listen to your mechanic, and change your cables

 

I did the annual pre-season tune and checkup on a customer's bike today. The bike is fifteen years old, with Shimano Ultegra road shifters, and the cables had never been changed.

So?

So in the past 2-3 years, I've worked on four or five bikes with Shimano road shifters (Ultegra and 105), where the shift cable has parted inside the shifter. In some cases, I was able to remove the short bit of cable and get the shifter working again; in others, I could not, and the shifter is gonna shift again, quoth the raven, nevermore.

I've resolved to tell folks with older bikes with Shimano road shifters that I recommend changing the cables, based on these experiences. My customer today agreed, so I changed 'em out (internally-routed shifting, so a PITA, but that's a rant for another post). The old cables are in the picture above. There's a terrible blow-up below:

 The lower cable is for the rear shifter, and you can clearly see the frayed cable. It was a matter of time and use before this let go. The cable above is from the front shifter. It's used much less frequently, but the careful eye will note that the black Teflon covering is wearing away a short distance down the cable.

The older Shimano shifters have the cable take a hard turn inside, and I'm sure that's what's causing the wear. I haven't seen the same problem with SRAM stuff, and I doubt it will be a problem with Shimano GRX shifters, partly because they're newer (after all, this takes a decade or so to happen!), and partly because the don't make the same demand of such a hard turn on the cable.

(But it WAS gratifying to have my recommendation so clearly confirmed!)

So if someone tells you to change out your old cables, the like of this is why. 

*All is not necessarily lost if the shifter dies. Even if the speed combination is discontinued by Shimano, I've had good success with two Chinese manufacturers, Sensah and L-Twoo. So your 3x9 drivetrain may still be able to be saved.

wrenching at the tour de franklin

 The Franklin Township Food Bank Tour de Franklin is usually the first charity bike event of the season, and I've been wrench-for-the-day there for years (except for last year, when I was at school in Oregon). They have rides for the serious enthusiasts (including a metric century), but also rides down to 5 miles, for the local families who bring out their kids. I forgot my camera, and had to take what pictures I could on my phone (and I'm not as adept with my phone as I am with my single-purpose camera, but a few of 'em came out anyway).

My workstation:

 Some of the registrations:

 Early in the day:

 

The rides of the different routes start with a mass-start (they have a lot of fun with it, with a barker and a cheering squad):

 It was a very windy day, and cooler than expected, so there were fewer riders than there sometimes are. But (as is common for this ride, and other charity rides that cater to the riders with more hope and good wishes than experience) there were some unusual calls for service at the mechanic station. One rider broke off the top of his presta valve when he was loosening the schrader adapter he keeps on it; the tire continued to hold air, so he went off to do the ride. One woman took the opportunity to have her bars straightened; I expect she had been riding that way for years! We did a couple of chain lubes, and filled a LOT of tires.

The Food Bank provides me with a high-school assistant (she's a minor, so she doesn't get a picture). She was initially enthusiastic, then bored (which was appropriate; it was largely a slow day). But she was pleasant to speak to, and treated me is if I were not just some superannuated stranger.

I like being the event mechanic; they treat me with a deference I find pleasing, and I see people I don't often see otherwise. I'll plan to go back until they won't have me anymore.

more is coming; it will get better

 

A couple of years ago, I posted about a particularly bad time for my mental health (yeah, this is a link to the original post); I'd driven to scope out a location for suicide. I've posted about my fragile mental health here a couple of times since (like this post, and this one), and I refer to it in a few of my ride posts. For suicide prevention month or mental health month, I link to one of these from my Facebook page.

The tattoo above, on my left wrist, is a reminder. It was commonly, for a while, about suicide awareness and mental health generally. Amy Bleuel, who began Project Semicolon, later died of suicide.

This shit is no joke.

It also doesn't just go away. A few weeks ago, I could tell that the anxiety and depression was trying to come back, and, a week or two ago, it did. Attaching to some of the most minor of occurrences, it took over my life for a few days, and I was thinking of suicide again.

I got through it, but it was bad.

 So now there's the ampersand on my right wrist. I hope it will be a reminder that more is coming; that when things are bad, they won't always be, it will get better.

(The tattoo artist pointed out that it would be upside-down when my arms are hanging and others see it. That's OK; it's not for them.)

Thanks for listening.

abbreviated ride, and a shifting mystery

Laura OLPH listed a 50-mile ride on the club website for today, with 2500' of climb, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that... but then friend Tom H suggested a route that started with Laura's, but then took a shortcut, winding up with about 40 miles, and a smidge over 2000', and that sounded like a better idea. Tom and I signed up for Laura's ride, with the intention of turning off (which we did; no suspense there!).

 

Althea, above, new to the slugs, rides a stainless-steel Tomassini, and this bike is very nearly perfect.

