The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

Heavy traffic on Route 28

 The joy of being in the motoring public continues. It struck me the other day that it only takes three cars to completely screw you on Route 28: one slow one in front of you and one coming the other way in each of the only two passing zones worth bothering with. There's a third passing zone, but that's just a pointless gesture most of the time.

I've documented before how drivers who amble along on the open road portion of the trip will speed up once the road narrows, with houses, driveways, people, and pets possibly popping in from the sides. Whipping around someone in the last passing zone before Wolfeboro won't usually get you enough of a gap to avoid being tailgated by the last idiot, who is now treating the road like a video game.

This morning was an exception. On impulse, I zipped past a floater in that last zone and dropped him like he was in reverse. I would have lost several minutes if I had stayed behind him.

There were more than three cars this morning. Oncoming traffic was fairly heavy for around here on a non-vacation winter weekday.

Every time I drive to work I think about how much smoother my trip would be on a bicycle. Not in winter, though. Ice and snow encroach, narrowing lanes. It takes half an hour to put on all of the clothing to make the ride, another 20 minutes to peel it off at work. Then a half hour to robe up for the return trip in the dark. And if anything happens to you, it only confirms the public impression that you had it coming.

There are workers who have been getting around on e-bikes all year round in this area. They mostly ride them like low-powered motorbikes. One of them hit a deer last winter. Others have come to various misfortunes. They choose it out of necessity, not principle.

The winter e-bikers mostly ride fat-tire versions. They pay a lot less overall than they would to have a car, but they have to pay something, whether it's their own time and a little bit of money to do their own work, a moderate sum to get a shop or other technician to do it, or the lump sum to replace a bike when they've finally thrashed it to death. They don't come into our shop much, but they might have other options in the subculture that's developing around their vehicles. They don't usually resort to us until the bike is completely fubar.

If I wanted to be enslaved completely to my fuel bill, I could drive to work all year. I would lose my mind. And the parking situation gets very competitive during the summer. It's bad enough when winter conditions are good, although who knows what will happen as the economy provides less and less disposable income down the pay scale? We might have fabulous conditions for winter playtime, and hardly anyone with the time and budget to play. We just passed Martin Luther King Day, the January three-day weekend, and took almost no calls to check on our ski conditions. Granted, conditions were pretty meager, but that's never stopped people from at least asking.

The second home crowd, many of whom have third and fourth homes as well, centers on the summer. We might see one or two of them between Labor Day and Memorial Day, but the lake in liquid form really drives the economy here. The peak is from the Fourth of July into about mid August. That has shrunk considerably since the 1990s.

The denser traffic and tight parking really make me glad to be on a bike during the busiest part of summer, but I'll already have been out of the car for at least a couple of months by then.

Saved from six

 Management rearranged the remaining bones of our skeleton crew to get me back to five days instead of six. So that's truly great. Now we're back to just dealing with the fickle weather, mushy economy, and receding consumer interest. Business as usual.

Yesterday I spent the morning poring over the Fuji B2B site, because the current US distributor is dumping product after Pacific Glory Worldwide terminated their contract to distribute the brand in the USA. Some categories are already wiped out: all e-bikes, for instance. Bikes sales took off very slowly last season, and Fuji models didn't generate a lot of excitement. Then again, nothing did. Aside from e-bikes, most inquiries were looking for gravel bikes.

Although most growth in the bike business is in e-bikes, specialist shop Seacoast E-Bikes is having a buy one, get one free sale. Times are tough all over.

This winter is marked by economic and political uncertainty in addition to storm timing and consumer interest. Individual retailers might not have that in the front of their minds. Retailers and consumers alike are tempted to brush it off as overly dramatic. But with tariff policy and oafish threats against longstanding allies throwing turbulence into global trade, and so much of our consumer hunger fed with foreign-made goods, we are seeing effects regardless of whether we are willing to acknowledge the underlying cause.

A bike shop has to project future demand in order to take advantage of the incentives suppliers offer, for discounts on product and shipping. The Fuji dump is offering free freight on the bikes if the bill is paid within 90 days. There's no way we will sell a significant proportion of the bikes we order within 90 days, but the discount off wholesale still offsets the freight charge we will face. What we don't know is whether anyone will be in the mood to buy anything by the time the weather warms up enough to get most people thinking about bikes at all.

It's always been a bit of a crapshoot. The stakes just keep getting higher and higher. If no one wants what you're selling, you can't even liquidate. It's all just junk.

Working sick

 When I tested positive for Covid last Saturday evening, management scheduled me for the next two days off to see if I could recover fully before they absolutely needed me the following Tuesday.

Mind you, I had already felt functional enough to return to work after the previous bonus days off when I was really feeling sick. The positive Covid test automatically made me feel sicker again, but I wasn't really. No fever. Some congestion. Very occasional cough. Not too different from how I feel in the winter anyway. Indeed, years of testing negative because I felt a slight scratchy throat or a somewhat persistent sniffle had given me excessive confidence in my lonely habits of social isolation to avoid infection of any kind.

