May 2012 – Page 2 – CanooterValve

The New Face of Progress

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May 172012

Last Tuesday I predicted we’d eventually see the end of bicycle component standards and interchangeable parts as we know them, and on Wednesday I predicted standards would be replaced with distinct “ecosystems.” After that I rode some bicycles and fell to blathering on about electric bikes.

If all that seemed to be leading up to the announcement of the insane 50mph-top-speed, more-torque-than-a-VW-Jetta, and completely proprietary Audi e-bike, I promise it was completely coincidental.

My powers of prediction are just that uncanny.

If there’s anything on this bike that’s standard or currently available, it’s those German Skyway Tuffwheels, but even the transmission and shifting seems to have been either cooked up by Audi, or developed in partnership with a much smaller company. Yes, every once in a while we see a bike like this flicker around the edges of reality without ever materializing, but one of these days it’s going to happy. Here’s why:

It’s never been easier to design, engineer and mass produce parts. Audi just purchased Ducati; do you think they can’t afford an $1100 MakerBot? Word is, they also know something about designing products and bringing them to market. But that’s not even the best part. These days a tiny, innovative company like Acros can partner with a company like Audi, and see some truly amazing shit get made. It’s starting to make more sense for companies like Audi to take a page from the Silicon Valley playbook, and buy or partner with smaller companies, than it does for them to keep reinforcing the big guys. And that’s because the smaller companies are able to build pretty amazing things.
Why the hell not? Remind me again why a company like Audi needs to spec Shimano or SRAM components to create a new type of vehicle? Audi built this bike as battery research and a PR stunt–i.e. using a fraction of their marketing budget alone.
Times they are a-changin’. This isn’t a mountain bike. It’s some sort of mountain commuting Red Bull wannabe trick bike/social media center (it communicates with your smartphone and Facebook). The entry point for a completely new company isn’t going to be an existing category (like Honda’s faux-entrance into DH racing); it’s going to be a completely new type of bicycle. Nobody knew they needed an iPhone until Apple showed them an iPhone. Apple, Audi–whatever–if somebody creates the bicycle version of the iPhone, consumers will buy it.
The old network is crumbling. Really it is. The argument that no shops would carry something like, and thus it would never get traction in the U.S. market is such a blatant example of asshattery that it’s more sad than amusing. What would it cost Audi to make these and distribute these, never mind a company like GM or Toyota building one? The economy of scale for production and services of one of the world’s top ten car manufacturers is staggering. Using a fraction of their resources, large manufacturers could create a quasi bike industry to support their “mobility vehicles”–let alone do something economical, like buy an existing distributor and simply add their own products to the mix.
The other old network is crumbling, too. If you really think the few truly independent bike shops left in the U.S. would turn up their noses at the idea of selling something consumers want–and they can get easily–then you haven’t tried to put a kid through college lately. For every Trek and Specialized dealer in the U.S., there’s a guy across the street who wants a shot at the title, and some of them are better shops anyway.
Bicycles are spilling into mainstream America like oil from a ruptured pipeline. And in an entirely new way, too. This isn’t just Lance-worship and trends. The skinny jeans crowd has sold their skinny jeans but kept their bikes. Fat people are riding bicycles while smoking–not to get in shape, but to get somewhere, and cities that don’t even want to be cool are having to install bike lanes. American consumers are finally sick of telling the neighbors we fell down the steps again, and that Big Oil really loves us.
That social media thing. No, seriously. How elaborate a distribution channel do you need these days, when you can leave a bag of money on Zuck’s doorstep and reach a few million qualified leads? There is no barrier to reaching consumers these days.
And speaking of Facebook . . . . There are companies who could do this without blinking. Google’s investing in self-driving cars, mobile phone manufacturing and wind farms. Free cash flow at Google in 2011 was just over eleven billion dollars. To offer some perspective, the last time I checked, total sales of the entire U.S. bicycle industry were right at six billion dollars.

Maybe none of this will happen. Maybe bikes will keep on just as they are. From what I can tell, though, the idea that a change is coming seems more realistic than ever.