Laura's "gimmick" for this ride is that she brings a bag of chocolate bunnies. Everybody who finishes get one, but they also go to the folks who make the worst jokes and puns along the way. In this crew, there's stiff competition.
 

I don't remember which road we were on when we found the closed lane... but of course, we did find the closed lane; after all, Tom H was on this ride.

 

 I did better today than I thought I would, and if I hadn't promised Tom I'd ride back with him, I might have gone on... (heavy foreshadowing here, and eerie organ music rises in the background). But Tom and I turned off shortly after this.

 

Tom's route included a stop at the Carousel in Ringoes, but when we got there...

 

 A couple of tables and some rusty chairs on the porch, and, although there was not a light on inside, one could peer in the window  and see that the shelves were almost bare (whatever was left on them must be virtually worthless). Perhaps another venture will open a deli there.

 

Perhaps it will be clean and inviting when they do.

 

Tom and I proceeded back to the start. About thirty miles in, I noticed that the rear derailleur was getting stuck on the easy gears.

 

Huh? If the cable breaks, the derailleur goes to the hard gear. I could tell right away that it wasn't the shifter, or anything having to do with the cable and housing up by the handlebar. I figured something might be stuck in the derailleur, so I pulled it out by hand. It came out to gear 5 (of my 10). I left it there and pedaled the rest of the way back, with only the two front gears for shifting.

 

That would have been tough if I'd continued with the 50-mile, 2500'-climb plan. As it was, it was a demanding last few miles.

 

When I got it home, I saw that the cable was fraying and getting stuck at the run of housing at the rear wheel dropout - fraying so much that I had to cut the cable in three pieces to remove it.

 

 You can click on the pic to see it bigger. If a cable looks like that, it's not gonna go gracefully through the housing. 

This derailleur is a recent Tiagra. Shimano has it cover ten gears over the amount of cable pull they usually assign for eleven gears. I think it's a bodge job by Shimano, or else an excuse so that you can't use this derailleur with any other indexed setup.

 

That's not generally an issue for me, as I still use bar-end friction shifters, so I don't worry about indexing. But the last bit of the cable leaves the housing at a sharp angle, and I'm sure that's what caused this on the ferrule:

 

 That's the ferrule from the end of the housing, just before the fixing bolt on the derailleur. The hole on the top is supposed to be circular, and it's anything but on this one; the hole is worn into an oblong. I expect the cable did that to the ferrule, and the sharpened edge of the ferrule then cut a few strands of the cable, leading to the fraying.

 

When I installed the new cable, I replaced the ferrules at the rear with plastic ones. It's been five years since I replaced the cables (when I installed the bar-end shifters... wait, has it really been that long?). I'll plan to keep an eye on the plastic ferrules to see how they do (I'll plan to, but I won't actually do it, until something untoward happens to the shifting... and then I'll look up this blog post to see what I did, and when I did it).

 

Maybe you want to think about changing your cables.

not fast. tough.

 

Today was my first "no pace" ride of 2025.

It's not about going fast; in fact, some of my riders come on this ride because they don't WANT to go fast. This ride is about getting out, meeting people, and chatting.

It was colder today than most of us expected. Some of the people who had registered for the ride, decided not to come. Two of those were honest enough to say it was colder than they had hoped.

 

I had ten (plus myself). We had a great time.

 

 

You can see the ride page (with the route, average speed, and whatnot) at this link. Don't let that average throw you from coming on future iterations of this ride - I ride near the back, at the speed that the slower riders are going. When people go slower (and, on this ride, they do), the average is lower.

We're not fast. But we're tough, and we enjoy each other's company. There will be more of these no-pace rides; look for 'em on the club calendar. (If you're not a member of the club, you might want to consider joining up.) A bit over twenty miles. The route's pretty flat. Some people go off the front (we let 'em); I ride with the people in the back.

A quick note about this one: Ramadan has JUST ended, and when we came up to the fields on Eiker Road, there were HUNDREDS of cars coming in from every direction to some kind of religious festival there. It was marvellously chaotic. We bobbled through and continued, wondering what it was, and figured it out later at the stop.

