From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIV

Introduction

This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.

If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.

May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara

You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.

Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!

So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!

Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.

January 19, 1991 – Berkeley

Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?

April 6, 1991 – Berkeley

Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.

Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else”  anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!

August 19, 1992 – Berkeley

School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.

November 6, 1992 – Berkeley

Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.

I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.

I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.

November 16, 1992 – Berkeley

I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” It never ends.

In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Selecting Bicycle Wheels - Part II

Introduction

In my last post I described how teenagers of my generation—at least, the bikeful ones—chose their racing wheels.  Well, with adulthood came money, and in the early aughts, after riding the tired old gear from my youth for many years, I decided to head out of the stone age.  (I got some momentum after buying my first non-steel road frame.)  This began an era of periodically throwing a whole lot of money at high-end equipment, which means cooler wheels than you read about last week.

If you read my last post you can skip this paragraph, which is an advisory to burglars.  Look here, burglars:  if you’ve found this blog in your Internet-scouring efforts to plan your next heist, think again.  No, I don’t have an attack dog trained to rip the zipper out of a pair of jeans, but the new wheels I recently bought were only $700.  Surely my neighbors have a lot of fancy electronics that are not only easier to stuff into your bag, but easier to fence.

How to select a modern wheelset

I hope I haven’t created any expectation that I’m a connoisseur of modern bicycle wheels.  Who is, besides the pro who gets the latest & greatest stuff every year, or the (somewhat rare) extremely wealthy guy who actually rides?  Besides, being a reluctant consumer in general, I can’t possibly keep up with the state of the art in high-end anything.  I occupy a precarious position as a person who a) is always reluctant to spend money, b) tends to buy pretty high end, cool shit when he does finally cave, c) has a soft spot for technology that was recently cutting edge but is now drifting into supposed obsolescence, and c) has trouble numbering his itemized lists.

Man, it used to be easy picking out wheels:  the hubs were seldom replaced, and the rims were mostly the same basic design, so the main thing you looked at was weight.  If you were a heavy rider, you picked a heavier rim.  If you thought black looked cool, you got hard-anodized (aka “heat treated”).  If you were weird and retro, you bought wood (though nobody really did this).  If a rim didn’t end up meeting your expectations, it was no big deal; they weren’t all that expensive (i.e., were usually cheaper than your hub, and sometimes cheaper than your tire).

These days the wheel-buying decision is harder than ever.  First of all, so many wheelsets look incredibly cool.  Gawking at them online, I felt like a Midwestern hayseed at a big-city strip club.  (If you thought the photos in my last post were kind of boring, well, that’s the 1980s bike industry’s fault, not mine.)  Carbon rims are common, many of them are super deep, lots have big, bold graphics along the side, and you see spokes of various materials & orientations.  (For an examination of the debate between modern factory-built wheelsets vs. old-school lace-your-own wheels, see Appendix A below.)

Why choosing is so hard

When you start to research modern wheels, you can get lost pretty fast.  Oddly, and in defiance of one of the most hard-and-fast rules of bicycle equipment, some of the more expensive wheels are heavier than the cheaper ones, and not just because some brands are cheaper than others.  Dura-Ace C35s are like $700 more than Dura-Ace C24s, despite being almost 100 grams heavier.  Why would I pay more for heavier wheels?  Ah, they’re more aerodynamic.  Will that help me, though, given that most of my riding is in the hills, where I’m going 6 mph up the hill and then (being a grandma) using the brakes on the way back down?

And then there’s the matter of carbon vs. aluminum.  Well, if carbon is lighter, and looks cooler, and has been proven many times over to be strong enough for just about anything, why is aluminum still here?  Is it just for cheap bastards like me?  Well, I’ve heard lots of complaints about poor braking and the need to use weird and expensive brake pads (e.g., “Try Black Prince pads and Basalt brake surfaces”), and also there’s this little matter of overheating.  Overheating, due to carbon fiber’s inefficiency at shedding heat during braking, can warp your rim.  A friend told me that carbon wheels were banned at Levi’s Granfondo at one point because so many riders had trouble with overheating rims on a particularly steep descent.  It’s an instance where technology trickling down from the pro teams may not be a great thing:  the pros probably brake far less than, say, rich dentists or even veteran former racers who have lost their mojo after a bad crash.  I recoil from the idea of wheels that require me to brake sparingly.

