Rediscovering the "Fast Bike"

Have I mentioned that I have two kids now, and that having two kids means I don't get to ride as much?  Oh, yeah, I guess I did.

Being a dad is pretty great.  Not getting to ride as much sucks.  For a long while, the best I could muster was a quick zip to our local, urban singletrack on my Stragggler.  I could get there, do a lap and a half, and get home in a little over an hour, which meant I could do it all while the kid napped.  Now we have two kids, and I'm bored with the local, urban singletrack, and honestly, the novelty of drop bars on singletrack has worn off.  So on Fathers' Day, when my wife asked what I wanted to do, I told her the truth: I wanted to get out for a good long road ride.  Like, on pavement, on a bike with skinny tires.  Don't tell The Radavist.

Many years ago, before the birth of ABW, I worked at a wonderful, if sometimes dysfunctional, shop in Oregon.  Among their brands was Cannondale, and our Cannondale rep was the best rep I'd ever worked with.  He'd been a wrench for a long time prior to being a rep, had worked for Shimano before Cannondale, knew his shit, and treated our shop really, really well.  It's his fault I'm a Cannondale fan boy to this day.

So he came in to the shop one day and told us that the warehouse guys at Cannondale had found some component odds and ends and did what they needed to do to make complete bikes out of them.  So they slapped Campy Record 10, and Ksyrium SLs onto CAAD8 frames and sold them to us for something insane like 1800 bucks.  That was more money than I'd ever dreamed of spending on a bike, but the shop guys correctly told me I'd be a fucking idiot not to buy one, so I did.  I rode it stock for a couple months, then sold the Ksyriums and bought some Record/Ambrosio wheels and put those on.  Then I rode the shit out of it for 10 years and the only thing I did to it was lube the chain and turn the barrel adjusters on the brakes.  It still has the original chain and brake pads, and neither is showing many signs they need to be replaced.  It's the smoothest bike I've ever owned.  I love it, even though I have had whole calendar years in which I've only ridden it 50 miles.  I just kind of forgot about it for a while.

Also for Fathers' Day (last year, and the year before, and the year before), The Wife gave me a free pass to go on a mountain bike trip to the location of my choosing, with whomever I chose, for at least a few days.  I finally took her up on it and rounded up a good group of fellow dads and the trip is coming up in a week.  I don't want to be the slowest guy on the team, so in addition to wanting to get reacquainted with my road bike, I needed to get some miles in. 

So Fathers' Day dawned kind of overcast, hot, humid, with the forecast calling for it to get a lot hotter.  Uncharacteristically for me, I headed out without much of a route in mind.  Getting lost isn't such a big deal out here, where the roads are pretty much a N/S/E/W grid.  I set out on a familiar road headed west, and kept heading west beyond where I usually turn south.  In the distance, I could see a long, gradual, straight climb right up to the horizon, so I decided I'd do that, and head south as soon as possible after the climb. 

Well, the first road south after the climb was gravel.  No biggie, but I will say this about the Stragggler - 41s at 45psi work better on gravel than 25s at 90.  I rode gingerly and slowly to avoid pinch flats and eventually made it back to pavement, headed south. 

I took the next paved left I could, headed back east at this point, heading home.  Before long, I had to decide - keep heading east on gravel, or turn north and head back to the path I'd taken out of town.  I didn't want to ride the same roads, so I decided to keep heading east on the gravel.  That was a bit of a mistake, as it turned to fresh, loose gravel within a mile.  25s at 90psi on loose gravel suuuuuuuck.  But it did wonders to refresh my bike handling skills. 

Anyway, I made it home without any flats, totally gassed after only 31.8 miles.  I'm no longer fit enough for the fit of the Fast Bike.  It's got a 120mm stem on it and about 8cm of drop from saddle to bars.  I think if I swap to a 110 and gain a few millimeters in height, I'll be OK again.  But damn, it still feels fast, even if I don't. 

Forget About Frame Material

I can't believe that A) I haven't covered this already and B) it still needs to be said in this day and age, but when you're considering a bike, don't make the frame material your highest consideration.  Just don't worry about it.  Worry about a few other things that will have greater impact on how much you'll enjoy your bike ride, and the frame will take care of itself.

Back in the day (90s-ish is when it ramped up it seems), four frame materials were the most common in the industry, and each had a firmly defined list of pros and cons:

Steel Pros: Lively ride, durable, relatively inexpensive
Steel Cons: Heavy, flexy, rusts
Aluminum Pros: Light, stiff, doesn't rust, relatively inexpensive
Al Cons: Harsh ride, prone to cracking
Carbon Pros: Light, absorbs road vibration
Carbon Cons: Expensive, can feel "dead," prone to catastrophic failure
Titanium Pros: Light, lively (magic ride quality), durable, "forever frame" material
Ti Cons: Expensive, expensive, expensive

And back in the day, most of this was true.  Big brands like Trek were still putting out high-quality steel frames that rode really well, aluminum frames really were stiff, especially in light of the primitive and uncommon suspension of the time, carbon was the new (to the mainstream) wonder material.  Ti was always there, and it's always been seen as prohibitively expensive.

