Sram/Rock Shox Suspension Clinic

If you follow this blog at all you'll notice that we do a lot of suspension training and suspension repair work. On Thursday June 24th we had yet another suspension training clinic. This time Dave Meadows (seen in the black XO shirt below) from Sram selected Freewheel Bike as part of their dealer tour. He came all the way from Colorado Springs to walk us through a Reba rebuild.


For many of us this was all review but we didn't mind getting together and having a good time.

But it wasn't all fun and games. Bob, our Assembly Supervisor, got some hands on experience. There's nothing like trying something for the first time as your peers stand around and watch, waiting for you to make a mistake to laugh at. Luckily for Bob he didn't give us that satisfaction.

Graham got to inspect a rebound damper up close.

We got to see some cool new technology, notice the i-pad.

And there were some fancy diagrams drawn on a pizza boxes.

The first person to send me an e-mail at peteh@freewheelbike.com with the name of the Rock Shox technology that Dave drew on the pizza box will win the Rock Shox shock pump in the picture below.
6/28/10 Edit: We have a winner. The answer is; "Motion Control damper". Thanks for playing.

Re-Loving Suspension

As a bike mechanic, I have tended to resist progress in my own bicycle library simply because I get my fill of working on bikes at work. This mindset has come as a result of a few less-than-stellar experiences with overly-complicated equipment.

In 1998 I bought a Diamondback V8. It was Richard Petty blue and red, with a Stratos shock on the back and a leaky first-generation SID on the front. It had first-generation SRAM ESP shifters, a super-short seatpost, and an awful WTB saddle, as well as a pair of Time ATAC pedals that I'm still using on one of my bikes. It came stock with XT cranks and tipped the scales at 24.8 pounds. By today's standards, it would still be a light, good-handling bike, and I put a few thousand miles on it over the course of the season.

By the end of the year, I had replaced the wheezing SID with a Manitou SX Ti, I had replaced three valves and ovalized the bushings on the Stratos shock, and I had cooked the bushings in the frame so that it went "URK-EEK" through its travel. The following season, for the above reasons, I rode a Bontrager Privateer. [fast forward sound]

Several years and a few steel hardtails later, I lost my inhibitions again and bought a 2003 Trek Fuel 98. Once again, I rode the thing into the ground, but this time it was my Alpha bike for three seasons. I wore out rocker links, beheaded pivot bolts, lost my lockout lever, toasted several sets of bushings, and popped half a score of early tubeless tires. This bike still sees some limited duty and still goes fast in the woods, but is now affectionately called "Mr. Sloppy" due to its handling characteristics.

I bought a Gunnar Ruffian single speed in 2006 and put the Trek away. Then I got a rigid fork. [fast forward sound]

Before Afton 2009 I did two laps of the race course with my beloved rigid fork and my wrists and shoulders said "that's it." They wrote me a long, sternly-worded manifesto in which they basically said that they felt they could do better elsewhere. In response, I dug out a 2003 Manitou Skareb that was serving a life sentence as spider habitat under my workbench. During the race, the fork, which had never seen any maintenance in its career, sprayed a bunch of oil out of the top seals onto nearby surfaces, such as me. Additionally, it was making weird noises, the lockout didn't work, and it felt kind of sticky. Off it came, and back under the bench it went, to the sustained applause of the spiders.

As I was gearing up to do Afton again this year, I remembered that suspension was a vital part of my campaign last year. Three laps with suspension was rough: there was no way I was going to do four laps without! The fork had not fixed itself, however, and the spiders have not been trained to work on Manitou stuff, so I had to do it. Grrrrrr..... I HATE WORKING ON MY OWN STUFF!!!!!

But, it turns out that fork service, while tedious (even Manitou admits this!), is good for your fork. It reminded me of the descriptions of veterinary surgery in James Herriott books. I managed to get most of it back together without dropping many of the pieces and without scorching anything with contaminating fluids. The old oil came out an opaque brown, the new went in a translucent purple. New bottom-out bushings replaced crumbly old ones. The old top seals that spewed oil on me were replaced with non-oil spewers. I also managed to dig most of the dirt (likely from Afton) out of the various nooks and crannies in the lower casting. Yup, it's lighter now.

When I was done, I gassed it up to 140 pounds and honched on it a few times on the floor. It made no slurping sounds, leaked no oil, and locked out dutifully. And it was smooth! On the bike, it was smoother! Yikes, it moves! This is how it's supposed to feel, apparently. I had never known it to feel as good as it did with fresh fluids and bits: I kept hitting things hard with my back wheel because I never felt them with the front wheel!

