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!

The Return of Full Slab

Introduction

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

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

Q-factor is:

a) A subjective judgment of how cute a bike is

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

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

An Italian bottom-bracket shell is :

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

b) Larger in diameter than an English one

c) Enough to get this post an R rating

Sturmey-Archer is:

a) A grain and oilseed conglomerate

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

c) A dashing rogue from a romance novel

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

A proper fleet

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

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

Death comes to the fast commuter

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

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

The Arseless

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

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

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

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

Finding a frame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The catch

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

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

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

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

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

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

The assembly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traveling exhibit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Big Red - Letter to a Young Gearhead

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

My response

Jan,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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