A Different Drummer

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May 162012

Week’s off to a fast start. I spent the past few nights studying marketing software and trying to get my head around some web development puzzles (including what turned out to be a rogue Twitter feed–who knew the Fail Whale sometimes visits?). Meanwhile, I’ve stepped work on the new e-comm project up to nine hours a day to learn some system processes and get a jump on major site prep work (pretty excited about where that project is right now). Somewhere in there I found a copy of Dirt Rag in the office break room and was happy to see the Manic Mechanic’s most recent response almost made sense. All the while, emails and phone calls have been coming in on Project Danzig, and I might have to make some decisions and hunker down for a few weekends with Solidworks, Pandora and some Deschutes Black Butte Porter.

Getting some time away from bicycles is difficult right now.

I’m TV-less again for the second time in as many years, which means my window to the world of things “non-work-related” consists of relentless auto-spam from those tools at Zillow (seriously guys, I’ve found a home, thanks, and I’ve unsubscribed from everything and tried to delete my account, but there’s just no escaping you, eh? Is it possible to hire Anonymous for contract work?). The only other happy distractions are the little news articles appear on my phone from time to time.

Last night one of those articles informed me that Bill Ward, the original and only drummer for Black Sabbath, won’t be playing with the band in upcoming reunion shows, due to some contractual stuff (band “management,” for one thing, wanted him to play the first few shows for free with no guarantee he’d be included on the rest of the tour). You should read the entire letter Ward penned to Sabbath fans, and ask yourself whatever happened to musicians like that. Or people like that in general.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I could stomach a Black Sabbath reunion tour anyway. Not for lack of interest, but because I’m old and just barely musically inclined enough to know how they’re supposed to sound, and I don’t drink myself into blind acceptance at shows.

I don’t have anything against old bands. I’m teaching my kids to be good little prog rock elitist nerds who appreciate bizarre virtuosity, so the whole unkempt lot of us will be seeing what could be one of Rush’s last tours this year, but there aren’t many bands that can play like Rush, even at age 60. Who doesn’t love Ozzy, but what little patches of live recordings I heard of various “Ozzfest” Sabbath reunion shows over the past ten years suggest there comes a time when you just have to call it a day. I’d sell a kidney to sit in a room and listen to the original members of Sabbath play “Warning” (OK, kidney and one other redundant organ, but that’s my final offer). Listening to them warble over that big generic stadium rock sound that obliterates almost everything that made the band so great, though? That doesn’t really do either of us any good.

Sabbath will always be a jazz band to me. Nothing against violent, drunken Slipknot fans, but I would’t want to try to actually listen to music with most of them. Worse yet, I wouldn’t want to witness Sabbath in that kind of scenario, struggling to play music around millions of dollars of overprocessed, canned-metal-product nonsense and spendy pyrotechnics that make what’s left of the band even paler shadows of what they used to be. If I want that I’ll go see McTallica.

Maybe there’s a way to visit Bill Ward instead, have some cranberry juice and listen to some old records or something, maybe some piano from Ward One: Along the Way. I think that’d be more my speed these days.

Easy Rider

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May 152012

The other day I slouched forth from my basement to put on some road miles and check out the rail trail of sorts that starts under the 205 bridge and runs along the Portland side of the Columbia. It was a perfect day here in Portland, the sort of day normally found only in Disney movies involving animated birds and bunny rabbits, which mean the river and shore were packed with people out enjoying the day. Likewise, the bike path was starting to see a lot of traffic.

Before this next part, I need to clarify something about myself: I am not a fast bicycle rider; I am a physical derelict who also happens to be a proud bicycle rider, and the combination of those characteristics is like the third leading cause of Simultaneous Massive Heart Attack and Spontaneous Cranial Explosion Syndrome in North America.

I mention this because I’d taken out The Fast Bike for this ride, and The Fast Bike does not like to get passed. The fast bike was made by Bob Parlee in Massachusetts and could care less about the ineffectual sack of ground beef turning the pedals. It has business to attend to.