The service manual wants me to check the oil in the air piston every 6-8 weeks because the oil can "dissipate over time and then you may experience some air leakage and increased stiction in the fork movement." The manual also wants me to eat lots of vegetables and get plenty of sleep. Most manufacturers tell you to do some sort of regular maintenance every so often, usually based on ride time. For example, Halson required you to draft a haiku and read it to your fork once a fortnight. [Needless to say, this is the reason that Halson Inversion forks did not overwhelm the industry.]

Fork maintenance is a big deal! If you've been riding around on a sticky, leaky, slurpy, non-functioning fork, you've been missing out on performance. The fluids in there get contaminated and break down from heat. The soft bits deteriorate. The other bits crave attention and will become sullen if neglected.

Do yourself and your bike a favor and have this towering yeoman look at your fork.


His name is Tyson. He doesn't fit a 48cm road bike very well, but he has made suspension awesomeness his life's driving ambition.

Edit 6/23/10 2:40pm: After reading Chris' blog I decided to run a suspension service special. Our suspension service packages are $10 off now through June 30th or you can win a suspension fork tune-up (labor only, you have to pay for parts) by being the first person to email the correct answer to the following trivia question to peteh@freewheelbike.com.

What unique design feature allowed Halson to use cantilever brakes on an inverted fork?

6/24/10 1:26pm We have a winner! The answer is that they had to make slots in the upper(outer) tubes for the cantilever bosses to slide up and down. Thanks to everyone for playing.

Bike Thieves Never Quit

I recently got word that a fellow from another shop had his bike stolen. It is a 2010 Fisher Superfly 100, serial #WTU099T149. I don't know what kind of reward he's offering, but if you happen to see this bike, let us or the guys at Penn Cycle know. The bike was stolen up in Duluth.

Homework

I finally built up this wheel that I've been scheming for months. You ever get some crazy, change-the-world idea in your head and life is too busy to execute it? That's how this went. I'm not sure how strong it will be, or whether it will flex like Spinergy mags, but it was a fun project.

I had an old set of XTR FH-M950 hubs laying around after the Mavic 517's they were laced to gave way. (Two-cross with Revolution spokes and aluminum nipples. Raced them for 6 seasons before I wore through the sidewalls.) They were begging me for redeployment, so I said "OK, you win" and bought a pair of Alex Adventurer rims.

If you haven't familiarized yourself with Alex Adventurer rims yet, you probably should. They are the most cost-effective training rim out there. They build up almost perfect, have eyelets and machined sidewalls, and are a true double-wall. "RACER'S EDGE" glares at you prominently from the decals, but at 540 grams for a 26" rim, they're about a third of a pound on the chubby side for number plate duty. But for beater wheels, they're a great option!

My idea was this: crow's foot lacing only works with spoke counts in multiples of 6: 24 hole, 36 hole, or 48 hole drillings are the only conventional ones that work. Otherwise, there is a hybrid crow's foot that looks pretty cool and works on wheels with multiples of 8 (which is most of them, except 28 hole). I've got these sweet hubs just pining to be used again, but they're 32 hole. So I thought about it for a while, drew some pictures while daydreaming in service meetings (sorry, Pete), and figured that if I took the crow's foot pattern, but used two adjacent radial spokes, crossing spokes would be three cross length and tangent at the flange. It would probably be a nice, strong, stable wheel, and it would be something different.


At last I had time to execute it, so I cut some spokes on the handy Phil Wood Spoke Cobbler: 16 radial (253 mm) and 16 3X (265 mm). I made the 3X spokes black, thinking it would look all awesome and stuff, but it wasn't as striking in appearance as I'd hoped. It looks more like I patched a disaster back together with some franken-spokes. That's OK, we'll call it theft deterrent.



Lacing was a snap. I did all the radial first, alternating heads in and out, and then ran the crossing spokes inside the radials. This was a somewhat arbitrary decision, but it seemed like there was better bracing this way. Plus, if I bust a spoke, it won't require a major tear-down to get at any of them. Given the type of service this wheel will see, this is a good thing.

Test ride coming soon!

Bicycle Tune-Up Sale Starts Today

Our Basic Tune-Up and our Comprehensive Tune-Up are 20% off now through June 20th.

Hurry in while we still have short turnaround times.

Our Midtown location is running about a three day turnaround on tune ups and our West bank location is about a week out.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Use a Helicoil

Soft metals such as aluminum and magnesium are touchy about torque. If you get too frisky with a bolt in an aluminum part, the part will often say "Oh, I see, is that how it's going to be?" and barf up all its threads. Then you have yourself a fancy aluminum paperweight or wind chime. Sometimes it's no big deal: if I stripped out the bolt hole on the hardware of a Kalloy seat post, I would fire the whole thing into the recycling bin with a Spaniard's flair. Fox forks, on the other hand, are generally worth saving.