But that’s not all.  There’s a school of thought that brand names don’t mean anything anymore since just about everything is made in the same Chinese or Taiwanese factory.  So now there are impressive-on-paper wheels available for relatively little money.  Should I be tempted by the cheap route, or play it safe with a known brand?  One friend advised, “Open mold, Chinese carbon certainly sound like the best deal but your wife would surely kill you if they contributed even the slightest way to a crash.  From what I’ve read, ENVE and Zipp are the best, but your daughters will have crooked teeth.”  (That is, I wouldn’t have any money left over for their orthodontia.)

Of course, cyclists are fickle, so a used wheelset, ideally from somebody who got bored with his wheels despite not riding much, might be just the ticket.  One pal advised cheap Mavic Ksyriums on eBay:  “Buy ‘em.  Run ‘em.  Wreck ‘em.  Do it again.”

Not lost yet?  Well, there’s still the question of whether it’s time to go tubeless.  According to Dr. Tyre, this technology will either go the way of Biopace and the McDLT, or will become mainstream and thus much cheaper down the road—so either way, it’s too early to adopt it.  Of course, that column was over a year ago.  Still, almost all my pals use inner tubes, even a couple who bought the tubeless-style wheels.

Please … get help

As you’ve already gathered, I sought advice from my cycling pals, via our e-mail group.  I’ve already quoted a few responses above.  My favorite e-mail, sent to the group around this time, was titled, “23mm wide wheelset for sale – perfect for Dana if he loses some weight.”  (Can you imagine an e-mail with such a title going out to a women’s team?  A feud would break out, people would take sides, friendships would end….) 

I got lots of good advice, but of course not everybody had the same answer.  As I’ve described before, the problem with soliciting advice from a number of people is that ultimately you have to ignore a lot of people’s advice, which can be socially tricky.  But we’re a thick-skinned bunch (thick skin with a lot of scars, to be precise).

So here’s how it broke down.  Two guys recommended Easton, though two others said they’re garbage.  (One of the detractors said of one of the proponents, “Ken likes them, but he’s, what, a buck twenty wet?”  Indeed, I put more stock in input from heavier riders.)  Three guys recommended Zipp, but those are a bit too pricey for me.  Four heartily recommended the superlight Dura-Ace C24s, carbon with aluminum braking surfaces.  These became a front-runner, despite my bad experiences with Shimano wheels (see Appendix B for details).  Four people recommended cheap Chinese wheels.  Five recommended the HED Ardennes SL, which are wider than traditional rims, and three more recommended wide rims in general.

Not that I was thinking of these responses democratically.  The guys I ride the most with get extra attention because they know where I ride and how.  Since the HED Ardennes SL and the Dura-Ace C24s were the most widely and enthusiastically recommended, I was particularly interested in my pal Mark’s recommendations, as he a) owns both brands of wheels, and b) doesn’t weigh a buck twenty wet.  He recommended the HEDs for a rider like me.

The theory of wide, phat rims

So, the HED wheels aren’t made of carbon or any miracle alloy, don’t have the most radically deep cross section, and are no flashier than other wheels.  Their innovation, which they call “C2,” is remarkably simple:  their rims are wider than pretty much every road rim before them.  They’re wider, in fact, than the Wolber 58 rims on Full Slab, my commuting bike.  The idea is that this improves the profile of the tire, increasing its contact area on the road, allowing it to deflect more uniformly in cornering, and allowing you to run lower pressure in your tires without causing a pinch flat.  Supposedly, they also offer lower rolling resistance and greater comfort.

I like the idea of these rims:  instead of using ever more expensive materials, making the wheel both more expensive for the consumer and more expensive to make, these guys apparently asked a simple question—“Why are all road rims so narrow?”—and discovered that lack of imagination and rote imitation of an ancient design seem to be the only reasons.  So this C2 thing doesn’t really cost that much to do, since companies retool every few years anyway, and yet it seems to have been a game-changer.  (Lots of other wheel companies have copied the wide rim, further legitimizing the design or at least the marketing of it.)  

