Who needs cars?

In addition to being a great bike route for heading across town, the Greenway has been a pretty popular destination unto itself this summer. Several bike-related events have taken place outside our front door here at the Shockspital/Midtown Bike Center the past couple weeks. Here's a shot from the Tour de Cure, where we had a roadside service tent set up:

...you can't appreciate from that photo the number of riders that were out there, but trying to cross the Greenway on foot was like a real-life Frogger experience. Here's a shot from the New Belgium Brewing Urban Assault Ride that better conveys numbers:

...in the foreground you can see the obstacle course that participants had to navigate at this stop. And check out that line! Here's a shot from the other direction:

Seems to me some of those folks should have saved this stop for later. It was supposedly a race. But what do I know?

The point is, I don't think I've ever seen more bikes on the road (and path) than I have the last couple weeks. Good job, people!

Thank You

Thank You, such a simple thing to say yet it can leave a lasting impact on a person's outlook. I have been noticing something around the shop that has driven home just how important is to give and receive thank yous. The following photos are pictures of some of the thank yous that we have received over the years. They have obviously made an impact on us because we not only keep them (sometimes for years) but we often display them at our work areas.

These are thank you cards that Patrick keeps above his workbench at Check-In.

This is a letter that I kept in my tool box.

I noticed this letter in Stephen's office. It's from a customer that bought a new bike and found that the fit needed to be tweaked to more closely match her old bike.

This has been in Kevin's office since I started working here about two years ago.

This is my favorite. There is a wall in the back of the store with where a bunch of Scout Troops wrote their thank yous to Marcy. I assume that she was teaching bicycle repair classes so that they could get their merit badges. Some are dated as far back as 1991.

This is a post card that Tyson keeps above his bench. Apparently Chairman Bob approves.

Most letters come via e-mail these days. I keep a folder of them.

This post is not meant to brag about how great we are because the truth is, we do get some complaint letters too. While we don't like getting complaints we do appreciate when people make the effort to give us constructive criticism and a chance to redeem ourselves if needed.

So I'd like to say, Thank You, to all of our great customers. You are the reason that we love doing what we do.

In the Museums of the Future

Sometimes we see bike designs come and go which make us scratch our heads. [we vouchsafe that it is not cooties making us scratch our heads: we are rigorous and meticulous groomers] I remember when I saw my first SE Quadangle back in the early '80's: I was probably 8 years old, but I still remember thinking "Why the extra tubes? And where is my Stomper?"

Then the mountain bike revolution hit, and since mountain bikes were revolutionary, the sky was the limit for design possibilities. Frame designers were looking for problems to solve, and the market was more than willing to part with its brass for even the snake-oiliest promises of newer and better. Out of this whirlwind emerged the legendary Nishiki Alien. I was enamored upon first sight, and many of my math papers in Jr. High featured frames with elevated chain stays scrawled in the margins: my teachers probably thought it was crude occult symbolism. I was little concerned about the extra weight of several inches of surplus steel tubing required to climb up and over the drive train, and the excessive bottom bracket flex was not readily apparent from the pages of Mountain Bike Action. It just looked neat. Better than this poor thing, anyways.

The suspension boom brought a fresh crop of strangeness and wonderfulness in terms of bike design as heads collided with suspension designs to produce such masterpieces of poor function as the Cannondale SE1000, the Trek 9000, the Boulder Gazelle, or the Fisher RS1. Many manufacturers learned the hard way that a bad suspension will put you out of business faster than a clever analogy becomes a cliche.

Not everyone learned this lesson, however: an infamous example is Klein. Klein produced some of the worthiest aluminum frames that we know of: they were brutally stiff, they had great geometry, they dented like soda cans when you crashed, they came in "I'm compensating for something!!!!" colors, and they were all under three pounds. Add to this the fatigue life of their Gradient tubing: you could legitimately race a Klein for longer than it took for the drivetrain to go out of style. Aluminum bikes often crack n' fail within a few seasons of hard use due to the stresses of welding and the alignment process after heat treating, but for some reason, Kleins held up better than most. You just had to deal with the stupid rear-facing dropouts and infernal (oops, I meant internal) cable routing.

When it came to suspension bikes, Klein insisted on doing things the old fashioned way. This involved a design staff of various correspondence school graduates (with degrees in fields such as Vagrant Identification, Parapsychology, Reptile Health, and Taxi-cabmanship) and a test team of world class athletes (including two aggressive inline skaters, a cricket bowler, a swashbuckler, three fishmongers, and a fellow who could juggle bowling balls). This collaboration was responsible for the consumption of several bags of circus peanuts, the slow demise of four NES controllers, and the Klein Mantra.

