chris@canootervalve.com

Ecosystems: Come Get Some

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

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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.

Fresh Pairs

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May 032012

What are you trying to tell me, underwear stalkers?

The march of interweb technology definitely seems to be detouring through some dark alleys these days.

Given the twenty or so odd hours I spend immersed in the bike industry, my various browsers roll past an endless string of e-commerce bike sites, which these days means I have something like ten thousand ads for cranksets and carbon 29er frames perpetually following me around. Since the whole Backcountry acquisition, Competitive Cyclist is particularly intense. They have some funky-ass ad functionality that compiles lists of anything you’ve looked at on their sites (applies to all the Backcountry properties) and keeps pushing it in front of you. It makes for a weirdly invasive and pushy vibe compared to the graceful homage to product and “come hither” bit that got them where there are today, and even the image quality on the little ads that follow you around everywhere you go seems out of place and below their standards. But if you need Amazon-like reminders that you looked at shit your life won’t be complete until you purchase, these ads are probably very effective.

Still, they creep me out.

They’re light years better, however, than the mysterious ads that cause you to question your life.

Case in point: why are ads for underwear from a company called “Fresh Pair” now following me everywhere I go? Yes, I’m living in a basement right now, and yes, there’s a bit of an ant problem, but I’m pretty anal retentive (literally) about keeping my clothes clean, thanks. And while I refuse on principle to visit their site, I have the impression that Fresh Pairs is marketed to a group of ultra-achieving males so busy reshaping the corporate world in their chiseled image that they need to schedule replenishment supplies of high-fashion, overpriced underwear.

Anyway, whatever system targeted me as an ideal candidate for underwear replenishment must have been using a complex underwear-condition-sensing algorithm that considers factors like:

Phone GPS – He’s a long way from home and has been there more than two weeks.
Purchase history – He seems to have purchased underwear at some point in the past.
Complex text crawling and processing – He’s living in a basement and rides bikes and stuff.
Government records – He appears to have at least one and possibly more jobs right now–likely ones that involve interacting with other people.
Demographic analysis – Based on age and gender, we suspect he is unable to take care of his own basic apparel needs without assistance.

So thanks, Fresh Pair. I appreciate all the attention, really, but the thing is, I would never spend on designer underwear. Nice try and all, but your data set is fatally incomplete. In addition to all those criteria causing your evil perma-cookies to annoy the hell out of me, I am also married, have children, and long ago gave up on impressing anybody–least of all myself. You are stalking the wrong cowboy, guys, and it’s doing neither of us any good.

If a company offering Subaru body shop work where to start stalking me with ads, then we might be getting somewhere.

Godsmacked and Shamwowed

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May 022012

I have this complicated relationship with fate. Probably just the Catholic upbringing, but when things are going well, I tend to become highly suspicious, and things have been going eerily well for me here in the Pacific Northwest.

Not perfect. My basement apartment is sort of weirdly freezing all the time, regardless of the temperature outside, and I’m working stupid-long hours, but we found an amazing home that’s pretty close to work, the schools are really good, and I’m enjoying the hell out of all the different work I’m doing.

And then my wife flies into town and everything I’ve loved about Portland she completely gets, grinning like I haven’t seen her grin in years as we’re walking from the loan officer’s place to dinner downtown. She loves this city. She loves the house in Washington that’s only fifteen minutes from downtown Portland. It’s great here.

To my mind, of course, this is the last nail in the happiness coffin. Things are officially going smashingly, and something’s got to give.

Turns out, it was the Subaru.

The poor, long-suffering Outback–already sporting a dry erase board in place of the rear passenger-side window from the Jones bike that crashed through it at the start of my drive across the country–ended up getting stomped by a van as we left the city.

Statistically, the odds of being attacked by an indy band with Radiohead influences while driving in Portland are like 1 in 3, and I’ve since found out that the incredibly nice young gentleman driving the van is one third of a band called Rags and Ribbons. The guy on keys was also in the van, was also an incredibly nice guy, and nobody was hurt all around, which is the best part. This particular band seems like pretty talented guys and create an interesting sound for a trio with no bass player. Plus, and they have a video where a kid runs through the woods in his pajamas.

Really the most fantastic part, considering I’d been sort of expecting the worst, is that we weren’t killed right then and there. This realization, that the godsmack had occurred and we’d survived, made me weirdly happy as I exchanged insurance information. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on the band, who watched me giddily tearing the ground effects off my car so that I could drive it from the scene, and probably wondered if everyone from Pennsylvania was like that.

