Objet Trouvé

Seen in Houston.

I swear to God that I didn't touch the thing; it was just right where I found it.

I have to admit, it's a little hard to imagine the circumstance that would allow a cyclist to just leave his left crank-arm and pedal sitting out there near the curb like this. I mean, clearly there was a missing crankarm-fixing-bolt, and I suppose that it's possible to lose one of those, (although I've never done it personally,) but how does this happen and you don't just reach down and retrieve the thing?

What's the most likely? Was it:

1. the cyclist was walking his bike and didn't notice;
2. the cyclist was walking his bike and too drunk to notice;
3. the cyclist had his bike on the back of his car;
4. the cyclist was riding and he and every bit of his bike except the left crankarm and pedal was hit big-time by an alien abduction ray;

When you figure it out, let me know.

Patch Kit Zen

I've been in some tough deadlines at work, so no posts late October. I've been enjoying riding in the cool autumn weather, enjoying the color, the wet leaf debris on the shoulder not so much, but hey, can't have it all.

Here's a bicycling koan (of uncertain provenance) that has seen a lot of coverage on the Web:

A Zen Teacher saw five of his students return from the market, riding their bicycles. When they had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, "Why are you riding your bicycles?"

The first student replied, "The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!" The teacher praised the student, saying, "You are a smart boy. When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over, as I do."

The second student replied, "I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path." The teacher commended the student, "Your eyes are open and you see the world."

The third student replied, "When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant, 'nam myoho renge kyo.'" The teacher gave praise to the third student, "Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel."

The fourth student answered, "Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all beings." The teacher was pleased and said, "You are riding on the golden path of non-harming."

The fifth student replied, "I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle." The teacher went and sat at the feet of the fifth student, and said, "I am your disciple."

Why do I post this? It came to mind late last week. I had done my usual morning preparations, (made breakfast, made coffee, made and packed lunch, packed my change of clothes,) and, as I was just ready to go out the door, loading my backpack/laptop bag into the other pannier, noticed that my rear tire was flat. I cursed under my breath, because I should have seen it the first thing, but wasn't paying attention. I considered changing clothes and driving in to work for no more than 2 seconds, and then got my agitation under control and realized that what I had to do was to do the very best job of fixing that tire that I could.

So I took my time and was careful. No obvious leaks, no hissing. A slow leak. Putting it in the kitchen sink, no leaks the first pass. Added a little more air, passed it slowly through the water, and turned up the very slow leak (about 1 small bubble every three seconds.) Put a peel-n-stick on it, looked for but couldn't find any persistent hazard in the casing, aired it up, got my kit back together, made it to the office only about 20 minutes late.

The payoff? At the end of the day, ready to ride back home, the tire was still rock-hard. I just love beating a leak and (especially) not having to go back and revisit it.

Bike fitting

Bike fitting, buying and finding and adjusting a bike to work well with your body, your flexibility, your strength, and your needs, is an important topic. Today I've put together a post that covers some of the online resources for bike fitting, and also briefly discusses fitting services and systems.

On-line Guides: First I'll give a brief survey of some of the online fitting guides. At top right is a chart detailing the topics covered by these sites:

Rivendell Bikes has a nice online guide for choosing a bike. This is predominantly a guide for choosing a frame size, based predominantly on pubic bone height (AKA "inseam"). It has an interesting rule for how to determine the leaning angle of the torso. This is oriented towards comfort and not racing sizing (which really is not addressed by any of these sites.)

Bikerowave (love the name) has a pretty plainly presented (looks like a forum entry) discussion, but the information there is good.

Jim Langley's excellent site has made the posts of this blog before. He presents fitting as a troubleshooting guide. Good if the bike you already own falls within the range of what you need, not so useful as a buyer's guide. (Langley quotes from Ivan Illich -- hm, good topic in itself for some future post.)

Kirby Palm's long discourse on bike fitting is encyclopedic. Anyone who can write this much on a topic probably knows something about his subject. If not, let's hope he gets lucky. Seriously, this is arranged in a somewhat wordy narrative, but is quite comprehensive and useful.