So off we go charging into a deafening headwind and picking off wobbly boardwalk types here and there, but basically maintaining an average speed approximately 12kph faster than any doctor would tell you I’m supposed to be going.

And then I see him, a speedy-looking Fred like me in the distance ahead, the rabbit that’s going to keep me buried for another ten minutes or so. Only a few boardwalk cruisers between us.

But do I really want to be doing this? So what if I catch him, but I’m all blown up and pathetic-looking? How bad would that be? And what if I get by and then just hover there like the aerobic muppet I really am? I take a second to remind myself to give an “on the left” before going around the cruisers while I continue to give this some more thought.

It’s then that I notice I haven’t gained any ground yet. I mean on the cruisers. A quick check shows some frantic leg action by Cruiser Woman, following by power coasting, then more frantic leg action. My own cadence has been relentless. It’s pancake flat, but the wind has my legs in “long climb” mode. Temporarily, everything I’ve ever believed is wrong.

I lock onto the blur of the two cruisers in my head and chase like a drooling fool. At some point I notice the woman is wearing flip-flops. I’m in the drops. If a small child in a bathing suit were to step out in front of me, I would forever be cleaning him off my glasses. People play volleyball and barbecue on the broad expanse of beach-like area along the river. I have gained some ground. The flip-flops are blue.

As I close in, it becomes clear that something is wrong. We’ve passed the guy I’d originally set out to catch. There’s a kind of bobbing to the heads of Cruiser Guy and Girl. The wind is so loud that only when I’m within a bike length do I hear the motors–two-stokes at that, chainsaw loud. My bicycle and I have now drawn up alongside bikes with motors, and I feel the way a dog might feel after working for a half hour to corner a tiger, only to realize he’s cornered a tiger.

I get around them by pretending I have a motor and use the image of their slouching bodies and vaguely bored expressions to pull away. I have passed motherfuckers on motorcycles.

And then I think, “There were motorcycles on the bike path.” I still don’t know how I feel about that. At the beginning of the ride I’d had to pass two guys jogging side-by-side and had felt bad for being a faster-moving bicycle, disrupting their conversation, and here were two chainsaws on wheels zipping along on the same path.

I need to get used to it.

According to Make Magazine, this Blackbird is a “super-charged pedal-powered super cruiser.”

Pedal-powered means it has pedals.

It’s cool and everything, and kudos to the guy who fabricated it. It’s a pretty impressive piece of work. Except that it’s not really pedal powered.

According to Makezine.com:

Eleven feet long and 150 lbs, the ‘Blackbird’ is ‘a fully custom made electric recumbent chopper bicycle constructed of off-the-shelf parts from the hardware store’ combined with scrap bike components, along with a commercial motor and battery. As for being super-charged, this bike is driven by a 36V DC motor capable of delivering 50 miles per charge at up to 20 MPH. If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper! An array of cateyes, headlights, a pair of monkeylights, and even a singular spinning strobe light would definitely cause this machine to be confused with a UFO late at night!”

So here they are, the new vehicles in the bike lanes, and I have to admit I’m still processing the significance of that.

On the one hand, that contraption really is pretty cool in a kind of Mad Max, Steampunk sort of way, but something about the “150lbs” part makes the sentence, “If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper!” seem a little optimistic. Having previously pedaling something that weighed about 150lbs, I can assure you that nothing about the experience warranted an exclamation point at the end of it.

And I guess that’s what bothers me about this motorized bicycle thing. I love motorcycles–grew up riding them–but we’re really starting to have a good thing going here with human-powered ways of getting around cities, and there’s a kind of self-sufficiency that comes with that that I’m not sure you get with a motor. Has the emphasis already swung back to needing to get there that must faster?

Or maybe I’m just still sore about getting roughed up by some people in flip-flops. Tough to say. Even my bike’s still confused.

Poison Oak and Customer Relations on Sincline

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May 142012

On Saturday I headed to Syncline Trail with Jason, who’d borrowed a Cannondale Jekyll. If each model in the Cannondale line has a slightly different purpose, the Jekyll seems to be designed for testing unorthodox rear shocks. Remember the “trunion mount” Jekyll? I do. In fact I sold some of those bikes, which is something I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life.