Maybe I’ll be struck by lightning tomorrow, but for now, I feel like I’ve passed some sort of pop quiz Portland decided to throw at me. It could have been really bad–a much heavier band in a much larger van–but it wasn’t.

Further proof that my ch’i was in need of realignment before I could start my new life as a lumberjack? Today I walked out to my car, armed with the same excellent black duct tape that was used to install the makeshift dry erase window, and prepared to tape my side mirror back into something like its original location.

Being Portland, it had rained most of the day, but unlike Portland, this had been a hard rain, the kind that soaks your shoulders and thighs when you ride your bike in it, even through jackets and rain pants. The poor Subaru was saturated–far from an ideal moment to apply tape.

“What I need,” I heard myself think, “is a kind of rag or something.”

And then there it was.

For some reason, when I sold my business and packed up a bunch of stuff to move to Chicago (similar to the Portland move only eternally sad and fruitless), I came across a genuine Shamwow. I don’t know where it came from, but it went with me to Chicago, and then home again, and somehow it was on the trip to Portland.

Given that my window had been busted out, I’d removed everything–I mean everything–from my car in case of break in, but standing there in the rain holding my mangled and dangling mirror in one hand and tape in the other and thinking, “I need a rag,” I noticed it there on the floor of the car. The Shamwow. Say what you will about Vince, the embattled Shamwow spokesman, but there is no better product for cleaning the surface of a snapped off mirror before attempting to reattach it with tape than a well-traveled Shamwow.

Not only did my tape manage to reattach the mirror–handy, because I have to be at a house inspection and then back at work as fast as possible tomorrow–but the mirror even adjusts position electronically again. None of this would have been possible without the Shamwow, which I think will become some form of pop art in my new home or go with me everywhere from now on. I’ve never been out for big wins and world domination so much as just surviving and focusing on what really matters. Ribbons are swell, but rags are really useful. And Shamwows are just plain magical.

The Home Front

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May 012012

With a little luck, looks like this is going to be our new home. Not Mt. Hood, exactly–I think we’re going to take a break from living on mountains for a while–but Camas, Washington, a town outside of Vancouver, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. Maybe we’ll find toxic waste everywhere or maneating slugs or something, but we’ve done a lot of homework at this point, and I think we might really love living here.

Posts may be even sketchier than usual over the next few days, as there are still some contractual wranglings to be done, but we’re pretty close. Soon, I’ll get to fly home to Pittsburgh to repeat the whole cross-country drive in a sweet rental truck with the governor set to 60mph max. Nebraska waits with its razor-sharp-toothed gaping jaws of relentless boredom. At any rate, we’re close enough to new home ownership at this point that I’m practicing channeling my sleep-deprivation hallucinations into genuine entertainment.

Now also begins the research. Yesterday, I noticed three guys on hardtails heading off from Lacamas Lake Park–one of them sporting a full-face helmet. Promising sign.

Solid States

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Apr 302012

While I’ve been adjusting to a new life in Portland and spending every minute outside of work searching for a new home, some interesting things have been afoot back in the bike industry. Most notably, evidence of what basically amounts to a merger between Shimano and Fox continues to grow. I’d first written about the “unique electricity” between the two companies back on March 2nd, but at this point, they might as well have exchanged class rings.

Regardless of what any of us think of completely and utterly wired bicycles, the intersection of Di2 and Fox’s CTD suspension system should pretty much be considered the point at which the two companies effectively become one–at least as far as competitors are concerned. Given all the suspension patents being held by Shimano and the more recent evidence surfacing on Geoff Kabush’s Scott, the partnership is definitely trying to shake off SRAM. The most interesting part of all of this might now become SRAM’s response. In the past, SRAM has proven particularly effective at using Shimano’s innovations against them, turning the barrel of things like “Dual-control” right back at them and pulling the trigger. For all the grumbling, electronics have been receiving a pretty warm welcome from consumers, while SRAM holds to an emphasis on ultralight mechanical designs and simplicity. Shimano remains the 800lb gorilla of the bike business, but both companies are on pretty solid ground now, and both are capable of innovating.