Whether it was zeal for the fatherland, anabolic steroids, or a poorly-timed sneeze at the end of the torque wrench's range that caused the customer to strip the threads out of the brake post, he was sad. We consoled him and gave him options: He could a) jam his foot into the crown of the fork when he wants to stop [not great]; b) bring a piece of broomstick to shove into the spokes when he wants to stop [not great either, and no modulation to speak of]; c) get a dragster parachute for his hydration pack [time-consuming]; d) drill a hole in his brake arch and mount a side-pull caliper BMX brake [he considered it, but all we had were gold ones from 1983]; or e) use a Heli-coil insert to have brand spanky-new threads in the existing place.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy, do I get excited to deploy new-fangled technologies! I guess new-fangled is a bit strong in the adjective department: they were developed in 1938. They're stainless steel, stronger than the original threads by a longshot, and used all over the aerospace industry! Why, Boeing endorses them for crying out loud!

Yes, Boeing. The people who make the airplanes in which you fly south to visit Grandma. Boeing employs klutzes and louts who can't operate torque wrenches properly:

Announcer: "Welcome to the secret test facilities for Boeing, where two top aerospace technicians are putting the finishing touches on a brand new prototype for a passenger aircraft, scheduled for its first flight tomorrow morning. Here, working on the hydraulic control mechanisms is Brad, age 42, a 1994 MIT grad with a degree in materials analysis and a minor in Baltic Satirical Literature, father of two and a half, scratch golfer at the local putt-putt emporium, and a real hound for quality used furniture. Assisting Brad is Floyd, age 46, who is several pounds too heavy for his jumpsuit, has a degree from the University of Texas in metallurgy with a hand-to-hand combat minor, owns four Boston Terriers each named Carlos to avoid confusion, and has written several noteworthy sonatas for the accordion. We join them now in progress as they install something expensive."

Aerospace Technician #1: "Blast it, Floyd, I can't find my crescent wrench: can I borrow yours?"

Aerospace Technician #2: "I thought you were using it to get pigeons outta the rafters this mornin.' You looked up there?" [gesticulates vaguely towards the roof of the hanger, some fifty feet above their heads]

Aerospace Technician #1: "Oh, yeah. I mean, naw, not yet." [gazes at the roof intently for nearly two minutes] "Huh. Ain't seein' it. OK if I borrow yours then?"

Aerospace Technician #2: "Well, the best one I got is this here one that says 'Brad' on it. Just a coincidence, mind you now, that it's called 'Brad.' All my tools got names, they're kinda like friends in a way." [tosses adjustable wrench toward Brad, who fumbles it, dropping it onto something expensive with a hollow 'clang' and a few muffled oaths as he fishes it out of the compartment]

Aerospace Technician #1: "Yeah, I here ya." [Looks closely at adjustable wrench] Say, this here's not a metric crescent wrench: you think it'll still work?"

Aerospace Technician #2: "Can't hurt to try. How come you don't use that fancy 'lectric torque wrench they give us?"

Aerospace Technician #1:"Aww, corn shucks. I took that thing home for the sport of my younguns, who are inclined toward things that beep and light up. You don't need a torque wrench when you been doing this as long as I..." *CRACK* [The color drains from Brad's face as he backs the fastener out of the hole, only to discover that the threads came with it. Beginning to perspire, he glances furtively about the facility to see if a supervisor was privy to the destruction.]

"Uh oh, Floyd, better grab a Heli-Coil."

[Lights dim, big-band music begins blaring from somewhere]

Man with Top Hat: [Steps out from behind something expensive, Crooning]

Broke something expensive, and you don't know what to do?
Too obvious for duct tape, or too big for Krazy Glue?
Stripped the threads from something that is worth more than your life?
Is your supervisor marching toward you with a butcher's knife?

Dancing Girls:

If your crazy supervisor's threat'ning you
Use a Heli-Coil and it's good as new
He will think the problem is in his head
And commit himself to psychotherapy!

Heli-Coil! Heli-Coil! When your backside is about to boil!
Heli-Coil!

Man with Top Hat: "Available at fine auto parts stores nation-wide!"

But anyways, the operation went like this:

Yup, no threads worth trusting.

Aaahhh! Hahaha!!! Haaa!!! Mmmm....

The tap is just a hair oversized to make room for the insert.
Once complete, the system is actually quite a bit stronger
than the original threads.
Here they are: cute little buggers, aren't they?

In you go! The black thingy makes them go in straight.
Apparently that's important or something.

That's all the pictures I was able to get. The brake went on perfectly, and we barely had to adjust the caliper. The customer was pleased as a squirrel whose mortgage payments are very low, and rides the bike today thanks to Heli-Coil!