Peter White Cycles has a page on the topic. It provides some general advice on frame fitting as well as advice on selecting the kinds of merchandise Peter sells. (I really like Peter's site and sincerely appreciate the information he provides. I would buy from him a lot more if he made it easier to do so.)

The Colorado Cyclist site has a thorough (if not particularly broad) guide. It uses a step-by-step approach that I like in this kind of guide.

Wabicycles has a frame-spec focused site that is oriented toward fixies. It information is compactly organized and not unsophisticated. Definitely the place to go if you're thinking about converting that old Raleigh from the '70s into a fixie.

Fitting Systems: Let's suppose, however, that you don't feel confident about measuring a bike (or yourself) and just want to have it done for you. There are a couple of bike-fitting hardware systems sold to bike shops whose personnel are usually certified to use them. Perhaps a shop in your area has one of these systems:

Bike Fit Kit: The "Fit Kit" sold to cycle shops to determine bicycle fit. Since they sell the kits, they don't "give away" their methods online, but visiting their site is interesting in what it says about their approach.

The Fitmaster is the all-in-one fitting machine seen in many bike shops. Shops in at least 25 states in the US have these. A nice, integrated system combined with training on how to use it. This is a good investment for any bike shop, it would seem.

Some randomly-chosen services using (probably) one of the above systems are listed below:

Ride Boutique is certified on several different fitting systems. If you live near Ann Arbor and have a couple of Benjamins to spare, this might be time (oh, yes, and money) well spent.

Papa Wheelie's bicycle shops (again, I love that name) in Boston and Portsmouth, NH also has advanced fitting services. They mention the magic word, "chondromalacia," which I suffer from.

Bicycle fitting services in Tampa, FL. Seem reasonably priced.

eBooks: Lastly, you may simply be a book person, and the comfort of the printed page (that is, if you're willing to print it yourself, as these are ebooks) is the way to go for you. (I can certainly understand this.) There are a couple of titles that come to hand, based on my Internet search:

Arnie Baker's "Bike Fit" ebook. If you're a learning-oriented, self-reliant kind of person, this may be for you. A whole lot less expensive than a fitting session, too.

Andy Pruitt's Medical Guide for Cyclists. Ebook. Combines a section on bicycle fitting with a section on injuries / prevention / care.

Online Bike repair guides

In the old days, when there weren't so many bike shops and the Internet was a green-screen geeks-only paradise that offered only email, FTP, and Usenet discussion groups, getting information on how to fix your bike was difficult. Bicycle repair was a matter of lore, and virtually all serious riders were competent mechanics (at least to a degree.) For the first 20 years of the Tour de France (1903 - 1923), a rider was in fact required to do his own repairs. (Thanks Chairman Bill.) Perhaps this custom that riders be self-sufficient is why John Forrester's seminal book Effective Cycling has so many of its pages dedicated to bike maintenance and repair.

Now, of course, if you don't want to get your hands dirty, it's a quick trip down to the local bike shop to get that drivetrain fixed or those brakes adjusted, or maybe even a trip down there to get diagnosed what is wrong in the first place. This is fine if you have the money, or lack a mechanical aptitude gene. (It also keeps the local bike shop in business, which isn't a bad thing either.) So you, dear reader, have choices, and an excellent choice is an on-line bicycle repair website. The web is full of them, some good, some very good, and some quite generic (the "generic" ones are the ones that list "bike repair" up alongside "gutter repair" and "13 uses for baking soda".) I've surveyed several of the bike-specific sites here and hope you find the overview useful:

Park Tools Repair Site:

This ia an encyclopedic, professional bike repair web site. Not surprising when you consider the source -- Park tools have a deservedly excellent reputation and there's no better way to sell and support tools than to show people the proper way to use them. The Park website has a nifty interactive Flash-based "bicycle map" that hightlights the parts of the bike that may need repair and navigates you to the "chapter" of the website where you can see the specific topics on that part.

Bikewebsite.com:
This website is very old-school. It has a chaotic layout, with ads sprinked about. Topics are hit-or-miss. The illustrations are both sparse and of marginal quality, looking like they were created with a DOS-based paint program on a VGA screen. There are a few interesting sections, though, including a section that deals with diagnosing what's wrong with your bike based on how often you hear noises.