While Klein loyalists, cycling journalists, and genial people everywhere tried desperately to enjoy the variable wheelbase, auto-firming suspension, and scary-things-which-happen-when-you-grab-the-brakes charm of the Mantra, the Klein office was facing some facts. About this time, a lot of things were happening: Gary Fisher had hit pay dirt with the Sugar, and Paola Pezzo had (sort of) won on it; URT bikes were being banned in many European countries; and most other Klein models had names which began with "A." Klein played it safe: they licensed the Fisher Sugar rear end; mated it to a light, stiff, candy-colored, ultra-thinwall front triangle; called it the Adept, and said "There." It was a rocket, and there was much rejoicing.

A few years later, another wave of designs was washing through the magazines, and Rock Shox founder Paul Turner emerged with the Maverick Monolink design. It was highly touted by touters of such things. Klein licensed it, called it the Palomino, and then went *POOF* into the night, to the chagrin of a lot of people. That's the shortened version.

We recently overhauled a Palomino.

As you can see, the rear shock is structural: the rear triangle bolts to it. When your shock croaks, your bike croaks. Rear end slop plagued the stock monolink, so most responsible owners upgraded to a Maverick-branded unit which slackened the geometry a tad and floated on precision bearings instead of bushings. It was a good trade.


The Palomino rode much like a GT I-drive, but was simpler, lighter, and had more travel. The rearward arc of the suspension was great for seated pedaling through rough stuff, but firmed slightly when standing. It rewarded bravery if you weighted the rear wheel a bit and plowed through rough sections of trail. In the end, however, the fussy, proprietary rear shock, fragile front triangle, and availability of more efficient designs probably spelled the end of Klein's valiant suspension efforts. Trek pulled the plug on the Palomino in 2005, then Klein in general when frame stock ran out a few years later.

To the museum with you!

SUPERLEGGERI

The other day Rick the Receiver approached me with a "check this out" look on his face and said "Check this out." He set down a box that looked just like this:


"Reverent hush" and "bike shop" go together about as well as "sauerkraut" and "Pop Tart," but here, recently excavated from the cavernous depths of Rick's private stash, was some classic old Italian bike-soul. "Superleggeri..." I murmured, passing each syllable as though it were a masterwork at the Louvre. Back then, marketing was a simple task: you wrote "SUPERLEGGERI" in red on the box and the customer knew if he was in or out. The other words could be a recipe, meaningless jargon, a cryptic love-poem, or off-color roguish jesting: pay no attention to them (especially because it actually IS off-color roguish jesting). "SUPERLEGGERI" is all you needed to know in order to make an informed decision.


But you can't just have a set of track pedals boasting "SUPERLEGGERI," you need the matching toeclips or your bike will attract scorpions and vermin to infest your living space, and your milk will always spoil three days before the stamped date. It's just not right. Rick concurred. Rick then showed me what was behind door #2:


If you've never seen one of these gems in person, they are impossibly light and dreamy (which is a good translation of "SUPERLEGGERI," incidentally). We set them on the scale and the scale laughed and said "OK, I'm ready." All Rick needs now is a set of Alfredo Binda toe straps and a pair of Brancale or Rivat shoes (maybe some Bata Bikers, but they don't accept the no-exit death-cleats which were popular on the track) and he's ready to rumble! Or perhaps these immaculate gems could stay in his museum and declare "SUPERLEGGERI" at passers-by from within their still-clean cardboard cases. Nothing wrong with that.

Big Bike. Short Arms.

I have to admit that a reverent hush settled over the parts room when I discovered this little blue box. Here it is, folks, the Nitto 66 Crystal Fellow Pillar. [lights dim, a solitary cello begins playing aria lines] Nitto is famous for making some of the most elegant, beautifully finished parts in the industry. Since they are Japanese, their naming conventions probably involved selecting words at random from a Japanese-English dictionary purchased at a steep discount, but the Nitto elves certainly knew a thing or two about making aluminum into beauty. This "Crystal Fellow Pillar" (which, in Japanese, is a rough equivalent of the title of a children's song about "a swarthy and resourceful husbandman who built split-level ranch out of icicle") is about 210 mm long, requires 65 mm of insertion, has close to two inches of set-FORWARD, and was cold-forged on a press which can put out roughly the pressure of a zillion elephants trying to stamp out a campfire, or the pressure you feel when trying to ride someone else's well-broken Brooks saddle (it's a close call on that one). Just look at how the light dances on that silky finish: it's enough to make a man take up sonnet-writing.