This current version is much better. For one thing it doesn’t have the unique 50-degree seat tube feel from Jekyll days of yore. As is the Jekyll way, it’s sporting no less than a double-cannistered ray-gun-looking pull shock. Both Cannondale and Scott seem committed to sticking with classic single-pivot/faux bar bike designs, but building them as exotic and carbon-fibery as possible, and going all-out on linkage and rear shock uniqueness. Based on my brief and less than scientific analysis, I thought this current Jekyll rode particularly well. Not sure what living with that rear shock would actually entail, but I rode around very briefly on the new Jekyll without looking around in a panic for my 29er, which is unusual for me when trying to ride a 26-inch wheel bike.

One of the best things about riding here is the terrain. You get so many completely different types of terrain all packed into such a small area–sometimes within the span of a single ride. Having never been to Syncline before, we took care to do almost everything wrong, climbing what we’re pretty sure was Maui Trail, one trail further East than we’d intended, and much of the trail was exposed, little to no canopy cover, with dry, loose rocks on the climbs alternating with the occasional rock steps and slabs. Sure, you’re in the Pacific Northwest–big deep forests and stuff–but one of the sections on Syncline is named “Little Moab,” and not ironically. Once at the top we ended up on what I’m pretty sure was Crybaby, based on the off-cambers and sheer plummet of doom to the all-too immediate right. Under any type of tree-cover the ferns and mossy trees appeared again, along with enormous quantities of Poison Oak. It’s that time of year at Syncline, apparently. Some of the most fun, steep descents were made even more fun by my mad slaloming to avoid patches of the sickly shimmering stuff. Then out onto the rock outcrops where Mt. Hood comes into view again. Some fantastic riding, but we left a lot still unexplored. Definitely have to go back.

Rolling out of the parking lot earlier that morning, I’d noticed a guy riding a Corsair Marque. You just don’t see that too often, so it left an impression. Later we met him again on the climb and struck up a conversation. Likely fearing we were rabid brick-and-mortar guys, he was a little evasive at first about the bike’s origins, but admitted finally that he’d bought it from a place called Speedgoat. So the first person I talk to on a trail in the Pacific Northwest bought his frame from me–and such a nice guy. He was one of those guys who’s genuinely happy to be talking about the trails. I made a brief introduction, thanked him, and wished him a good ride. To this day I think some of what Pablo Tafoya was doing with those designs was really cool, but I was happy to hear the owner of the Marque was a mechanical engineer.

The best part of the ride, other than the views and the descent, had to be this, the best written “No Trespassing” sign ever written, pointed out to me by Jason.

It almost made me wish we’d brought cheese and wine.

You can find some good Syncline information over here.

Our Own Devices

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May 112012

So I’m away from my family again. When left to my own devices, as I have been twice in as many years, I revert to a kind of primal bachelorism that doesn’t involve binge drinking and strip clubs so much as eyestrain and saturated fats. Without my family around, I think about work and work-related stuff pretty much unceasingly, and I eat really horrible food.

The upside of this is that I tend to find myself waiting in line at Taco Bell at 7:00pm at night, and–having failed to eat anything but a spoonful of peanut butter since 7:00am that morning and just slightly hallucinatory, the world around me becomes one big allegory for the bicycle industry.

Last night, for instance, I’m waiting in line behind this enormous guy at Taco Bell, and I’m thinking about mountain bike pedals when all the pieces suddenly start falling into place.

One of the guys in the office had roasted his Crank Bros. pedals for like the zillionth time–bushings in there, you know–and as I’m contemplating the cost savings of plastic bushings versus some more robust options, I can’t help but notice that the massive guy in front of me is ordering food that isn’t on the menu.