My life is a one-man show. The cellist has her career, which takes her away for months at a time. I'm left to manage the estate. Nothing gets done unless I personally lay hands upon it and do it. In the winter, that means all snow removal and firewood splitting on top of the usual grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, cat care...

During prior, more conventional illnesses, I knew where I stood by how I felt. Colds were colds, flu was flu. Norovirus was the devil's work. All known quantities. This Covid shit is something else entirely. As complacent as the public has grown with it, it still presents surprises to each individual who gets it, especially for the first time. Which of the more optional symptoms will you get? The puking and diarrhea? The blood clots? The deep respiratory infection? The long drag of joint pain and brain fog?

My recovery slowed, but did not reverse. My sinuses produce a more alarming and disgusting product than the run of the mill snot of a normal winter. The cough last night, after I had to put in two or three hours with the snow thrower after I got home from work turned deep, vibrating my rib cage. My brother, who has been through it himself and cared for others around him warned me about pushing too hard. But if I don't push enough when the situation demands it, I won't be able to get out of the house.

At work, I wear a mask. No one says anything, but I catch varying reactions ranging from mild alarm to humorous contempt. Anyone who thinks I'm being silly is welcome to a snot rocket in their coffee cup. But even a sympathetic reaction marks me as weakened. Just as an animal, I hate to appear weakened. And, having this still-new-to-science disease, I am weakened, and no one can tell me how much. Maybe what I feel is pretty accurate. Maybe I'll drop through into something really debilitating. Roll the dice!

The sickness coincides with a period in which I will be working six days a week indefinitely, because our year-round part timer quit, and our seasonal part timer only wants to work three days. It's impossible to find anyone to work here, not because of inherent character flaws in the working population, but because the job is chronically low-paying and weird. At each point that we've had to hire someone, from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, we had some degree of "cool factor" to attract someone young and intelligent. We have no "cool factor" now. I have no idea what would make anyone want to work here. Apparently, no one else does, either.

The shop itself is an evolved product of its specific environment, as independent shops so often are. "The Industry" tries to analyze shops like ours from outside, so that they can set expectations and pressure us to move product. They don't want to listen and cater to individuality. They want to predict production quotas and dump merchandise. Meanwhile, in through the other door walk the customers, with whatever they think bikes are, or looking for whatever they think bikes should be.

It's winter now, so most of the business is ski related. That's another whole realm in which we chose our specialty -- cross-country -- and try to please as many customers as possible. Just like the bike industry, the categories of cross-country skiing have gotten more separated, more complicated, and more expensive. A shop has to guess how many of what kind of skier of what height, weight, and experience level will come in, and how much money will they be willing to spend. We've gone from having a little bit of everything to having not quite enough of hardly anything. Except for having way too much of some things no one seems to want.

Day will follow day in an endless grind in which the day of the week itself will become almost meaningless. It only matters to me because of how it affects customer behavior. Weekends tend to be busier and more festive. Other than that it's just a bleak plod toward the grave. I can still make myself useful to a few people. You're only worth what you contribute to society.

As the only person who cleans up in the workshop or maintains any of the equipment, being here nearly every day helps me stay on top of that, and the trash. I've already cleaned up a lot of the neglect that accumulated while I was away for almost a month caring for the cellist. Part timers don't have to care about the long term effects of their lax habits. They know that we're grateful at this point just to have a relatively sentient being who can cover things in a rudimentary fashion while the full-time people try to catch up briefly on sleep and laundry. Frankly, I'm just as glad not to have to clean up after some of the well-meaning slobs who have deigned to "help" us over the years. But it's going to grind me down.

Life is just a journey to death anyway. No one knows how long it will be and how comfortable or uncomfortable. Dreams are just dead weight. All anyone really needs is a job to go to and a place to rest up between shifts. The sooner you cauterize away any notions of fun, frolic and creativity, the better you will be prepared for reality.

Parts replacement versus "mechanicking" again

 A rider brought in his fat bike because he had accidentally burped out one of the caliper pistons in the SRAM G2 Ultimate front brake. So it's a four-piston caliper with three stuck, one on the floor, and no juice left in it.

I figured I had one shot to do it economically with what he had: reinsert the rogue piston, juice the system with fluid I didn't mind losing, and use the usual pressure tactics to dislodge the other pistons. This meant trying to do at least a semi-effective fill and bleed to get any kind of pressure from the lever.

The procedure failed because the piston seals for the runaway were too damaged to hold the fluid. It gooshed out around the piston too quickly to impart any force on the remaining pistons. There is no back door way to get those bastards out of there. I can reassemble and keep trying, or troll through YouTube videos, but the shop's hour costs about $80.

This is yet another example of how the industry and its technolemming devotees have set themselves up for ever more expensive repairs for the sake of taking a bike ride.

One more time with the old chorus: Mountain biking started out as relatively cheap fun on beater bikes. Certain visionary riders saw that it could be so much more as long as money was no object. Money, and the precious life hours of mechanics who know better, but are stuck in this futuristic nightmare.

It fits right in with every other dystopian horror we're living through.