Various companies tried to copy the elegant one-bolt design of the CFP, but they often failed to use aluminum that was hard enough to withstand activities such as cycling while seated. When I was a lad, I had a Kalloy version which used the CFP design, but featured little notches in the mating surfaces of the clamp and the top of the shaft. Despite this clever attempt to provide positive engagement between the two surfaces, the fact that Kalloy had made the thing out of aluminum which had once been gummy worms rendered the thing stripped and useless within a month.

Did I mention that it's a 27.2 diameter? You've probably got a bike this post would fit if you're 5'5" and attempting to build a 58cm LeMond up as a fixed-gear, or you hanker to put aero bars on a frame that's way too tall for you. Perhaps you just wanted that "seat real low and way out in front of my pedals" look on your current steed. Here's a piece of classic bling to make your short-top-tube dreams come true.

You had better hurry, because we're down to two of them! So if you wanted to shorten up the reach and inseam of your tandem...

More Treasures

Ah, the cottered crank. Imagine with me: at one point, this was the pinnacle of technology. Crank arms falling off was kind of like getting a flat tire or sweating out your tweed, it just happened. We happen to have a modest selection of these ancient artifacts occupying a bin in our parts room. Nothing combines billows of nostalgia with a cold sweat of terror like an old Dunelt or Robin Hood 3-speed rolling in the door with a seized cotter pin in the crank arm. In fact, when bike mechanics tell horror stories around the campfire or prank-call other bike shops, the subject is often cottered cranks.

We are waiting to see if Trek will make a BB90-compatible spindle for a cottered crank setup, but suspect that Cannondale will beat them to it with their BB30 design.

Here are a couple of gems from the mine: a 3-pin Stronglight (good luck finding chainrings); a 5-pin Nervar with a 50mm BCD (can fit chainrings from 26t up to 52t if you can find them!); and a microscopic Sugino, probably for a unicycle.

Such Treasures as King Solomon's Mines Never Yielded

Recently I had the enviable opportunity to rummage through the Freewheel Bike Parts Museum on company time, and it was sort of like a vacation for bike geeks. For the non-bike geek, it was something like what Sisyphus went through, or trying to solve a Rubik's Cube in mittens, or painting stucco with a foam brush, or cutting wet wood with a hacksaw blade. The task at hand was to organize a parts room that had well over a decade worth of inventory nightmares heaped untidily into cardboard bins and labeled cryptically with random bits of gibberish. Fortunately, I speak gibberish fluently (it's my mother tongue, in fact), so I was the man for the job.

The tedious moments were broken up by some strange and wonderful discoveries. Freewheel Bike has quite a reputation for being one of those places where you can conjure up obsolete parts. This is delightful for customers, many of whom can be seen capering out the door, singing merrily about lifted clouds and sunshine because we found a replacement for their antiquated hub cone. It also makes for scintillating intra-shop trivia questions amongst the employees. [Hint: do not challenge Marcy to a game of "identify that part:" you will lose, and she will mock you] Some of the items probably will never find a home, but that's OK. They can live peacefully in their respective bins, trading embellished stories about the glory days when dinnertime conversation in the average American home included glowing references to cottered cranks and three-speed hubs.

Now comes the part of the blog post designed for those who prefer pictures to a thousand words.


OK, you've probably heard of Stronglight. They're still around, still making nice cranks and chainrings and other stuff. But there is something special about this particular Stronglight chainring:


If you are in the market for some serious gear inches, this immaculately-crafted beauty is your secret weapon (although the secret may be somewhat easy to spot). The ideal customer profile is someone who desires to hit 25 MPH on his Alex Moulton with a 20" rear wheel, happens to have Stronglight (or compatible) cranks from this era, and who doesn't mind that someone wisely wrote the bolt circle diameter and tooth count in red permanent marker on the back of it.


For reference, here it is the mighty 60 with a standard 52-tooth ring from a triple setup. I don't know about you, but my kneecaps are writing letters to their congressman trying to get that thing banned. But that's not all: "someone" (I'm refraining from mentioning Bill's real name so he doesn't feel sheepish) anticipated a 60-tooth chainring fad amongst Stronglight owners and bought not one, not two...


They'll be around if you need them. Incidentally, we're getting rid of our 2009 Bike Magazine calendar as well, and could probably get you a sizzling deal.

Cateye Headlight

This old Cateye headlight still works.