I don’t mean to suggest he’s gotten his Kentucky Taco Hut™ (pretty sure that reference is licensed to my friend, Dan) nomenclature all jacked up and is asking the taco man for fried chicken. He seems to know he’s in Taco Bell and that various tacos are what’s on the menu. It’s just that he’s hell bent on combining the words on the menu in ways that don’t refer to available food. He wants, for instance, “A Supreme Pizza Taco,” or a “Grand Burrito” or just “a Supreme.” Most of these words appear on the backlit Taco Bell menu he’s referencing, mind you–it’s just that none of them appear in the combinations he’s attempting. The poor guy behind the counter has at this point taken out a plasti-covered menu and is doing his best to translate, but the sheer skill with which the big guy is deftly avoiding any word combination of food that’s actually available is sort of breathtaking. Hungry as I am, a point is reached at which I’m essentially rooting for him.

And that’s when it occurs to me that so much of the bike industry is very much like this exchange. There’s a kind of disconnect between what we’re asking for, and what’s actually on the menu.

You know what would be great, for instance? A Crank Bros. pedal with at least some small attention to moving parts. I’m not expecting Chris King hub-like design here, but some form of bearing capable of withstanding the weight of a 150lb rider for a full season or two doesn’t seem out of the question in a day and age when most automobile engines last well over a hundred thousand miles, and your phone can tell your TV to record a show you won’t be home in time to see. You know, just a pedal that actually works as nice as all Crank Bros. pedals look. I think Crank Bros. could probably do it if they wanted to.

Time was the company that started the whole “open rail” pedal design, but it’s become increasingly clear over the years that they just aren’t trying anymore. They’ve taken the ATAC, an initially brilliant idea, and continued to make it worse and worse over the years by accentuating the crap nobody liked (lateral float?) and whittling away at what did (there’s a simplicity to the original ATAC pedal body that’s been completely lost on the current designs). Look entered the scene talking all kinds of game about bearings, but ended up boldly distinguishing themselves from both Time and Crank Bros. by somehow producing a pedal that functioned worse while simultaneously demanding more time and energy to properly set up. The “It’s expensive and doesn’t work, and you’ll like it like that, bitches!” approach to bike component design, while sporadically popular in Europe, never seems to gain traction in the U.S. a country where beer cans have visual indicators to tell us when they’re cold. In fact, it’s almost as if every company but Shimano is circling the ideal pedal but doesn’t want to go ahead and create it for fear of actually making everyone too happy.

Why can’t someone just give us our Supreme Pizza Taco pedal? It’d just be nice to have at least one alternative to Shimano in terms of construction.

Here’s a quick sketch:

It has a pedal body doesn’t appear to be made from recycled Star Wars action figures.
There are ball bearings on the inside, like there are on the pedals the DH guys use.
The end caps stay on, and it uses a collete lock mechanism similar to a Santa Cruz frame pivot, making that high-kick you do when your foot finally pulls the whole pedal right off the spindle a thing of the past.
It uses a stupid-simple cage mechanism like all the ATAC offshoots do, except the cage is as minimal as possible.
You can rebuild it, and when you do, you feel like it’s at least better than it was before you rebuilt it.
Why not 3mm of adjustable Q-factor at the spindle while we’re at it? We are making up our own taco here, after all.

Just some really nice construction is the most important thing, instead of all the bullshit Steve Jobs wannabe marketing-first, product-second, let’s pick out the names and colorways before we even test it crap.

I still think there’s a lot of room out there for new companies who are actually listening to people who ride bikes.

Zen and the Art of Roadkill Documentation

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May 102012

Five percent of all road kill in the U.S. is never identified.

To the long list of reasons to ride your bike we can now safely add “scientific research.” According to Wired, a “roadkill observation project” was launched this week by Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between scientific researchers and adventurous outdoor types. Basically, they want you to document roadkill on your rides.

There are some genuine benefits for the scientific community here, but really, they pale in comparison to the advantages to the cycling community. First and foremost, this adds an entirely new and seemingly airtight argument for riding a bike almost continually–a particularly nice development for more aged and doughy riders for whom the “I’m training” argument rings increasingly hollow, particularly when you haven’t registered for any competitive event short of pie eating since at least 1985.

Far more important, though, is the sense of connectedness–and a legitimate, “larger than ourselves” kind of purposeful connectedness, too, not just that cheesy, digital kind. I’m talking real connections.