Bicycletutor.com:

This is easily the most "social web" oriented of the repair sites. Most if not all instructions include downloadable videos. Note the "tags" below the image-map of the bike at right. All instructions allow comments by users. This site has some general topics, such as "how to shift gears" and "how to tune up your bike", as well as the specific highly-categorized topics.

Utah Mountain Biking:

This site has a large selection of topics; each topic is well-illustrated with lots of well-cropped photos. I like that the graphic bike-parts index includes "Chad". Definitely a focus on mountain bike and downhill stuff here -- this is the place to go to get info on disk brakes and shocks.

Jim Langley's Bicycling Site:

This is definitely an "old-school" site with a pleasing personality. Lots of old-bicycle-poster eye candy, lots of mini-articles about bikes, with a focus on antique bikes. He does have a page calling out bike terminology, but unlike the other sites, he doesn't use this as a clickable index. This won't suit everyone, but the information given, although you may have to hunt around a bit to find it, is good. He has a number of topics on bicycle fit and adjustment.

Sheldon Brown's Fixit Pages:

The late, great Sheldon Brown of Massachusetts' Harris Cyclery had a collection of pages on the Harris website. The range of topics is by no means encyclopedic, in fact it's hit-and-miss, but if Sheldon Brown covers a topic, it's worth taking a look, because the depth of his topics is extreme (including things about the history of each component, going back to the English/ French/ Italian standards of the 1950s). Each topic is more like a brief "white-paper" style treatise on that kind of bike component or situation. For the experienced cyclist, this will be elucidating and enjoyable, but it's not for beginners who are looking for a "step-by-step" approach.

Wheelpro Wheel Building Guide:

I'm going to wrap this up with a single-topic website, or rather, a reference to an excellent book on perhaps the most important maintenance / repair topic, and that is wheels and wheelbuilding. Roger Musson, a British bicycle wheelbuilder and mechanic, has written the final word on building bike wheels.

It's not free, but neither is it expensive, and it comes with a money-back guarantee. It's packed with useful information and guarantees you that if you follow the instructions, you can build a wheel that will be straight and true for its lifetime (i.e., until the rims wear out.) If you like riding on round, true wheels and want to build wheels that are better than those you can buy, this is the reference for you.

Summary Chart:
For those of you who have made it this far, here's a chart summarizing the topics covered in all the sites listed. Click the image for a high-resolution, printable version.

Disc Brakes

... or is it Disk Brakes? Anyway, I've never understood the use of disc brakes on anything other than a mud-eating mountain, downhill, or (maybe) cyclocross bike. The brake-choking mud or dirt seems to me to be a requisite to justify it.

Why is this? The reason is simple, if you have an interest in amateur physics (and I do): Braking Torque. Think of it this way: if the braking is occurring at the hub (as it is with a disk brake), then all the braking force has to be transmitted from the hub, through the spokes, to the rim (where after all, the "rubber meets the road.")

This means that the spokes (which are the weakest link of the wheel) do at least twice as much work on a bike equipped with disk brakes. I haven't seen statistics for this, but I'd be willing to bet that spoke breakage is higher on bicycles equipped with disk brakes. I also wonder if there is a higher rate of failure of the seat stays (which absorb braking force), since the force applied by the disk brake is several times higher than a rim-caliper brake. (see illustration)

On a rim-brake setup, you can think of the entire wheel as the "disk". Braking force is less, but more importantly, the braking force is being applied near the rim, and the only loads that are carried by the spokes are for driving force (which are inevitable) and structural (keeping the wheel true and round).

As long as the wheel is in fact true, and you can properly keep adjusted your rim-caliper brakes (of whatever type), They are a physically and structurally superior solution. It does require that you keep your wheels true, but I'm sorry, if you have wobbly wheels, your riding quality is going to be pretty poor no matter what. I will grant that using the rim for braking means that the rim is eventually going to wear out and you'll have to replace the rim (rebuild the wheel), but we're talking tens of thousands of miles here.