Best of all, HED themselves have gone from 23mm to 25mm with their latest wheels, so I was able to find the 23mm ones—no longer the cutting edge—on closeout for a mere $700.  This is chump change as modern wheels go.  (Mark approved of this strategy:  “500 bucks for 2mm seems unnecessary and contrary to your inner cheap bastard.”)  I love buying things right after they’ve become officially obsolete.  (I think I have the best tube-style TV ever made.  If you’re a burglar, good luck un-cabling everything from the back in time to make a getaway, and good luck trying to sell it.)

So how are the HEDs?

On paper (i.e., according to published weights) he HEDs should be about 50 grams heavier than my “old” (actually, dead at two years of age) Ksyrium SLs, but I weighed them and they’re exactly the same.  They look really, really cool because the lettering is giant and reflective (it catches the sunlight, not just my camera flash) and the fatness of the rim is just, well, phat.  

What’s more, the handwriting scrawled on the rim suggests that the wheels really did come from the HED factory in Minnesota.

I guess these wheels are kind of American.  I say “kind of” because the spokes are from Belgium and the rims from Taiwan.  The implication from this article is that they’re actually American-made.  (Even if they’re not, Belgian spokes is totally badass!)

Since my last wheels rode no better than the ones before them, which rode no better than the ones before them, I found it pleasantly surprising that these HEDs really do ride better.  Actually, they ride better than anything I’ve had before, since my old tubular wheels had too many spokes and weighed too much.  The ride is really plush.  Maybe it’s just the lower pressure (95 psi rear, 85 front), and I could get the same benefit from lower pressure on my other wheels.  If so, this is an impressive bit of marketing.

(Could I actually run my tires at lower pressure with standard-width rims?  Many times in the past I’ve forgotten to pump up my tires before riding, and the ride was poorer, not better.  HED claims that with these rims, the air volume is increased.  Intuitively I sense this is impossible, but then I’m just an English major.  Maybe I’ll do an experiment with my floor pump one of these days.)

Whatever the case, I now find the stretch of Wildcat Canyon Road between Summit Reservoir and the Brazil Building—which is so rough it’d be smoother if they just broke up and removed the rest of the asphalt—oddly fun to ride on.  My bike has never felt so sure-footed.  The newly configured tires just soak up the bumps.  And cornering on descents feels much better.  Braking seems smoother than with my Ksyriums.  So far (i.e., after 500 miles), the rims have stayed perfectly true.  If these last a good number of years, I think they could end up being the best wheels I’ve owned.  On the other hand, if these turn out to be frail over the long haul, I’ll update this post accordingly.

Update - July 2018

Well, I’ve had these wheels for about four years now, though I haven’t gotten four years of use out of them. How’s that, you may ask? Well, within the first year or so, the rear rim cracked. HED gave me some hassle about the warranty, making me go through a local dealer which was a problem because I bought them online. A local shop owner did me a solid by pretending to have sold me the wheels. But, I had to pay for shipping, which due to the usurious practices of UPS cost me like $80. HED did fix the wheel right up and even upgraded the rim, so I was satisfied by the end.

Alas, another year or so later, after the warranty was up, the rear hub and freewheel started binding. So I had to go back to my 2003 Ksyrium again until I (eventually) got around to taking the wheel to a shop. They discovered some broken part inside the hub, and ordered a replacement from HED. This wasn't terribly expensive but still a drag. Fast-forward less than a year, and the rear hub is making so much noise it’s hard to have a conversation while riding. So once again I’m back on the 2003 Ksyrium until I find the time to take this wheel to shop yet again.

So, overall I can’t say I’m thrilled with the durability of these wheels. Caveat: as I believe I mentioned above, I'm notoriously hard on my wheels, so take this with a grain of salt.

Appendices

And now, in case you’ve actually been enjoying all this text, here are some appendices offering even more bike wheel lore.  Read them aloud while hanging out with friends, or driving motorcar, or boarding on snow.