“I think that cyclists and the pedestrian world have this weird connection to roadkill because of the risk we’re always facing,” says Fraser Shilling, University of California, Davis ecologist and the man behind the idea to link adventure and scientific data.

Disconcerting and somewhat disturbing as that sentiment may be–in fact I’m still processing it hours after having first read it–the data-collection argument for bike riding really is all about connecting with the world around you in a more meaningful way. Messy and unpleasant as documenting roadkill may seem, the Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation’s program offers an entirely new and exotic kind of smug, a strange and just slightly demented new way to make the world a better place–which is much more than your over-competitive asshole of a friend can say about the new personal best Strava data he just posted, which frankly seems a little fishy, even if his wife did just buy him that new bike which was really a crock of shit anyway because it was his yearly bonus money she used to buy it and he only even got the bonus in the first place because he’s like naturally gifted at smiling that shit-eating smile of his and slapping guys on the back and wearing his Drakkar Noir and power ties.

How pathetic and futile these narcissistic concerns seem to you now as you straddle your aging bike at the side of the road, holding your phone above what may have been a platypus, or just a duck that died while engaged in some sort of terrible disagreement with a squirrel.

Ecosystems: Come Get Some

Bikes, Gadgets 3 Responses »

May 092012

Are there no standards anymore?”
– Phillipe Anselmo

I’ve been thinking some more about yesterday’s post regarding the relentless march of system engineering and the death of compatibility, and a few things have occurred to me. Of the two or three people still reading this blog, I suspect my audience now divides pretty evenly into:

Those intrigued by misadventure and perversely curious to see if I’ve survived each day–and if a blog post would show up anyway, even if I didn’t.
Those inclined to think so much like me that I’m now your daily affirmation. Lookin’ good, guys.

Misadventure has been at a minimum lately, though by “lately” I mean no attempt has been made on my life in the last 48-hours, and for the record I did manage to flat somehow on what’s only a two mile ride into work this morning, so I’m not ready to declare life as official “grand” just yet. But while misadventure takes a much needed holiday, I’d like to focus on that second one, those deeply interesting individuals out there who share my strange views.

Well done.

Given that you probably already think like me, you’ll no doubt be thinking exactly what I’m thinking about proprietary designs. Exactly! It sure worked for Sega when it comes to urinal video games.

Yes, the one time mighty video game console manufacturer who contributed Sonic the Hedgehog to the culture of Western Civilization before failing to keep up with X-boxes and Playstations of the world has found what we’d call a niche, manufacturing urinal-based interactive video games.

Yep. Stop thinking about “standards” for bikes and start thinking instead about “ecosystems,” today’s hip term for “shit that doesn’t work with other shit.” Apple may be the undisputed lords of ecosystem, owning nearly 100% of the hardware, software, and messy “humans” involved in the manufacturing, sale, and use of their products. Liberate your music files from iTunes and you feel like you should have cosmetic surgery and move to Mexico. Jailbreak your iPhone and you probably should.

But not to be outdone, Sega is showing us that which ecosystem you own isn’t important. What’s important is owning one. And check out how awesome the games are.

I can’t even imagine getting tired of that video game. It makes me wish I could piss for hours and hours. You have to hand it to Sega. There’s just something so funny about terrible weather in Japan, and is there nothing anime chauvinism can’t make even more funny?

Listen up, bike companies. Sega teaches us it’s not what you own; it’s just that you own it. Hello 50mm pipe spindle bottom brackets with electromagnetic fields for bearings® and trucker mudflap chick tread pattern tires©!

All Ball Bearings Nowadays

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May 082012

All Ball Bearings

One advantage to simultaneously working forty-two different jobs within the bike industry is the connections you get to make. Not just between people, but between ideas. At this point I have a different hand in retail; wholesale and manufacturing; design and engineering; and media and journalism. Actually, some of those are feet, maybe a nose, and an ear. It’s quite the game of Twister I have going on.