Of course, bike manufacturers are loading up their offerings with disc brakes, even for bikes that will never see off-road use (and of course many so-called "mountain bikes" will always be on a paved trail.) Here's an offering from Raleigh, here's one from Trek, here's a Civia, and even REI has one. These are all touted as premium bikes in their categories. But bear in mind that the disk brakes, while superior in an automotive setting, don't convey that much superiority in a bike that won't be used on unpaved trails.

Give me old-school cantilevers any time. They require some hand strength, but they never fade, and boy are they reliable.

Update: The excellent "Cozy Beehive" blog has a report on a disc brake induced failure here.

Cold Weather and Adhesives: A tale in 3 chapters

Chapter 1: Late last fall when it was quite cold, I had an "interesting" experience. My helmet (a Giro Atlas) delaminated—the shell peeled right away from the foam core of the thing. Strangely and excitingly, it happened while I was riding. I made a quick decision to not stop (it was cold, after all) and try and recover the shell on my morning ride to work, which I did.

I wrote the customer service wing of Giro and they kindly sent me replacement tape (adhesive tape around the perimeter is what holds the standard vacuum-plastic-foam helmet together) with instructions on how to repair it.

I was surprised (stunned, really) about how the thing just let go all at once. Clearly (it seemed to me at the time) this was a temperature-related occurence. I'm now using (for extreme cold weather riding) a Bern helmet using their "Zip-mold" technology, quite a different thing from the vacuum-plastic-foam approach.

Chapter 2: Cycling in to work about 6 weeks ago, when I was about a mile from the office, I experienced a sudden flat. Since I was so close, I just got off and walked the bike in. When I got the tube out of the tire, I was surprised to find that the cause of the flat was a Slime Skab peel-and-stick patch that had just let go. I immediately thought of my helmet and began to wonder about how cold weather affects adhesives. (I also began a more philosophical rumination about how our lives depend on adhesives, but that's for a different time.)

When I was fixing the tire that day, I was concerned about the "wrinkly" appearance of the Skabs (I had several on this particular tube). I compared them to the appearance of a Park peel-and-stick that I also had on this tube. (This is, admittedly, a rather "road-weary" tube.) The Park patch was more rigid, but perfectly flat, while the Skabs were thin and pliable, but all wrinkled.

Chapter 3: Earlier this week, a second Skab developed a leak. I replaced it, but I must say the cold weather reliability (or lack thereof) of the Skabs has me concerned. At the moment, I would not recommend the use of Skabs if you're going to be cycling in significantly cold (below freezing) weather. Reliability of your cycling system needs to be high in extreme weather conditions. I'm not calling it a matter of life and death, but a flat at the wrong time (for no good reason) can be a matter of significant discomfort.

Epilogue: If you're going to be cycling in cold weather and you use peel-and-stick tire repair, go with Parks.

My Ride

Here's my current ride. It's a commuter that's really built on a cyclo-cross frame. I'm a pretty old-school guy, so in some ways this is an old-school bike. I've put about 4500 miles on this bike so far, (about 1600 this year) and it's held up well. Here are the "specs":

Frame: Steel Nashbar generic mountain bike hardtail frame and rigid fork. Extra long seat post to handle my long legs (38" inseam!).

Wheels: combo rim / disk brake compatible 26" mountain wheels. Sun Rhyno Lite rims on Deore hubs (I wish they had cartridge bearings.) I have Forte City ST/K tires from Performance Cycling which I run at 85 psi.

Drive train: This is the most unusual aspect of my bike. It's a 9-speed. 45-tooth chainwheel on an old French TA crank (185mm crank arms for those long legs of mine) driving an 11-34 Shimano cluster. This is all the gear range I need around Columbia, Maryland. SPD compatible pedals from Nashbar. Sealed Shimano bottom bracket. Deore indexed shifter and derailleur. Just having a single gearing to shift up and down on is so intuitive, it's almost like having an automatic transmission. Sometimes I think about replacing this with an internal-geared hub. (It would be nice to downshift when stopped.)

Saddle: Terry Liberator Men's. Very nice commuter saddle. Durable and comfortable.