Given that SRAM seems to prefer to grow by acquisition, if they were to go after electronics, it’s tough to imagine any clear targets, but more unique companies like Factor are certainly doing some interesting and very different things with integrated electronics.

One way or another, it seems like the next few years are going to be pretty interesting to watch.

Factors

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Apr 262012

A Note from Your Author: Looks like my scheduled post for Thursday never posted, which I guess is as good as any way to take a day off, but here it is anyway:

I’m writing this one the night before it posts. By the time you read this, I may be divorced, dead, or even the owner of a new home somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. My wife, sick with a killer head cold, arrives in Portland around 11:00pm Pacific, which is 2:00am Eastern. When healthy, this woman tends to be a “morning person,” waking up at 5:30am every morning, but borderline comatose by 10:00pm each night. So this should be interesting.

Bright and early tomorrow, she’ll go off with one real estate agent while I go to work. Then, after work, as I’ve done twice this week already, I’ll head out with another real estate agent. Possibly later we’ll meet or something. Tough to say.

The plan appears to be spreading out across as much of the Northwest as we can, thereby increasing the number of homes that just won’t work for us exponentially. It’s possible we’re going for some kind of viewing record, though my inability to quit my job(s) to turn professional house hunter will no doubt thwart everything.

You may have noticed I rarely type words like “bike” or “bicycle” these days, but this shouldn’t be construed as an indication that they’re not on my mind. In fact, I’m helping launch one new company while experiencing the onset of “catalog season” at another. So I’m still ass-deep in bikes, as they say (they don’t actually say that, I think), and I’m paying attention to what’s going on out there.

Speaking of which, how ’bout Steve Domahidy’s new project! I knew Steve and Chris from Niner years ago while I was running Speedgoat, and I’ve gotten to know both guys a bit more over the years, and it’s no wonder Niner became the company it’s become. I have a small sense of the time and energy Steve’s put into helping develop that bike, and it’s hard to overstate the kind of focus it takes to pull that stuff off. Making bikes happen is a job, pure and simple. Like any other job, there’s shit you have to put up with, constraints, personalities to work with and around–it’s a job. It looks–at least anyone involved in making bikes prefers it to look–as if these things just spring to life with pixie dust and whimsy and somebody’s trust fund, but in fact there are deadlines, rules and regulations and endless reams of crap to track, and there’s accountability, which is like the opposite of whimsy.

The Factor bikes definitely rub some purists the wrong way, but the funny things is that they’re almost always the same purists who like to bitch about the UCI. And hipsters. And DH guys. Bitching’s easy. I nearly managed to make a career of it. Actually bringing shit into the world is hard. I emailed Steve to congratulate him today, because he definitely deserved it. The designs he’s creating fly in the face of convention, and I really think we should have more people doing that.

And more cheap five bedroom homes in the Portland and Vancouver areas.

Good Neighbors

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Apr 252012

Anyone still reading this might have noticed I’ve been somewhat distracted lately. Basically, I’m taking time off from Canootervalve, but seem to still be writing. Peculiar, that.

Between the two gigs, the occasionally Manic Mechanic piece for Dirt Rag and the suspension system design, dull moments have been few and far between. Add in a house search that commenced 9:00am the morning I hit Portland and has chugged along steadily (second day in a row of going house hunting after work), and at this point I’m just looking for a peaceful and beautiful home where I can finally have that massive heart attack.

We’re committed to Surburbia–sort of intentionally. Bear taking monster dumps in your yard, and constantly having to relocate rattlesnakes is OK when you’re twenty five and have no kids (actually, it’s not even OK then, really), but three kids later, we’re more than ready for the cul de sac. After hearing the wife and kids got hit with fifteen inches of snow back home on the mountain in Pennsylvania this week, this sentiment has only been reinforced.

Still, all these houses I’m seeing sure are close together.

Growing up my life was pretty great when we were one of only a few houses in the neighborhood. Lots of dirt in which to play all day long. Between the lead in the soil, mine shafts that would occasionally open when I used to play, and general radioactivity, it’s somewhat surprising I’m not clutching my Deschutes Black Butte Porter in my handy prehensile tail as I type this.

The search goes on, anyway. I’ll be plenty happy when all if it’s over, and I can once again blame my typos and general incomprehensibility on the fact that I was typing all this while watching The Colbert Report. Until then, I’ll practice getting used to some actual neighbors by wearing pants inside the house. At least during peak hours.

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