But that degree of “fly vision” I have lately–a weird kind of 360-degree view of how things are working–makes wearing the many hats pretty interesting. I might notice a cause one place, the effect in another. On the surface, none of the things I’m doing seem to have anything to do with one another, but the patchwork starts to make sense when I step back from it, and you can really see trends and movements. One day I may even be able to see the imaginary construct that is the bike industry as all Neo-green ones and zeros.

One of the intersections I have going on right now involves organizing product categories, writing product copy, and thinking about current “standards” for frame bottom-brackets and head tubes, and the more I look at each of these things, the more I realize something about where we’re headed as an industry.

Standards are going away.

I mean that literally, mechanically-speaking, not as a kind of moral judgment (though there are definitely some shady characters in the business). From a design standpoint, I think we’re approaching a time when each bike is going to be its own unique animal, with fewer and fewer options for swapping parts between bikes. We’re talking about the extreme extension of “system engineering” here, and depending on your perspective, that’s either the key to having the strongest, lightest bikes possible, or a hell unlike any of us have ever experienced.

It all starts with ball bearings. Consider how ridiculous it would be if companies manufacturing full-suspension bikes had to buy their pivot bearings from SRAM or Shimano. So why do they bother buying headsets and bottom brackets? For now there’s still an advantage to letting somebody else worry about making those, but the window on that seems to be closing. Poor Cane Creek and Chris King make about 700 variations of internal, external, zero-stack, straight, tapered, mix-tapered and holographically chamfered headsets, but none of them fit a Ridley, because why the hell shouldn’t Ridley just make their own even more ginormous diameter lower bearing? Carbon fiber has largely changed the way we think about bicycle frames: if you’re spending the money on a mold anyway, why not just have it include almost everything you need–everything but the bearings themselves?

And even if you don’t make your own headsets and bottom-brackets, what’s really left to engineer and market about a Press-fit 30? How different can one brand’s BB30 be from another’s? About all you can do is release a ceramic bearing option–the headset and bottom-bracket manufacturer’s version of adding another child to a sitcom family.

It’ll all start with the ball bearings. Everything else will take a while, but try to think of a component a bike manufacturer hasn’t yet tried to make.

Disc brakes? Remember AMP? Any poor Coda owners still out there?

Crankset? That design Specialized bought from the recumbent company seems to be working out just fine for them.

Stems, bars, saddles, seatposts and tires? Bontrager.

Suspension fork? Cannondale banged their head against that wall until it finally cracked (ambiguity there’s entirely intentional so’s to appeal to both fans of Lefty forks and to the detractors, but you have to admit, they’re here to stay). Even Specialized keeps wrapping Fox and RockShox guts in their own shells, and that’s exactly how proprietary is going to happen. You won’t see Fox and Shimano going out of business. Your shit just won’t be able to move from one bike to another any more.

And maybe that’s not such a big deal. You don’t buy a Honda CRF frame and then build it into a full bike (well, most of us don’t, anyway). But the key is that this stuff has to work. If system-engineering proprietary parts are where we’re headed, there should be a noticeable advantage in things like performance and durability. Look at what Santa Cruz did for suspension pivots. They redesigned the shit out of an otherwise standard issue generic bearing, but the result was way better pivots, so nobody’s bitching (or if they are, they should take Santa Cruz up on the free replacement offer).

It’s all ball bearings nowadays. Let’s hope that if proprietary happens, it actually makes life better. Jury is still very much out on that one.

Ride Around Clark County

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May 072012

Somehow I’ve managed to love riding bicycles despite the fact that I haven’t been in acceptable physical condition since 1978. Unlike those unique individuals who can drink a case of Miller for breakfast and then bag a 100-mile single-speed mountain ride, I approach any ride over five miles with the wary preparation of the chronically unfit. I don’t mean to suggest I stretch or anything, just that I worry about it a lot.

I’m also fairly sure that sometime between 2005 and 2011 continued exposure to extremely unhealthy levels of stress damaged some kind of valve in my head that regulates sleep. My wife tells me this is related to cortisol levels, and I’m inclined to believe her, but I only know there’s hardly any point in the day when I could not spontaneously fall asleep. The only exception to this is night-time, when you’re supposed to.

