls in it, typically only two of them, that allow it to move independently of the wheel in one direction (i.e., coasting) while engaging with the wheel in the other.  The full load of your pedaling is thus concentrated on these very small bits of metal.  Modern freehub designs still use pawls, but I think they’re made better.  Maybe it’s an economics thing:  when you’re making a $1,000 wheelset you can afford to do everything right, whereas the margins on a $30 freewheel were probably never very good.

It was about 23 years ago that I learned the hard way about pawls.  My mountain bike had been making this low, grumbling, subtle clonking sound, and I could feel it when I pedaled.  I put up with it for a long time, and then discovered very abruptly what it was.  One pawl had broken, hence the noise.  It was when the other pawl broke, and the freewheel no longer engaged the wheel, that the problem became obvious.  Naturally, it was under full out-of-the-saddle pedaling pressure that the second pawl broke, so my pedaling thrust—suddenly unopposed—threw my weight violently to one side and I went down.  This was in traffic.  I looked up to see the impressive grille of a Mercedes Benz come to a stop just a couple feet from me.  Good brakes on those cars … I got lucky.

Cheapage

When I heard the noises and felt the crunching in Full Slab’s freewheel, I didn’t mess around.  This freewheel was a piece of junk to begin with, and had been running strong for at least 20 years.  I don’t even know how I came into possession of that crappy a component.  It was an all-black, bottom-of-the-line model and surely its manufacturer expected it to spend its life sitting, cobweb-covered, in a garage, instead of seeing heavy action. 

Ditching that freewheel didn’t, however, mean buying a new one.  (Maybe I considered such a purchase, but only in a reckless, impulsive way, like when you get the sudden notion to steer your car into oncoming traffic or off a cliff.)  Nobody makes an even halfway-decent freewheel anymore, because all halfway-decent bikes have freehubs now.  Plus, I’m cheap.  And I knew I’d find something in The Box that I could use.  What box, you ask?  You mean you don’t have a Magic Box chock-full of awesome (if obsolete) bike parts just waiting for an afterlife on your commuter bike?  What, did your wife finally make you get rid of it?

I settled on a great-looking old Suntour Winner Pro that’s almost a corn cob.  I used to race on gearing like this, full-time.  No hill seemed too steep for a 19- or 21-tooth cog.  Then I moved to the Berkeley area with its monster climbs, and more importantly I started getting older, so I had to gradually go to larger and larger cogs, which is to say gradually increase my own disgrace, to the point where I actually browsed online the other day to see what a decent compact crank goes for.  (Rest assured, it was a moment of weakness, and the breathtakingly high price of such a thing quickly snapped me back to reality.)  Anyway, it’s great to finally have a properly small cluster on one of my bikes.  Check it out:

But my problem was only half solved.  You can’t replace just the freewheel if it’s over twenty years old—you need a new chain, too.  Chains and freewheels are enablers, the classic co-dependents:  a chain as old as mine would skip on any freewheel except the one I just replaced, and vice-versa.  The two had ruined each other; their relationship was as dysfunctional as George and Martha’s in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  They had each other because nobody else would have them.

In a perfect world, I’d have a Sedisport chain, still in its paper wrapper, just waiting to be installed to match the new-ish Suntour freewheel.

Ah, the Sedisport.  That was the working-man’s chain.  All black.  Didn’t shift particularly well, but didn’t stretch much either.  It was a badge of honor, my brothers and friends and I felt, to use that chain even on our pride-and-joy race bikes.  A Sedis chain cost $8 retail.  Even though a bike’s chain has over 400 moving parts, that $8 model was plenty good enough.  It was, in fact, the cheapest bike part I ever put on my bike, unless you count mere accessories like the $2 Benotto bar tape and $2 Velox bar plugs.  

Alas, my Magic Box didn’t have a Sedis chain.  Just an all-black Shimano 9-speed HG chain.  I had a strong feeling the HG wouldn’t work very well, but still managed to be hopeful.  In fact, this could be great, I told myself.

When chain slippage is kind of cool

I figured if this chain slipped just a bit, that might be pleasantly nostalgic.  During my teen years, I raced a lot against Dale Stetina’s 7-Eleven junior team, easily the best in Colorado, and in ’86 they were using these wacky freewheels—I think they were Regina or Maillard—that had spacing issues.  There was always one shift that none of the 7-Eleven guys could get right.  The chain would find this Never Never Land between cogs and slip a few times, making a light hissing/ringing sound, before engaging the next cog.  I always enjoyed that.  It was the only thing about that team that wasn’t superior to me.

One time, I even got to experience this slippage for myself.  Warming up for the time trial at a stage race in Aspen, I punctured.  I had just minutes before my start and no spare wheel.  I went over to the 7-Eleven van and my friend John loaned me a wheel.  “Sorry, it’s only got a 20!” he grinned.  I think most guys were using at least a 23-tooth large cog for Suicide Hill.  It was going to be a bitch humping that wheel up the hill, but what could I do?