Fast forward a few decades, and advances in manufacturing and economies of scale, and with the exception of the cheapest frames, all of this is now utter and complete bullshit.  The fact is, in the hands of a good brand or builder, any frame material can be made to perform any way the designer wants (and yes, how a frame "feels" is performance).  A steel frame (Speedvagen) is the stiffest frame ever tested by VeloNews.  The CAAD bikes from Cannondale and the Smartweld Allezs from Specialized are marvels of metal manipulation and ride insanely well, with no "harshness" to speak of.  Carbon has gotten dramatically cheaper, and because it's been the trendy material for decades, there are a ton of garbage carbon frames out there that ride like shit.  And ti is still there, and it's still expensive.

As is my common refrain, so the fuck what?  Here's the problem with focusing on frame material: again, with the exception of really cheap (cheaply made and cheap to buy) frames, the frame material has less to do with the enjoyment of the ride than all these other factors (listed roughly in order of importance/impact):

• Your shorts and the quality of the chamois therein
• The fit of your bike
• Your gloves and bar tape
• The size of your tires and tire pressure thereof
• The quality of the drivetrain of the bike
• The quality of the wheels on your bike

As I explained elsewhere, a bike is a study in economics, and buying a bike with a more expensive carbon frame means you have less money for the above variables.  That's not to say there aren't wonderful, inexpensive carbon bikes out there these days.  There are, and more every season.  It's just that when you walk into a shop, or hop on the interwebs, and say, "I want a carbon bike," it frames the issue in a way that makes it harder and more expensive to achieve the ultimate goal of getting a bike that you'll enjoy riding.  

So bottom line, test ride a shit ton of bikes, and take them out for a real ride, where you go over a variety of surfaces, have to fight the wind and a couple hills, and need to shift a bunch.  Then buy the nicest one you can afford.  Then ride the shit out of it.

Bike Shops Can Still Piss Me Off

My daughter goes to physical therapy every other week to help with her walking.  Grand scale, it's not a big deal.  I only bring it up to explain how I came to be fixing this beast:

It's a Kettler trike with hand cycle.  When we started PT months ago, it was already "broken." The hand cycle would turn, but for unknown reasons, wasn't turning the wheel.  I didn't find out about the issue until a few weeks ago, when my daughter climbed on and tried to escape (be still my heart).  She could turn the hand crank, but nothing was happening.  I asked the physical therapist what was going on.  She told me it was broken and that she'd taken it to every shop in town (we have five), but every one told her they couldn't fix it.  One gave a lame excuse that "they couldn't get parts for it."  That shop had not actually done any disassembly or diagnosing.  I haven't spoken to any of the shops, but having worked in "normal" shops for a loooong time, I'm pretty sure I know what happened.  They saw a non-standard machine, knew it could be an ugly can of worms, decided they were unlikely to make any money on it and/or just didn't want to deal with the hassle, and bailed.  "Can't fix it, can't get parts for it, sorry for your bad luck."

I get it.  I understand the harsh economics of brick and mortar retail in general, and bike shops in particular.  If you can't make money, you can't stay in business, and many are not doing either.

HOWEVER.

So I told the PT that I'd been a mechanic for a long time and I'd be happy to take a look at it.  As I've often mentioned, I'm losing the grease under my fingernails and that makes me sad.  It seemed like a good project to exercise my mechanical brain a little, so I brought it home, and started digging in.

Giving the shops the benefit of the doubt, the first real obstacle I encountered was a non-threaded crank arm.  You see that, you wonder how it's gonna come off.  Prior to Campy Powertorque, it would've been even more confusing, because virtually all crankarms were threaded.  However, any mechanic worth his salt, especially one who's dealt with Campy, should know that pullers exist for all kinds of things without threads.  Luckily, my dad was a Snap-on dealer forever, and I knew he'd have something in the garage.  He did:

After getting the crank off, removing the chain guard was easy, and then it was even easier to see what the issue was.  The chain was loose, and because it hangs vertically, it wasn't engaging the teeth on the bottom sprocket.  The only tensioner is the upper jockey wheel, and it's only got about 1/2" of diagonal movement, which really doesn't amount to a lot of tension adjustment.

I guessed, probably correctly, that removing a whole link would be too much - even with the tensioning pulley backed off as much as possible, the chain would be too tight.  What to do, what to do...?

Luckily, I've been a misguided singlespeeder for a while now, and in the interest of getting my Leftiachi all tukt and shit, I usually have a half link lurking in a bin somewhere.  Bingo.  Full link out, half link in, master link back in, and the chain is tensioned perfectly:

So why does this make me angry at bike shops?  Let me enumerate the ways:

1. All told, the fix took me probably 20 minutes.  It was really, really easy
2. It seems the shops didn't even bother to try to figure it out.  If they had, they should've realized what an easy fix this would be.
3. And that means they missed an opportunity.  At my old shop, the rate was $60/hour, and that was 10 years ago.  A shop that could've fixed this in the same amount of time as a washed-up old mechanic could've easily made money on this.  The PT office would've been paying, and while I'm not suggesting any shop pad their hours, you could've charged them 60 bucks and they wouldn't have batted an eye.
4. They also missed the chance to become the shop for the PT's office.  That place has a whole room full of bikes.  They're all "weird," but they're all simple.  You get a PT's office bringing you bikes, and you've got a cash cow, not to mention the chance to work on something out of the ordinary every once in a while.  Maybe you don't want to take this on in June, when every fred wants his bike yesterday, but what else are you doing this time of year?  Let your mechanics dig into shit like this.  You're not gonna lose any more money that you would be otherwise and they get to stretch their brains.