At any rate, it’s been a pretty unhealthy few years there. I’ve tried to ride at least some almost every day, but all short rides, too many of them inside on rollers, and I haven’t done any significant road rides since I used to be able to ride bikes with my wife, back in 2004, before life got extremely complicated. It was with some trepidation, then, that I told my boss, Jay, I’d join him and the Portland Velo club for a group ride on the 2012 Ride Around Clark County in Vancouver.

Not doing the ride would have been absurd. For one thing, my boss asked me to go ride bikes. I’m not blind to how rare and fantastic a thing that is. Secondly, I’m moving there. The ride was going to roll through much of the neighborhood where I’ll be living, and there’s no better way to see it. Of course I would love to do it, yes, thank you, I’ll be there. Done.

The only thing was the miles.

And, to a lesser degree, the condition of my road bikes, which hadn’t been touched since being strapped to the roof of my car for 2700 miles, and weren’t flawless even before the trip started.

I didn’t have the impression that we’d be doing the 18-mile loop. Jay has ridden across the country. I hadn’t met anyone from Portland Velo, but they didn’t sound like dabblers.

Friday night I took an inventory of my diet over the past month since starting the drive across the country and setting up camp in my basement AirBNB room, and realized I’ve been subsisting on hamburgers, cookies and beer. This had the potential to be ugly.

As it turns out, a lot of people ride bicycles here. The photo up top is just the people who happened to be at the first rest stop at the same time we were. Turnout for the ride was huge, despite the cooler temperatures and occasional light right (which turned out to be just about perfect). The members of Portland Velo are extremely nice people with extremely nice bicycles. Just within the smaller group of twenty or so riders in our group, we had two Parlees, a gorgeous Indy Fab, and even a Tom Kellogg built Spectrum.

Some great bikes on this ride. There's a Pinarello, Parlee, Moots and Strong Ti bike in this photo.

We did the 65-mile loop, and somehow I survived. Partly it was scenery, and partly it was getting to ride with a really nice group of people, but I hung on. The self abuse diet caught up to me around mile 55, when the quads went (first right, then left), which meant the decision to give up standing, a resolution arrived at following a delicate negotiation between legs and ass. There seems to come a point for me when my legs have officially cramped, but I’m still able to pedal as long as I’m seated. In fact, it’d be more accurate to say I’m unable to stop pedaling without causing my whole body to cramp endlessly in on itself until all of me can fit into a space about the size of a Starbuck’s Grande cup. So I started the last ten miles or so developing a strategy for how I would eventually get off my bike and back into my car without ending up in the fetal position or alarming passers-by.

For whatever reason, though, the cramps mostly went away in the last few miles, allowing me something like composure during the process of loading up the bike. Well, as much composure as possible when you’re loading a ridiculously nice road bike onto a car that’s missing a rear window on the passenger side, and is completely caved in on the driver’s side.

Open Letter to the City of Portland

Bikes, Uncategorized Comments Off

May 042012

Cars Really R Coffins

OK, Portland. No cars. I get it. Please don’t hurt me.

For the second time this week, somebody tried to drive into what’s left of my poor Subaru, and this time–unless there’s some custom here of making left hand turns from “right turn only” lanes–you can’t blame the out-of-state driver.

Seriously, somebody needs to let me know how many Radiohead-inspired cerebro-trios from the 1900s do you have around here, because I’m running out of quarter panels on my car.

So I’m sitting at a light in a lane with straight ahead arrow. To my right is a Toyota Rav 4 sitting in a lane with a right turn only arrow. Light changes. I go straight. He goes left. What the fuck?

Fortunately, I now drive like a goddamn ninja, figuring at any minute a bicycle could crash through my window, or a reunited R.E.M. could come at me in a tanker truck, so you didn’t get me this time, Portland. Eyes in the back of my head.

I understand now why everyone rides a bicycle here. It’s because driving is just too risky. Impressive as it is, the large and ever-increasing percentage of those commuting by bicycle in Portland is partially the result of the rapid extinction of hapless drivers. At this rate, in two years the only people left to have accidents will be the triathletes.

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