Brakes: Mafac cantilevers with drilled-out Mafac levers. These are very "old-school" brakes. They require a fair amount of hand strength to operate, but they are as solid and reliable as it gets. Fantastic stopping power.

Handlebars: Old improvised "bull-horns" cut from a standard drop handlebar. Bought for $5 from the parts box of a local bike shop. I use a double-wrap of gel tape covered with yellow and blue Cinelli cork tape. It is so important to be color-coordinated!

Lighting / visibility: Cateye 3-LED front light, 3-LED rear light (on seatpost), with 3" amber truck reflector on the back. (You can see the reflector shining in the mirror behind the bike in the photo above.) Everything uses AAA batteries, and they last a surprisingly long time.

Mudguards (fenders): Yellow Planet Bike "Hardcore". Life is too short to limit yourself to black or silver fenders.

Baggage carrying: Old Eclipse platform rear rack with a couple of Nashbar panniers. I fill these up on a daily basis. One pannier carries rain gear, a change of clothes, a lock, and lunch. The other pannier carries my briefcase-backpack, including my laptop. It's a pretty full load, and this bike handles it nicely.

Chain Maintenance: Waxing

Most people probably think that tires are the highest-maintenance items on a bike, but they're not. The highest maintenance item is the chain. I might have to deal with flats 3 or 4 times a year (I use aramid aka "Kevlar" belted tires), but I have to lube my chain every few weeks (say every 300 or 400 miles) or it starts clattering.

I use a very "old-school" type of chain lubrication. I dip it in hot (liquified) paraffin wax and let it sit for a few minutes. The chain heats up, the joints loosen, the old dirt falls out, and the wax seeps in to all the nooks and crannies of the chain. I pull the chain out, and it's magically shiny -- a thing of beauty. It cools, and has a slightly waxy feel (can't imagine why). Goes right back on the bike and I'm good for a couple more weeks of daily riding.

The hidden beauty of chain waxing is that it is (as far as I know) the cleanest form of chain lubrication. It's dry and absolutely does not pick up dirt. Which means it doesn't get the rest of the bike dirty nor you dirty. Most liquid lubricants inevitably pick up dirt and just getting near your bike will give you a "tattoo". A needless mess, whereas I can rub against my chain all day, even with long pants on, and.. nothing.

So, if it's so advantageous, why doesn't everyone do this? Well, it's a bit of a hassle to get set up. First, your chain should be removable from your bike without tools (see Update 1 below). Then you need a pound of paraffin wax (this is widely available at most grocery stores in the "canning goods" aisle.) Then you need something to heat it, and here's where it gets tricky. You have to use something that will melt the wax but not heat it above its flash point or you will have a big fire on your hands.

For a long time I used a coffee can with my wax melted into it and set that in a large saucepan of water. Just like a double-boiler in principle. This has worked fine, but my dear wife has finally had enough of the little wax splatters that inevitably happen. So last weekend I went out to a beauty supply store and bought a wax heater (just a little thermostatic hot-plate device that they use for heating depilatory paraffin.) I wish I had taken pictures of the quizzical looks on the beauty-supply clerks' faces when this big sweaty cyclist walked in their shop wanting a wax heater.

If it works, (and I've got a little setting up to do yet this weekend,) I can leave it set up out in the garage. Woo-hoo! It will be nice to be able to just flip the switch, get the wax liquid, and drop the chain in, and not have all the cleanup associated with the kitchen.

I'll let you know how it goes with an update.

Update 1: I haven't got the new setup going yet, but my brother Willie makes the comment that, in this post, I assumed that all users would have an easy way to remove the chain from their bike. Silly me for making this assumption! I use an SRAM Power-link (pictured at right). and have for years. Here's a good web-page that gives the best technique for removing the PowerLink, which does have some, uh, "nuance".

Update 2: I published an Instructable that gives a step-by-step method for chain waxing. Enjoy!

Bikes and Obsolescence, Planned and Otherwise

About 25 years ago, my brother Willie made the observation, "Bicycles are, relatively speaking, immune to planned obsolescence. They don't wear out very fast and are indefinitely maintaintable."

