From the Archives - The CarbonTech Debate

Introduction

I just read a profile in The New Yorker about Grant Petersen, the founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, a company which makes retro steel bike frames with touring-type geometry, which are built up (generally) with upright handlebars and puffy tires. They’re the kind of bike that you’d put a big weird Brooks saddle on, from which you’d hang a hand-tooled leather bag containing perhaps an old fashioned tobacco pipe, a silk handkerchief, a pince-nez, some hand-tied fishing flies, a leather-bound book, and maybe even a beautifully crafted letter opener. You’d dress up in flannel and loafers and ride this bike to the brewpub or coffee shop where crumbs would get stuck in your beard. Myself, being someone who (somewhat) recently advocated in these pages for modern aerodynamic wheels—the better to cheat nature and ageing with—I can’t really relate to the vision of low-speed, low-intensity, woolly hipsters on kinda heavy, needlessly lugged bicycles that cost $2-5K but aren’t much faster than my $265 1981 Miyata 310 … just a lot more elegant.

All that being said, I do respect Petersen’s ethos, and bristle a bit at wealthy wannbes on excessively high-performance racing bikes wearing skintight $200 Rapha jerseys. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that these guys are supporting the bike industry, and it’s their money to spend on whatever they want (and better this than a jet ski or a $1K bottle of wine), but the sport starts to look a bit silly when it tips too far into this high-end poseur realm, and the Lycra is stretched over a pot belly. Wool both hides that belly better and excuses it, because nobody is pretending to be a pro racer.

I’ll also admit that I sometimes get a bit nostalgic for an era when cycling was more affordable, and more Euro, and cyclists were more like outlaws, or at least outcasts. Many years ago I even sent an essay of my own to the Rivendell Reader, which they were nice enough to print (and which you can read here). This push-pull between tradition and tech has been with me for decades and today I offer you the below dialogue among a couple of college racing pals and myself, which had originally circulated among our bike club. I won’t share the entire thread, but here is the gist: one friend, T—, had asked about stripping the paint off of his beloved carbon fiber Miyata CarbonTech 7000 so he could repaint it. Another friend, R—, pooh-poohed the idea, saying that sentimental value notwithstanding, the expense of restoring the Miyata (hundreds of dollars) would be silly, and it would be better to buy a new, superior frame. This touched a nerve with both T— and me.

Here’s a picture of the bike in question, from the catalog, with the laughable thou-doth-protest-too-much opening line, “Put any misgivings about the reliability of carbon fiber out of your mind.”

The CarbonTech Debate – October, 2007

On October 23, 2007, at 6:33 PM, T— wrote:

Yeah, but your so-called “new far-superior modern” frames are fugly and not worth the price. Watching the peloton these days is like watching the detritus from a McDonald’s garbage can blowing down the street in a wind of eau de cologne.

And repainting the Miyata certainly isn’t silly for a few hundred, or even twice that, frankly. I know this bike rides well, damn well, because I raced it for two years, to quite a few significant victories (a few of which I believe you were taking up space as pack filler [sorry guys, this what R— likes to bring out in me, thus his use of the words “silly” and “modern,” and I am sure he is giggling near-uncontrollably (there are innocents reading this one R—, so behave ourself)]).

Are you telling me I can find a decent frame for $3-500 that will ride as well? In an industry that is increasingly pre-fabbed and preoccupied with production costs and experimental methods, where riders are more likely to be listening to 50 Cent than anything else, where frames are offered in S, M and L, and with bad angles, I doubt there is much out there that would fit the bill without breaking my little bank. In fact, triple that amount and I might only be getting close to something in steel, and double it again to get something close in carbon.

Also, R—, what “modern” bikes today capture the imagination like the ones mentioned in the recent exchanges? Sorry, rhetorical question, but you knew that.

T—

On Oct 23, 2007, at 11:58 PM, Dana Albert wrote:

Well, I don’t know about the rest of y’all (though I can guess), but I for one am giggling like crazy. Sizzling stuff. If I had a “pleasure vein” in my forehead like Dr. Shimano (aka G—, cc’d herein) it would be ready to burst. Naturally I couldn’t stay away from such a delightfully bombastic fray.

Can you really strip a cawbun fibuh frame? I thought it would damage its fontanel or something.

Given the most impressive of T—’s victories on that Miyata (national collegiate road race in ‘90, for those on this distro who weren’t there), I would personally have the frame bronzed if it (and that achievement) were mine, except that the bronzing process is almost sure to damage cawbun fibuh. Sentimental value is too rare these days, especially with regard to bikes. And as I’m about to get to, only the irrational, emotional part of our minds could conscionably champion the modern bikes.