Appendix A: the modern wheelset dilemma

In the good old days, when bike parts were cheaper, heavier, tougher, and simpler, you didn’t select a wheelset per se.  You selected some hubs (or stuck with whatever your gruppo came with), picked out some rims, and chose between DT and Wheelsmith spokes.  Everything was interoperable so long as your hubs had the same number of holes as your rims (unless you were being really sly and lacing a 36-hole hub to an 18-hole rim on your team time trial bike).  Colorado Cyclist—then a small enough outfit they’d recognize my voice when I phoned them—had a service where you sent them your old thrashed wheels, and they’d cut the spokes out, repack the hubs, and lace new rims to them.

Choosing rims was easier, too.  Your only criteria were weight, brand, and looks.  If you didn’t weigh much and thought you could get away with it, you chose something light.  Perhaps you had a brand loyalty, as I did, maybe tied to country of origin.  (Most of my friends agreed that Japanese rims just weren’t any good, even if post-1984 Dura-Ace components were the shizzle.)  And one rim looked about as cool as another, frankly.  Ambrosios had white letters on them which was pretty fly, but not really all that noticeable. 

Well, things either changed quickly in the aughts, or they evolved while I wasn’t looking.  In 2003, when I built up a new bike, suddenly it seemed like a whole lot of people were riding factory-built wheelsets made by a single manufacturer.  Maybe this seems unremarkable to you, but it sure threw me.  “What?  Shimano is making rims now?  And spokes?”  It seemed inconceivable to me that guys were going around on wheels that didn’t have DT or Wheelsmith spokes—and that were possibly even built by a robot.  To me that seemed as weird as getting my hair cut by a robot.  (In the good old days, only cheap, basic bikes came with robot-built wheels.)

So yeah, I had some catching up to do.  Needless to say, I stumbled into a ferocious debate (still raging in some circles) between those who favor the modern, light, stiff, factory-built wheels, with their higher spoke tension and (generally) lower spoke count, and the old-school types who not only favor hand-built wheels but this or that personal wheel builder (who in high-end bicycle circles command even more respect than a Hollywood hairstylist).  Among other factors, hand-built wheels could be trued easily and would last a good long time.  Factory-built wheels are very hard to true, and they’re great until they’re suddenly not.  And there’s just something cool about a person in a bike shop starting with a pile of spokes, a hub, and a rim and applying magic to turn them into a wheel.  (My brother Geoff, a great wheel builder, could always reach into a box of spokes and—without looking—grab exactly the right number of spokes.)

Appendix B:  My “great leap forward”

As I mentioned, in 2003 I got one of those (then) new-fangled aluminum frames and decided to modernize my wheels while I was at it.  Dazed by all my new options, I followed the prevailing advice, from guys on my bike team, to get the (then) cutting-edge Shimano wheels.  (Not that you’d find anybody now who would admit to having given such advice; the first generation of Shimano wheelsets went the way of lactose intolerance and bell-bottoms.)  I was impressed by these wheels because the spoke nipples were moved to the hub flange, a bold re-imagining of wheel design that seemed to make sense.  After all, spoke nipples were historically heavy, and rotating weight (I’m told) makes a bigger difference.  (Yeah, hub flanges rotate too, but closer in.)

So I broke my own rule, about only riding European (preferably French) rims, and got the high-end Shimano wheels (which, oddly, weren’t called Dura-Ace).  They were really light, really aero, and at the time struck me as really cool-looking.  They had only 16 spokes, front and rear, which did seem totally absurd.  After all, I had a history of being hard on my equipment, and weighed like 185 pounds, and normally rode on tough, no-nonsense equipment.  I felt like a construction worker switching from steel-toed boots to ballet slippers.  But I was giddy at getting a new bike that was at least five pounds lighter than my old one, and everything seemed possible.