The Freewheel Frolic

Which of these statements is true of the above picture?

a. I've never ridden this bicycle before.
b. I am only licensed as a Cat 2, but I am going to go and do an Expert race.
c. My cycling shoes still have mud from Jingle Cross on them.
d. I wear dark glasses in the woods on overcast days.
e. All of the above

Freewheel Bike was a proud sponsor of the Freewheel Frolic, which benefitted MORC. How did it benefit MORC, you ask? Good question! By providing them with extensive trail repairs to perform, whereby they might hone their considerable skills to razor keenness. If you weren't there, you may not have experienced the pocket-sized thunderstorm that perched immediately above Salem Hills and attempted to rain out the well-populated event. When I went to bed on Friday night, the forecast cheerfully reported "sunny and mid-80's." When I got up Saturday AM, I said "are you sure about that, mister forecast, the part about the "sunny and mid-80's?" The forecast replied "Oh yes, sunny and mid-80's indeed." Therefore, I left my raincoat at home and my warmup jacket at Midtown. A few hours later, when the sky was gray as dryer lint and fafafareezing cold, and a big green blob with red blobs swirling inside of it began to drift across Pete's phone, we began formulating a plot to put a 1/4" bearing inside the top tube of every meteorologist that comes in for service.

The citizen class made it through their race under skies of lead, but the reports of 45 MPH winds in Bloomington had everyone very uneasy. Tents were folded up, people skittered back to their vehicles, and even the intrepid Super Mario stopped grilling delicious veggie burgers for a little while.

And down came the rain, unlooked for, unwelcome, unpleasant, but I suppose necessary in a grander scheme than our meager perspective affords. Our meager perspective happened to look like this:


Difficult choices needed to be made. MORC builds their trails to last, but having hundreds of people ride them after a rain storm (even a brief one) could cause lots of damage in a hurry. Yet this particular race is always well attended, and this year was no exception. After a 90 minute delay while the promoters waited for the lightning to head up toward Lauderdale in search of golfers, it was "game on." The Sport class was treated to some good old fashioned "paste" mud, which cakes and goobers and generally attempts to inflict destruction on everything it touches. Several bikes ended up like this:


O the devastation of a poorly-timed shift in such conditions! Many drivetrains breathed their last on May 22, 2010.

The promoters decided to shorten the lap a touch to minimize damage to the grassy fields and knock down the lap count by one for Comp and Expert. "Fine by us," we said, grimly appraising the shattered remains of once-noble bicycles limping across the finish line under Sport class riders who needed hugs. Amazingly, however, conditions turned out to be fine for the Comp/Expert race. By the third lap of the Expert race, the course was downright enjoyable, as was the weather.

Here's a picture of stout yeoman and Freewheeler Rodney Johnson (whose brakes are currently on the fritz and waiting for parts from Shimano [who ship brake parts by taping them to the bellies of white swans and giving the swans a printout from Google Maps]) enjoying himself immensely.


Thanks to everyone who attended for making this a truly memorable event! Especially the ladies and gentlemen in the Sport class who had by far the most miserable conditions of anyone, you folks deserve a raise.


And special congratulations to Megan Lennon, who won a set of Crank Brothers Iodine wheels in the post-race swag drawing!

I Missed Us (even if no one else did)

OK, so we have officially climbed out from under the spring landslide (or, Spring Landslide if you prefer proper nouns) and unofficially have time to blog again.

Lots of neat things have happened since last we wrote: for example, I now have a sweet tire lever that shouldn't break anytime soon, unlike the blue ones which seem to go *bang* at awkward moments (such as when Maury the Trek rep is walking through the line of fire). It's red, and looks like candy, but isn't as far as I can tell.

Other neat things which have happened include:

• New magazines have appeared in the restroom! Now when we go "rest" we don't have to read about Lance's comeback unless we want to!
  
• The tub of Pro Soap has become nearly empty, which is OK, because we have four more of them!
  
• We replaced our automatic parts washer with one where you have to scrub the parts and actually earn your wages! Now the factory finish doesn't come off of some parts unless you really scrub at them!
  
• We received pairs of yellow dishpan gloves and all fight over the "large" ones, even though they're still too small for most of us! The phrase "Large Woman Hands" became an instant classic.
  
• We have seen some really cool bikes come and go (but I usually [though not always] forgot to get a picture)
  
• One Saturday morning, we actually listened to a Bach/Vivaldi station on Pandora for four hours, and enjoyed it!
  
• We got a new dustpan!

Of the cool bikes that have come in, here are a few:
Here's a Scott Rubicon. As you can see, it firms up when you stand up, and your legs grow shorter when you go over bumps. And yes, as you have guessed, it weighs more than most third graders. And, indeed, if you forget to install one of the linkage parts when you overhaul it, you will have no place to sit or run your cables. Can you pick out which linkage part that would be?