To love a modern bike is to abandon your senses as would a fool-for-love. Why? Because they’re just whores, that’s why. First of all, you can’t count on them. They’re not designed to last, because the pros they’re designed for all have multiple bikes they jettison at the end of the season, if not mid-season. These bikes are not designed to withstand crashes, because that’s what the spare bike on the team car is for. Remember stage 17 of last year’s Tour [de France], when ‘Roid Landis soloed, and flatted at one point? He dismounted the bike and just dropped it on the ground like a piece of trash. I didn’t necessarily expect him to set it down carefully or hand it to his mechanic, but he could have at least winced or something.

And yet ... I did love my Orbeas. Both of them [though actually I ended up having—and breaking—four before I gave up]. To the very end, each time, I was just smitten. I’d be working in the home office down here and glance over at Fava [my late Orbea] leaning there against the wall, and I would sigh. Why? Sheer good looks? Well, it did look cool. And had flair. But no, it was more because I’d immediately remember what it’s like to ride that bike. Man. T—, you really would have to ride a modern bike to appreciate what R— is talking about. They’re amazing. That first ride on Spentje [my nickname for my first Orbea]... I’ll never forget it. I swept up Spruce two minutes faster than I ever had before. Two minutes! All I could think was oh my GOD, I can’t believe this! It was like having a 40 mph tailwind or something. And then on the basically flat section of Wildcat before South Park? Man, the bike just accelerated like nobody’s bidness, and those modern wheels, you feel like you’re just slicing through the air like, well, like a Ginsu steak knife or something. (T—, I know you’ve had some pretty trick time trial wheels, so maybe that part wouldn’t be quite as noticeable to you.) And on the downhill? More plush than any steel bike I ever had. As far as the riding experience goes, they’re simply better in every single category—except that you can’t get attached to them.

Because they break! What a drag that is! Going back to my old steel bike, Full Slab, after each Orbea broke and I had to wait for a warranty replacement ... those were dark, dark days. And Full Slab was full Dura-Ace, hollow crank, hollow BB, titanium here and there—not like some ancient thing (other than that godawful frame). Even with the modern wheels, I was miserable. Just miserable. It was like salsa made in New Jersey, or wearing a beige shirt to a bank robbery, or trying to get good tech support from some offshore guy making his developing country’s paltry minimum wage. You might as well just bag it. Now, I’m not saying your Miyata CarbonTech 7000 would be like that, but it would be on that side of the coin. (My backup bike, an aluminum/carbon Salsa, is very much of the modern era. It’s fast, really fast, kind of O-Thank-God-fast after Full Slab, that wretched thing of evil.)

But these modern bikes ... they break! It’s ridiculous. I didn’t even get 10,000 miles or two years out of either bike. They break for no other reason than they’re not made to last. Now R—, I know what you’re going to say—it’s just Orbeas that break. Bah. The only reason you don’t hear of other bikes breaking is because the modern riders treat them like the whores that they are, discarding them out of boredom before they ever have a chance to break. The modern cyclist has the fickleness that only wealth can bring, like an investment banker who trades in his wife every few years for a younger, hotter model. Nobody wants to keep a bike long enough to get attached to it (people don’t even name their bikes anymore!). Modern bike consumers are like junkies building up a tolerance—they can’t wait to have that exhilarating feeling again, the one I described a couple paragraphs ago, and they’ll buy and buy and buy to try to get more of it. They’ll never get it again, of course; you can only jump bike eras once every decade or so. They’ll shave off a few ounces each time, but they won’t drop five pounds while picking up extra stiffness and yet comfort. They’re just tinkering, at that point, and if they ever quit doing that and tried to love the same bike year after year, that bike would give out like a faulty boob job, quickfastinahurry, I don’t care what company made it (or, rather, had it made under the auspices of their brand).