I've got one more thing I can try that might save this particular bacon before I report to him that he can tinker with it at his leisure or get a new caliper and start fresh. We'll see how it goes.

EDIT TWO HOURS LATER: The one more thing worked. It worked smoothly enough that it wasn't even too pricey, relatively speaking.

Welp, it's Covid

 I felt good enough to go back to work yesterday. I masked just out of courtesy, even if I had just a cold or flu. It acted like a cold or flu, albeit a bad cold or a middling flu. Today I dropped the mask, feeling not quite a hundred percent, but only minorly inconvenienced. Like, I wake up feeling this shitty on most winter mornings.

With the cross-country skiing destroyed by a heavy rain that turned into an ice storm and then froze hard, we haven't been renting skis, so the bike repairs that popped up were welcome.

The first call was a road rider who had noticed as she rode her trainer that the chainrings seemed really wobbly. She brought the bike in. The BB bearings on the drive side were pulverized.

As part of the initial inspection, I sprayed the bottom bracket area with Finish Line Speed Degreaser. I smelled nothing. Ooohhhh, that's not good. I'd noticed a typical diminished sense of smell with this sickness, as one gets with any sinus congestion. But this was absolute erasure of a smell that usually permeates the shop when you use the product.

I bought new Covid tests on the way home from work, since the ones I had on hand were at least three years old. I've led a bit of a charmed life so far, avoiding people like the plague since 2020. I don't mask much. I just choose my times and places to avoid crowd density, and I'd been really lucky with our own clientele. I've hardly had a sniffle of any kind since the end of 2019. Until now.

Not any more. The colors popped up vibrantly. No squinting at faint lines, wondering if I could pretend not to see it. I wouldn't even have thought to check if I hadn't noticed anosmia.

I continue to feel better and better. Now's the time use my super power while I scoop the cat boxes and take out the disgusting kitchen trash. 

Bikes were made for the road and the road was made for bikes

 On a trip to the gas station today, the card reader on the pump malfunctioned, so I had to pay inside. As I returned to my vehicle, a pickup truck with a plow blade came barreling in from my left as if I did not exist. The station is having a price war with one down the road, so it's bustling with eager customers.

I'm sick today. I wouldn't have gone out at all, but this was the least frigid and nasty day for several days out in the forecast. I half turned my head toward the truck with a well-practiced "where the fck do you think you're going?" look. He kept pushing me, but at least slowed enough for me to get across to the gas island.

I thought about all of the decades I've spent facing down vehicles that could effortlessly kill me. I thought about how mountain biking and other segregated forms of cycling avoid the confrontation and life risk of traffic, except as you are driving to your "safe" place to ride.

Good luck getting motorists to recognize the role that bicycles played in the early engineering of both automobiles and airplanes, as well as the first public pressure to improve pavement, making today's highway vehicles possible at all, especially at highway speeds. The airplane thing is less of a stretch because of the Wright Brothers, but then those guys escaped from traffic by heading to the sky.

When I first mastered a two-wheeler at the dawn of the 1960s, that was the key to freedom for a kid in those days. All the way to the 1970s, motorists seemed more willing to go along, get along, but as both cyclist and motorist numbers rose, conflicts rose with them. By the mid 1970s, road hassles were common. In some places they were endemic. It's only gotten worse since then. This follows the paradox that increased bike usage almost always coincides with surges in population in an area, guaranteeing more hostility. There are more biking organizations today than in the 1970s and '80s, and overall more riders, though I don't know the breakdown regarding the percentage of road users. And yet we still have to deal with the careless and the malicious.

It extends to pedestrians as well. On social media I see posts from pedestrian advocacy groups reporting their own encounters, and sometimes deadly incidents with drivers.

Motorists are caught in the middle between themselves and the vulnerable road users. Who here is ready to admit that they have absolutely seethed when stuck behind someone who seems to be driving much slower than conditions warrant? I have as bad a tendency as anyone to rate my speed on the basis of the limits of stability and traction. More than once I have come out of an entrance ramp a little sideways, though definitely not in the last 30 years or more. When the road is open I drive fast, so I can drive slowly when I get to the congested parts. So I don't preach from a stance of superiority. Motorists, I am a sinner like yourselves. The difference is when I'm around vulnerable road users.

From the moment I started driving I sensed peer pressure to keep up the pace. Back before internet navigation services, if you had to find your way around an unfamiliar area, good luck with the locals. They all knew where they were going. Even in your own area, you would attract unwanted criticism. This was when road rage shootings happened a lot less often. There again: more than a hundred million fewer people in the country when I started driving. For social animals we really seem to piss each other off a lot.

As someone who was bullied for a few bad years in school, I developed a defensive offensiveness because I couldn't develop the kind of sense of humor that launches entertainment careers. I grew tall and broad shouldered enough to make most of the tough kids decide not to bother in high school. I wasn't tall by any means. Just tall enough. The idea of defended personal space translated readily to road riding in the 1970s and beyond. It's a shame that it has to be that way, and it's hardly a foolproof charm. It's just part of claiming the bicycle's ancestral territory.