Here's a venerable, steel Cinelli mountain bike, complete with the circuit trace paint job. I 'bout swooned when I saw this one come in. It had seen better days to be sure, but it's still a Cinelli. I took my hat off and drafted a quick sonnet (it wasn't all that good).

Anyways, we're back on line and will have more goodies for you to snicker at in the near future!

The Doppelgänger!!!

No, we don't believe that it's a bad omen to see what looks like the same bike twice in a shift. It's a bit creepy though. Can't help but get a chill down the spine when I see this at the overhaul bench...


...and this up at check-in...


...at the same time. Double-take. Check. Yup. I haven't seen a Trek 1000 in years, and suddenly, a pair swoops in to trouble my soul. I'm not normally given to superstition (I may repeat that several times to reassure myself), but it had been a hoppin' busy day and I was getting fatigued. I remember walking up toward check-in, seeing a dryer-lint gray Trek 1000 hanging in the stand, and saying "it's back already?" Just as I was turning around to drat myself for getting out of bed, I saw the other one still in the stand!!! Now, I'm not normally given to superstition (is it too soon to repeat that?), but it was clearly time for some caffeine and Clif Bar action. "First," I said to myself, probably out loud, "I will snap some pictures. If one of the bikes is not real, it will not show up on the camera." I, ever the closet empiricist, nodded quietly to myself, took some pictures, and strode purposefully to the showroom to buy some vittles.

After my caffeine and Clif Bar, I strode back to the shop and THEY WERE STILL THERE!!! Now, if one of the Trek 1000's was a phantasm, it wouldn't have been so bad. Figments of the imagination are relatively safe: cage matches between people and figments of their imagination usually go in favor of the people. A cage match with a Trek 1000, especially the one with the yaller rear tire, could be a handful however.

Re-Learning

I spotted this rare gem at the Como Zoo. It's an old Pro-Flex Attack LE, probably 1996 vintage. A quick inventory informed me that everything on this steed is original. It has been retrofitted for trailer duty and has probably not seen off-road action since its first couple of days in operation. "How do you know that, mister smarty pants?" Those tabs that form the pivot behind the BB shell are teensy little things, goobered up with 6061 TIG welds, and probably re-aligned by hand after heat treating warped them out of functional alignment. Can you say "stressed aluminum?" Hopefully the owner won't be doing anything more drastic than bouncing down a few curbs between now and retirement. Most riders who ended up with one of these traded up to a real suspension bike right away, as the Pro-Flex only yielded about 1" of travel under optimal conditions. Optimal conditions for full travel included such variables as: ambient temperature above 70 degrees Farenheit; relative humidity below 46%; rider's body positioned so that 80% of his weight was directly above the rear axle; rider's middle name contains no unpronounced letters (as in "Geoffrey"); terrain consists of rolling hills and gentle corners, with no slopes exceeding 15% grade; soil composition less than 20% decayed material; absence of mythical beasts such as manticores, harpies, dryads, cool-headed Irishmen, and the like; and so on. These conditions were to be listed in the first appendix in the Pro-Flex manual, but to cut printing costs, the appendices were omitted from the final version of the manual.

Much has changed since 1996. I was recently putting together a new race bike that packed more technology than that bucket of bolts that took Buzz Aldrin to the moon. The frame alone was billowing tech so profusely that many of the other mechanics swooned to the floor. [We took this opportunity to hose them down with Tri-Flow and tell chimpanzees that they were smuggling bananas under their clothes--haven't you always wanted to do that?]

You would think that with all the technical advances coming out of the war rooms of the bike world, the little stuff wouldn't get overlooked. Engineers who are in charge of small frame parts would look at the new tech specs from component makers and what not. That's a safe assumption, right? That's the type of thinking that the crew of the Minnow engaged in before their fated three hour tour.


This is a rocket frame from a household name in cycling, and that is a brand new Deore XT derailleur. That pin on the aforementioned derailleur is hanging on for dear life to the little tooth on the derailleur tab, waiting for the first available impact to send the upper pulley into the cassette. Perhaps there will be no problems, but this is a RACE BIKE. It's designed to be pummeled mercilessly by skinny, leg-shaving dudes who can put out 250 watts for two hours straight over terrain that would lame a goat! This part will likely receive a beating the likes of which rented mules have rarely seen! And I'm a pessimist (as if you couldn't tell)!

Perhaps, again, there will be no problems. This machine might end up with a trailer behind it and never see more chain slap than that which occurs from dropping curbs slowly. The Pro-Flex has managed to survive this long (fifteen years!) without losing its rear end after all.

We really love engineers and appreciate their labors. Some of our pets are named after famous engineers (or maybe it's the other way around) (my dog is named after one of Saturn's moons) (OK, done sharing). Maybe the engineers at this particular company weren't getting along, because this sort of thing should be caught in house.