As I shifted gears during the flat part of the race, my chain slipped between two cogs, and made the same ringing sound that the Slurpees’ bikes made.  I really felt like I’d arrived, like this was some natural progression toward becoming one of them.  On the climb itself, of course, I was doing no shifting at all—I was well overgeared in the 20-tooth cog.  Seeing my struggle, a guy yelled, “Come over on the sidewalk!”  I guess he figured it would offer less rolling resistance, or there was gravel in the road or something.  So I went up on the sidewalk, and the (albeit modest) crowd there parted before me, furthering the king-for-a-day impression the chain slippage had given me.  That ended up being one of my best-ever individual time trials.

The Zen drivetrain

So, it really seemed like a chain that slipped now and then, especially on my commuting bike, wouldn’t be the end of the world.  Sure, it might slow me down a bit, but how bad could it be?  Well, I took Full Slab out for a test ride after installing the HG chain, and discovered to my horror that the chain skipped in just about every damn gear.  Only the largest cog was spared, for reasons I can’t quite fathom without applying some serious brain power to the job.  (Perhaps my readers can explain this, or better yet, bicker about it amongst yourselves.)

So, naturally, I went right out and bought a proper chain, didn’t I?  Well, no.  It was night.  The shops were closed.  And the rigors of my working-stiff/parenting lifestyle made it impossible—well, okay, difficult—to get around to this errand.  I wanted to call around and find a shop that had an actual Sedisport chain rusting away in its original, albeit moldering, wrapper, that they’d sell me cheap.  Of course, such lofty projects invite procrastination.  The ensuing civil war that raged within my drivetrain was basically inevitable.

But actually, I discovered something about the new setup.  If I just refrained from shoving on the pedals, and accelerated exceedingly gradually, I could keep the chain from skipping.  I developed the capability of coaxing speed out of the bike, rather than just stomping on the pedals as I’ve been doing for 30+ years.  Since most of my commuting these days consists of escorting my older daughter to school in the early morning, and she’s on a 3-speed bike called a Lazy Susan with remarkably slack frame angles, a big rack with a heavy pannier and a violin lashed to it, and giant balloon tires, the pace has been mellow.  The whole thing has been really pleasant and peaceful.  The narrow chain is whisper-quiet on those wide-spaced cogs, especially compared to my old setup with that grumbling freewheel and old, chattering chain. 

There’s actually some precedent to a cyclist hobbling himself intentionally.  I give you the guys who ride fixed gears in the winter, to improve their pedal stroke or some such thing.  This isn’t so common in the Berkeley area, where we have serious hills, but I remember seeing real road riders on fixed gears when I lived in San Francisco.  (Note that roadies on fixed gears shouldn’t be confused with hipsters on their fixies, many of which bikes are actually just one-speeds—i.e., they can coast.  Hipsters, who also do totally brainless things like smoking and riding at high speeds with no helmet in urban areas, certainly don’t deserve to be copied by anyone.)

Could this skipping problem teach me to slow down and just enjoy the bike?  To embrace the Lazy Susan ethos?  Could this be some kind of Karate Kid learning opportunity, to teach me patience, and tranquility, and smoothness?  To generally just Let It Be?  In short, was this a Zen drivetrain I’d stumbled upon? 

For weeks, half out of laziness (i.e., avoidance of a bike shop errand) and half as experiment, I’ve tried out the Zen drivetrain.  It has been illuminating.  After having recently watched twenty competitors ride away from me during the Everest Challenge, I’ve gotten to watch my daughter ride away from me on her Lazy Susan, maxing out her 3rd gear, while I gradually brought Full Slab up to cruising speed.  I’ve literally coasted toward green lights, knowing they’d be yellow before I got there and I’d just have to wait at the light, frozen in time.  I’ve consoled my impatient side by pausing to appreciate how quiet my bike is, how smooth the pedal stroke.

Yeah, right

But no way could I tolerate that forever.  Accelerating as slowly as a train is one thing when I’m riding with my daughter, but when I’m riding home, or to Bart, I demand the right to step it up.  I’ve paid enough dues as it is, having commuted for years on the Arseless, my Triumph 3-speed.  Its flaky Sturmey Archer 3-speed hub has a nasty tendency to slip out of 2nd gear, usually with painful and dangerous results.  No way am I going to accept such drivetrain shenanigans on two bikes.  So, when I was buying  a Ksyrium spoke for my race bike the other day (and errand that absolutely cannot be put off), and the mechanic asked if I need anything else, I said, “Yeah, I’ve got an old Winner Pro freewheel that’s fighting with a 9-speed chain.  Got an old Sedisport or anything?”  Without moving from his stool he reached under the counter and produced a SRAM 6-7-8 speed chain, the modern incarnation of the Sedis.  It’s like he was just waiting for me to ask for it.  So, 17 painful dollars later, it’s mine.

Of course, owning the chain is a far cry from it actually making it onto Full Slab.  The garage is torn apart, and it’s been raining, and my life itself has a lot of moving parts.  Who knows, maybe by the time I get around to installing that chain, I’ll have already achieved enlightenment!