It's undeniable that bicycle technology has changed a lot in the past 20, or even 10 years: Many modern carbon-fiber frames have integrated headsets, bottom brackets, and even seatposts. It's a far cry from the day where there were only three standards: English, French or Italian threading on bottom brackets and headset diameters. Everything else was interchangeable and standard sized.

But even today, with the proliferation of sizes and configurations (some of it reasonable, much of it not), it's possible to buy, outfit and maintain a standards-based bike that can indefinitely be maintained. Bicycle technology (and its market availabilty) is very interesting: it's as if (using a car analogy as I have before and doubtlessly will again) cars equipped with model-T flathead 4's and modern variable-valve-timing internal-combustion engines were available side-by-side at the same dealership.

Personally, I'm leery of the fancy integrated frame/headset/bottom bracket/seatpost tech. If you're a true racer and need that last 1/10 of 1% edge, it's better I suppose to get it with carbon fiber and ceramic bearings than EPO (sorry, just had to slip that in for the Tour de France fans :) But as a consumer, fancy nth-degree technology ties you down. You're stuck with one manufacturer's idea of what will work for you, and the limited availability of same.

This is one area where (again, unless you're a racer) buying a cheaper bike will actually buy you additional value in the form of maintainability. While it's possible to spend $3000 or even $10000 on a rarified bike, it's also possible to buy a lot of bike in the $500 to $1000 range. I would even say that "planned obsolescence" benefits the low-to-medium end buyer, because of "trickle-down" quality in components. The difference between a $300 and a, say, $1000 bike is quite significant. But the difference between a $1000 and a $5000 bike in today's market is difficult to discern for all but the everyday racers.

The Bible

There is really only one Bible of practical cycling (or bicycle commuting, if you prefer.) It's a book entitled "Effective Cycling" and it was first written by a visionary named John Forrester in 1976. I remember seeing my first copy — it was a plastic-comb bound, self published book amateurishly published by a company called Custom Cycle Fitments (CCF) of Palo Alto, California. CCF manufactured made-to-order custom-sized cycling clothes, including rain gear. (CCF has been out of business for quite a while, something that is too bad but is probably inevitable. Impossible to compete with LL Bean and their suppliers in the Far East. And not enough call for custom sized things for outsized people like me. I'm 198cm tall. I wonder if, even when they were viable, they didn't realize more revenue off this book than off their clothing.)

But I digress—back to Effective Cycling. It's astonishing to pick up a later edition (it's now in its 6th edition, picked up in 1984 by the MIT Press) and realize how little of the core information in the book has changed, and how relevant the book is today. It's truly the only book you'll ever need to read about cycling (unless you want to race professionally, which is a different topic), and it tells you everything essential about bikes, including building, maintenance, sizing, riding technique, and safe use. Most users will never even true a spoked wheel, much less build one from scratch, but it you want to, step-by-step instructions are in this book. As such, it can be more than a little intimidating to the new serious cyclist.

As good and complete a reference as it is for bike assembly and maintenance, however, the seminal contribution made by "Effective Cycling" from its beginnings is about safe bicycle transportation — how to safely "drive" a bike in the midst of automobile traffic. Forrester worked out a relatively complete set of cycling "rules of the road" and since 1976, everyone else who has written on the topic has really just been polishing Forrester's edifice. Not everyone agrees with Forrester, whose central principle is that most traffic devices intended to "protect" cyclists do no such thing, and cyclists are best served when they behave predictably in traffic, not separated from cars.

There are many people who don't like the somewhat imperious tone of parts of Forrester's work — passages such as "The government's bicycle design standard is based on engineering incompetence" turn some people off. But Forrester has a point. Bicycle commuting requires (I think) a hard-nosed confidence that comes from a presence of mind (some would say, a mental toughness) and sugar-coating that requirement would be deceptive and possibly dangerous. I will talk more about "St. John the Curmudgeonly" later and theorize about the source of this attitude.

You can buy a paper-bound copy of the book on Amazon here (Disclaimer: I provide the link for convenience and receive no compensation of any sort from sales of the book.)