Mastering the Art of the Non-Lumpy Wheel

Spring has sprung here at Freewheel. Spring means only one thing to Freewheel Service: a list of new things. We saw new faces (welcome, Adam and Nick!), new fonts on our shirts, new presta chucks, new jaws on one of the truing stands, and new technology. We recently had a training session about how to balance spoke tension in a wheel by using a computer-generated graphing program. As is the case with just about everything in life, balance is the key. A few stresses not countered by equal and opposite stresses can make your life look like a Pringles brand baked potato crisp faster than you can say "a registered trademark of the Proctor & Gamble corporation, all rights reserved." The same, it just so happens, goes for wheels. A wheel may look round, sound round, smell round, taste round, and give off a roundish sort of aura, yet its soul may look like this:

Anguish and despair lurk insidiously in those little peaks of blue and crimson: what the graph is illustrating is the tension in every spoke on the drive side (red) and the non-drive side (blue) of a standard repair wheel from one of our suppliers. The soon-to-be-legendary Karl went through a handful of stock wheels and nefariously fiddled with the spokes in order to whack out the wheel's tension balance while keeping it straight. Is a straight wheel a good wheel? The wheel represented by the graph was pretty straight in the stand, but the wild fluctuations in spoke tension predicted that the customer would be back with an angry countenance and a Pringle-shaped wheel if he rode the bike at all.

We could just blame the customer for poor technique I suppose.

Shop Guy: "Charlie, you're eighty-four and a veteran of two wars. You've killed a rabid black bear with the tweezers from a Swiss Army knife. You performed a successful emergency appendectomy on yourself. You taught all the robins in your neighborhood to sing excerpts from King Arthur by Henry Purcell. You built a tugboat out of your old Caprice Classic after you went car-free. Haven't you learned how to ride down a curb properly yet?"

Charlie: *sigh*

And you know how it works: happy customers tend to smile quietly to themselves while angry customers send telegraphs to everyone they know. Soon customers would rather eat icelandic cuisine than come to your shop for service.

So we learned how to fix them using ingenious tools such as tension gauges, computers, Girl Scout Cookies, diet 7-Up, napkins, compressed air, and abundant tomfoolery. Since pictures are worth 1,000 words according to conventional exchange rates, and since Pete managed to take some dandies, I will let them tell the tale.

A few faceless Freewheelers kibbutzing shortly after close. The calm before the storm.

Nick and Mark chasing the spikes away. Notice Mark's custom embroidery.
We were all quite fond of it; quite fond indeed.

Adam beardedly and Trek-hattedly measures tension on the drive side of a stock wheel.


Pete gave out some luscious Girl Scout cookies at the end of the meeting.
Here is your author about to toss one in the boiler.
Tyson (yellow shirt) is actually kneeling in this picture.


Don't let Karl's relaxed posture fool you: he strikes like a cobra.

Patty mans the computer.
Bryan closely scrutinizes the tension.
Graham offers high fives at discount prices.

What is the recommended spoke tension range in KGF for a Mavic Ksyrium Elite front wheel?

The first person to e-mail the correct answer to peteh@freewheel bike.com wins this hat and candle holder.

3/26/10 We have a winner. Thanks for playing.

Trek Speed Concept Bike

Be one of the first to get a sneak peek at Trek's new Speed Concept bike. On display at our West-Bank location for the first four days of our Open House Sale.

We're Looking For A Few Exceptional Mechanics

Here's your chance to become a Golden Wrench. If you want to work in a service department that is quality driven then we want to hear from you.
Ideal candidates will have few years of experience working in bike shops or have professional training from Barnett's or UBI. Required traits are an eye for detail, pride in your work and a desire to master your trade. Openings are for either part time seasonal or full time seasonal.

If you want to become one of the best, send your resume to peteh@freewheelbike.com

Galvanic Corrosion

This aluminum bottom bracket has been turning to dust inside of a titanium frame. Anti-seize would have acted as a sacrificial annode and saved this expensive component.

The Bonk of the Soul

Spring is rough in the bike industry after a long winter. It's probably rough for grizzly bears as well. They get right fat in the fall, sleep like loaves through the winter, wake up all skinny in the spring with some breath let me tell you, and BOOM! FIVE MILLION CUSTOMERS, ALL OF WHOM WANT TUNEUPS YESTERDAY!!! So they eat the customers.

This is why customers have stopped going to grizzly bears for tuneups. They are tired of being eaten. A good customer service motto would go something like this: In the springtime, do not eat the customers. They will tell all their friends that you are grizzly bears and take their business elsewhere. That would pop on a coffee mug.