Now, you make a pretty good point, T—, about bad angles in the modern frames. I assume you’re talking about the compact geometry, that makes an expensive road bike look like a BMX bike, with two feet of seatpost showing and a stem with all that rise (and/or gobs of headset spacers). But even beyond the aesthetics, I have a problem with the epidemic of cawbun fibuh frames out there (or “plastic bikes” as my pal P— calls them). What’s wrong with cawbun? As a material, nothing—I think we owe most of the comfort of a modern bike to cawbun. But you don’t get to pick your geometry anymore! And let’s face it, the stock geometry for the American market is about as reasonable as the stock ingredients in an American deli sandwich. All these short top tubes, steep seat angles, ultra-short chainstays, high bottom brackets—it’s garbage, pure garbage. Specialized made a big to-do this spring about how they spent all these millions (!) to get Tom Boonen a longer top tube, because the poor guy was having all these back problems. S, M, and L indeed. Straight-up pure garbage. And you get these new Time bikes (I think it is) where the seatpost comes built-in, and you gotta cut the top off to fit. Well, what if you guessed wrong? Or decided you hated your saddle (and who wouldn’t, these new things with the big valley down the middle, for paranoid stockbrokers whose prostates are shrunken by bad living, with so little leather you couldn’t make a child’s coin purse out of it) and bought a new (or better yet, old) one with taller or shorter rails? Screwed, simply screwed—go drop another three grand. For all that money, you get stock geometry ... somebody forgot about ergonomics somewhere along the way. It’s like buying a suit at the factory outlet store and they won’t tailor it for you. That’s my gripe with full cawbun. Certain modern frames, Cyfac and Orbea among them, offer custom geometry because they’re made out of metal tubes that can be cut to the perfect size by a human who knows what he’s doing, instead of you having to settle for a frame that seems to have been extruded somehow, like a giant robot taking a dump.

[This is the frame geometry I came up with for my Orbeas, which was absolutely perfect, but which is why the warranty replacements took so long. The name “Fava” refers to a joke I made to T— once about compact geometry … I said of it, “I think of it kind of how I think of lima beans. They have a right to exist, but I don’t know why anybody would want them.” After my first Orbea, the company adjusted my design to be semi-compact, as you see below. All the important characteristics were maintained with an only slightly sloping top tube. I told T—, “I wouldn’t call it a lima bean. A fava bean, maybe.” Click the image to study it at length.]

Oh, Lord, who needs caffeine? I’m ready to brawl! Against whom? Anybody! Everybody! Like D— W— rushing onto the soccer field because a fight had broken out ... did he know who started it? Did he care? No! He just started swinging! Full of the spirit, like when he won that sprint in training, sat up, and yelled “FUCK!” (By the way, T—, that’s what it’s like to ride a modern bike, if I haven’t made that clear enough.)

The question is, what is the bike for? To appreciate aesthetically, as a connoisseur? Or to go as fast as you can, to defy the ageing process and deny that your glorious youth is behind you? Both are worthwhile pursuits. Spiritually speaking, though, this dichotomy is worthless. Now, I’m not sure if rhetorical questions are ever supposed to be answered, but I’ll take a crack at your last one, T—, about which modern bikes capture the imagination like the glorious bikes of yore. My answer is, precious few. I hear people rave about Cervelos. Meh. And Felt ... that’s not even a real bike company, that’s somebody’s silly made-up brand. Scott? Please. A marketing company trading on their good reputation for skis. Skis! I’m offended. What else? R—, I know you love the way Treks ride and I’m quite sure they’re brilliant. But let’s face it, they’re the Dell Computer of the bike world. Next. Ridley? Ugly and terrible. And what’s with these pro teams riding Cannondales? Have they no shame? Nuff said on that sad topic. Man, I’m actually starting to get depressed. Even Orbeas, that weird Spanish brand we’re probably mispronouncing, are starting to get a bit trite. I can only hope the ugliness of their cawbun versions scares off the new enthusiasts by the time I get my new [aluminum] one, if I’m even that lucky.

Okay then. Needless to say I have more I could say, in response to the other excellent points made in this long and growing email chain, but it’s waaaaaay past my bedtime.

Dana

P.S. I’m not going to proof this thing and I’m sure it’s riddled with clumsy mistakes. I grant you permission to heckle me one time, in aggregate, for all the mistakes.

Epilogue

In case you’re wondering, my lengthy tirade about modern bikes ended up being kind of a last gasp. My best friend rides a Cervelo, with hydraulic brakes and electronic shifting no less, and it hasn’t even occurred to me to give him a hard time about it. I myself have—and love—a carbon fiber Scott mountain bike. I rented a Felt for a week of cycling in the French Alps and liked it just fine. The modern, carbon frame I have now is a Giant (the second-best-selling brand in America) and has lasted for over ten years and about 50,000 miles. On top of all this, T— himself, unable to elegantly repair a knackered rear dropout on the Miyata, eventually succumbed and has a carbon Trek that he bought from R—. Oh well … at least we put up a fight.

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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!