Well, I got about a year on those wheels.  Then, during a training ride, I broke a spoke on the rear wheel.  I’d just done a U-turn at the bottom of a climb and was starting to ride back up, which was fortunate because the wheel locked up instantly.  It was as abrupt as being clotheslined.  Then, no matter what tricks I did with the rear wheel in the dropouts, I couldn’t get the wheel to spin without it hitting the frame.  My bike wasn’t even walkable, much less rideable.  I had to put it over my shoulder and start walking, and almost a whole minute went by before a friendly motorist offered me a ride home.

What if the spoke had broken when I was going fast?  I could have totally stacked!  And the idea that breaking a spoke makes your bike unrideable?  Completely stupid.  Those wheels eerily foreshadowed what Lance Armstrong taught us years later:  if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. 

(Nobody stayed on those early Shimano wheels for long.  A friend, knowing I had them, showed up at my place for a dinner party bearing his pair, which he donated to me to use for spare parts.  He announced this notion with a single word—“rubbish!”—which caused another partygoer, of the hand-built school, to burst out laughing.)

Appendix C:  The problem with brand loyalty

Needless to say, after my catastrophic early foray into Japanese rims, after gnashing my terrible teeth and roaring my terrible roar and rending my garments, I decided to go back to French rims … but what would I do for hubs?  It’s not like I could use those wacky Shimano ones that were designed for backwards (in fact, ass-backwards) spokes.  Besides, I’d had a taste of the performance of these modern wheels and couldn’t bear to go back.  (Maybe this is how a guy feels who has switched from caffeine to crack—he knows it’s the wrong path but can’t bring himself to care.)  So when my brother suggested Mavic—one of my few long-held brand loyalties—he got my interest right away.  But a factory-built wheelset meant Mavic—i.e., French!—hubs!  That went against my long-held belief that the French can only competently do rims (and, in one special case, shifters).

On the other hand, what did the Ksyrium SLs have to offer?  Were they light?  Yup.  Known for strength?  Yeah, people said so—I even heard of guys doing cyclocross on them.  Cool-looking?  Yeah, totally!  (The graphics of the Shimano wheels suddenly seemed so … eighties.)  Did I bite the bullet and buy the Ksyriums, and have my wife pick them up from the shop for me so she could have a sticker-shock-induced heart attack for a change?  Yes.  Did these wheels end up being a pain in the ass because I had to continually field-strip the rear cassette and lube it with mineral oil because the French did a crummy job of engineering it?  Yep.  Was the hassle worth it because the wheels really did seem bulletproof?  In fact, yes.

I got six or seven years out of those wheels, after which they were still totally true (though the bearings were shot).  During that time I broke a spoke on each wheel, without any catastrophic consequences.  But I decided to retire them, in accordance with my new policy of replacing my equipment before it wore out and failed.  (I adopted this policy after a high-speed crash on Mount Diablo— click here for details—caused by my Dura-Ace crank snapping in half.)

I didn’t feel like doing any research, and my love affair with Mavic had been rekindled, so I went right out and bought another pair of Ksyrium SLs.  These ones weren’t quite as cool.  They had red anodized bits that have nothing to do with the aesthetics of almost any bike.  And weirdly, as I discovered too late, they weren’t even French.  They were made in Romania.  Was this necessarily a bad thing?  Well, low-end Mavic wheels had been built in Romania for awhile, which didn’t bode well.  I’ve since read an article in which a Mavic guy is quoted as saying, “The Romanian factory is identical to the French factory; the French factory just has prettier people.”  

But wait, don’t people matter?  I would have to think that the French, who are notoriously unconcerned with meeting consumer demand, would be great at quality control.  They probably flunk every third pair of wheels on principle.  (“Cette roué?  C’est impossible!”)  What do we know about the Romanians?  Very little, in my case.

As it turned out, the Romanian wheels sucked.  I broke spoke after spoke.  The guy at my local shop said he’d seen a lot of problems with the late-model Ksyrium SLs.  Finally, the day after what would prove to be my last spoke replacement, the rear hub cracked.  (I’ve broken at least seven frames, and three forks, but I’ve never broken a hub before.)

As Murphy’s Law would have it, the wheels were about two months past the warranty period.  Romanian Rhapsody?  I think not!

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….