We had several zillion customers come in today who requested that we engage in various activities such as fix their bikes, sell them things, hunt for ancient hub cones, nurse a few more miles out of their ramshackle winter rigs, and explain the difference between UG and HG chains and why the big blue S changes its mind all the time. Not to mention normal shop activities such as deciphering layperson-speak over the phone, marveling at marvelous things (if you're too busy to marvel at marvelous things, you're too busy--another excellent motto), and giving Pandora the occasional thumbs-down. By the end of the day, we had all begun to drift toward the limits of sanity.

The general manager, whom we'll call "Jacques" to partially conceal his identity, was sitting on the floor behind the parts counter. He was furiously eating a slice of pizza with a hollow and hunted look in his eye. This was probably the first break he'd had in four hours.

One of the sales guys, whom we'll call "Whatsisname" because I can't remember who it was right now, stood motionless in front of the suspension bench for about a minute before admitting that he had forgotten what he had come back for. I complimented him on his convincing thousand-yard stare, noting that he was nearly translucent. Despite his haggard countenance, he responded crisply in the King's English, forming what most certainly was a sentence, and probably a good one at that. I was using my resources to frantically check sold bikes over for customers and could not use my brain to process incoming verbs and nouns. I got the prepositions and a few adverbs such as "to" and "by" and "swiftly," by which I think he meant that customers were waiting and I ought to work faster.

I was installing a rack with lots of fiddly bits which was designed by people who smile and laugh and play lots of Frisbee in the cool grass, having had an excellent lunch, and who often knock off work at 3 PM to go mountain biking in real live mountains, which are right out the back door of their offices, those offices being stocked with pinball machines and tanks full of tropical fish. As I mused about the designers, fiddly bits of their latest masterpiece were bouncing off the chainstays and into the seamless void. Apparently the guys who designed the racks have three hands, or perhaps work in teams. Or perhaps they have super powers of magnetism. Or maybe they spot-weld the fiddly bits in place between games of pinball or three hour mountain hot-laps. Or perhaps they make the tropical fish do the work.

Anyways, as I struggled, Jason (oops! I mean "Whatsisname") glided silently away to help (and not eat) more customers. He will sleep with vivid dreams, I thought to myself.

We closed down the shop in high spirits, but had begun using hand gestures and shorter sentences without relative clauses (which look like this) to communicate with one another. We had come to the end of ourselves and prevailed. We can do it! More than one veteran of spring rushes said "Game on," and more than one greenhorn was trying to look brave in the face of the hurricane.

Is it going to be worse on that first 70 degree day in April? Probably. We'll be toughened up by then. Of course, at the end of the day, we'll still be running on fumes, grunting and waving at one another, laughing out loud at stupid things, and fighting off the gremlins which make us drop our tools. But we'd do something else if we didn't love it.

Pete on his laptop, burning the closing time oil
Notice the slight hunch in his shoulders
Methinks he could use a hug

Bicycle Repair Classes

If there is one thing that I love more than working on bikes it's teaching people how to work on bikes. That's why I love teaching the repair classes at our Midtown Bike Center. My favorite class is wheel building.
There are usually three to four people in a class. On the first day we lace the spokes between the hub and the rim and start getting the spokes tight. The second day is the hardest. We have to true, round and center the rim. Then we stress the wheel to relieve tension on the spokes which allows them to unwind. Then we add a layer of tension and repeat, and repeat, and repeat..... You see, in order to build a good wheel you have to add many small layers of tension and this can become tedious to some. During this process we constantly check spoke tension with the Park Tool TM-1
At some point we determine that we have reached an acceptable average spoke tension, usually around 100-110 kgf. It's at this point in the class that I break out the Park Tool Tension Conversion Calculator and the students kinda groan, roll their eyes and polity excuse themselves from class. You can't imagine how excited I was in the last wheel class when my solo student, Frank, stayed with me the whole way. We even tension balanced his wheel! He said he was some kind of engineer, mechanical engineer maybe, which might explain why he didn't mind graphing out spoke tension then manipulating different spokes to get them all closer to the same tension.
Frank built up a Shimano FH-M756 hub with DT 2.0-1.8 spokes and a Stan's ZTR Arc rim. Here is what the spoke tension looked like in Frank's wheel before we started balancing the tension:




We followed the tension balancing instructions from Calvin's Corner and ended up with spoke tension that looked like this:




After four tries Frank still had one spoke one the non-drive side that was too tight. Luckily he owns a TM-1 and a wheel truing stand so that he can finish this at home (balancing spoke tension takes a lot of time).


A wheel with well balanced spoke tension will stay true longer, spokes will last longer and the rim will be less likely to crack. This is why so many people demand hand built wheels.
At Freewheel Bike we offer a wheel building class about once a month. We have parts for you to use in class so that you don't have to buy the parts or you can bring your own. If you want a wheel built and tension balanced but don't want to do it yourself we offer the Pro-Wheel Build at both locations for $70 a wheel.

Be the first to answer the following trivia questions and win this King hat.


What is the thread pitch of a 2.0mm spoke?
What does "kgf" stand for?
E-mail answers to peteh@freewheelbike.com

3/10/10 11:35am we have a winner. The answers are; 56tpi and "kilogram force". Thanks for playing.

Things You Don't See Every Day

You're probably spending a lot of time riding in wet, sloppy metro streets these days. Paths, trails, the Greenway, sidewalks, parking lots are all covered with large pools of grayish-brown liquid in various stages of freeze/thaw. You really never know what's at the bottom of some of those puddles. "Is there a Kraken in there?" I often ask myself, hoping for the answer "no." Well, no Krakens yet, but that isn't to say that I haven't ridden through puddles deep enough to conceal at least a juvenile Kraken.

The worst (relatively speaking) time is when the grayish-brown stuff is just starting to freeze. At sunset, for example, when the air temperature is starting to drop rapidly enough to make you wonder if another layer wouldn't have been rad. There is that magical temperature when the earth is still warm enough to keep the grayish-brown stuff liquid, but it freezes on your bike. We had a bike come in the other day with a nice, even coat of grayish-brown stuff frozen all over it and this interesting formation on the BB shell:

You can just read part of the serial number in the reflected light. The owner took it home and stuck it in the freezer in case his bike ever gets stolen.

Tough Love

Occasionally we have customers come into the shop with antiquarian rigs featuring seized or frozen components. Two dissimilar metals have been duking it out for decades, and eventually they just can't let go of one another. Kind of like the two male mooses who got their antlers stuck together fighting over a particularly virtuous she-moose, or the plot of Romeo and Juliet. Yes, sometimes these conflicts end up messy, and we are called on to mediate.

Our job is to break the wills of taciturn components. And we have turned it into a nuanced art.

This particular customer came in with a very fetching purple Maruishi singled road bike. Japanese steel: very savory! Unfortunately, the seat post was chemical welded into the frame. It's like a chemical snowball fight between an Irishman and a pacifist. The aluminum says "Ya flanny gaet, aeet some SNUUUUUU" and the steel says "Fine, I'll go ahead and keep them" and an electrolyte (salt from toxic sweat or from the road) begins egging on the Irishman from the sidelines. Soon, electrons are zinging across from the aluminum to the steel at a great rate, causing the once-smooth surfaces of both metals to become rough and scratchy. The battle can cause quite a mess, and breaking them up is hard to do.

A couple of themes are involved in a seatpost extraction. The first is leverage. The seatpost stuck in the frame is often made out of aluminum just slightly firmer than mashed potatoes, and therefore putting leverage on it is a delicate proposition. Too much leverage improperly applied tends to smoosh and shred and squarsh the seatpost without actually breaking the bond. Not enough leverage makes the seatpost giggle, and that's just demoralizing. Here is a brief pictorial tour of the clever setup that our chief persuader devised for the task at hand.


Man does not live by torque alone, however. Another aspect, lubrication, plays a crucial role in the operation. Lubrication puts little ball-bearing shaped molecules of oil between the bonded surfaces, making the seatpost and frame lose some interest in the dispute. We leave a penetrating and corrosion-attacking substance in the frame overnight to do its insidious work before reapplying leverage. If this doesn't work (which it didn't in this case), we get out the final step: flame.


MAPP gas torches are not just for heating tepid coffee (just visible in the lower right corner of the picture). They are a powerful tool for unlocking seized components. One might object that aluminum (seatpost) expands faster than steel (frame), so wouldn't that make the situation worse? I would answer "SILENCE!!!" because somehow it just works. The different expansion rates sometimes cause the little aluminum oxide teeth to shift from their little rust detents just enough so that one can wrangle it out. Sometimes it works, other times it just stinks up the neighborhood for a few hours and cooks a frame. Like Romeo and Juliet.

In the present case, the snowball fight ended up with two casualties. The Maruishi gave up the ghost but not the post.

Got Matrix?

An expectant hush falls over the bike shop employees assembled around a work stand in the back of the service area. A new Madone hangs there, newly outfitted with Shimano's electronic Di2 group. A mechanic spins the pedals and lightly presses the front shift button; into the circle of silence steps a robotic hum, like a servo motor coming to life. The front derailleur leaps into motion after just a brief pause, guiding the chain onto the big ring, then readjusts itself so it's not rubbing the chain.

...Magic!

Okay, I'll stop trying to emulate Chris and just tell it like it happened. Here's a shot of the guts of the Di2 system hanging out of the bottom bracket shell:



Now we heat-shrink the waterproofing seals which are necessary for internally routed cables:



Here we are after everything's been crammed back into the frame. Pretty tidy! Note the surprisingly compact battery which powers the whole system tucked away under the bottom bracket:



The revolution is now!