You never know what you're going to come across!

ride near the shore

 

Tom H invited some of his Insane Bike Posse (is that joke way outdated yet?) on a ride to start near his shore condo in Avon-By-The-Sea. The only takers were me and Jack H. It was a good ride for me, only notable for a few things:

• I was an hour late; I had it in my head that we were starting at 10am, not 9am as Tom had told us. I'm usually very early, and when he didn't see me at about 8:50, he called. I was already en route to the start, and the guys were kind enough to wait (I drove less than completely legally in order to try to make up time). Sure, it's a mistake that anybody can make, but it's the second time I've done it this month, and, as I turn 70 in about six weeks, and have just been scheduled for cataract surgery, I'm convinced the forgetting is a sign of my dementia related to aging, and I'm wondering how long before I'm put in the assisted-living facility, where they will plop me in front of a TV that only gets basic cable, and they'll forget to change my diaper until the stench peels paint off the walls.
• Nonetheless, 42-ish miles at 14.5mph, which is much better than I was doing in 2024. Serious headwinds at the start; at the end they were friendly tailwinds helping to blow us home. See the ride page here. 
• We stopped at this Allenwood General Store, which we generally miss because it's not convenient for the rides we generally do in the area, but it's a quirky and pleasant place. They had Mash soda (I call it "soda for grownups"; less cloyingly sweet than most, and interesting combinations of fruit flavors), and an available toilet... and several rooms of antiques and such in the back.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• I've got a "no pace" ride tomorrow; my first lead for the year, with about a dozen signed up. I'll plan to post on that one, too.

philly bike expo 2025

 

I feel like it's been forever since I attended one, even though I know I went last year.

I love the Philly Bike Expo. There's all kinds of bicycle weirdness. Like modern versions of the Ordinary, the so-called "Penny-Farthing", but these have modern aluminum rims and modern saddles, and are, I'm sure, much lighter than their forebears, if no less dangerous and uncomfortable:

 This guy makes sustainable bike stuff out of bamboo and invasive species:

... and he also sells boxed sets of bungee cords made of old bike tubes. 

There was a rep from the bike messenger world:

 Planet Ert sells jewelry, some of which is made from bits and bobs of bikes...

 ... and then there's Yellow Bird Threads, who used to sell bike clothing, and has moved on to jewelry for your bike - top tube covers, bar end plugs, and the like, all done up in colors and fancy machining.

 Ciclovation is making gorgeous bar wrap:

... and then there are artists inspired by bikes: Tanya Lempert (I usually get notecards from her):

... and paintings from Dug Art:

 Velo AI was out with a not-ready-for-prime-time concept of a bike light and radar system that will take a reading on whatever is coming up behind you, decide if it is a truck, car, or other cyclist, and also if it is likely to be a threat. It can put a message on your phone or GPS, and play tones to alert you... theoretically.

 Leather bike bags. Lovely. 

 But maybe not for rain and mud.

And, of course, beautiful bikes, old and new.

 

Fine is making bikes with lovely lugs.

 

I love the upward bend in the top tube nears the seatpost of the titanium bike, and the detail of how the seatstays meet the seat tube and top tube:

 

And some from Peter Weigle, a name to conjure with among bike folks.

 

 At one point, I heard someone call, "Old man!", clearly directed at me. (Not inappropriate, and certainly not inaccurate, but unusual...). I turned to find Gabe, who had been a fellow student in my bike mechanic class last year.

 

 

 At the time, he'd been working for one of the cycling magazines. They'd let him go, and he took advantage of the time by learning how to build frames. This is his:

 

 He's formed a company, Pana Cycles ("Pana" has some meaning like "companion" in the variety of Spanish that is his other language), and will be taking off to Puerto Rico to see about starting a frame shop there. I wish him every kind of luck except bad.

 

Now, I'd gone to the expo for two specific things. The first is a new rear derailleur that Rivendell Bikes is developing:

 

It's got some technical stuff having to do with the spring that you really don't care about, and it's Rivendell, so it will only index up to nine speeds (although it will manage more than that using friction settings)... but the thing that piques my interest is that it's "low normal". When the cable breaks, instead of going to that smallest cog, making it hard to get over the hills on the way home, it releases to the biggest cog. That will be too easy of a gear most of the time... but you'll probably be able to get the bike back home, without either having to call an Uber or an ambulance. In the pictures below, you can see that when the cable is all the way in, the chain is on the small, high gear, and when it's all the way out, its on the large, easy low gear.

 

I want one. The controls on my titanium bike, The Yellow Maserati, will drive it (bar-end friction shifters), and, while I doubt that I'll ever have a cable break, I am just captivated by bicycle weirdness. For example, in 2025, the favorite of the bikes I own has a titanium frame, downtube shifters, and rim brakes - all outdated (but still functional) technology. (The downtube shifters are a modern take on the old technology.)

 

The other thing I went to see was Linda M's talk on " 'Plan B' training, when sidelined by illness or injury". Linda's been a fixture of the cycling scene in eastern Pennsylvania for longer than any of us like to admit (because it makes us sound old). She had a crash with a car last year, and still isn't all the way recovered. She's an Occupational Therapist, and brought a unique view or her experience with recovery (for example, at least some doctors talk to her as if she has some brains, which has rarely been my experience with doctors).

 

 

 

I'm glad I went to hear her. I'm not recovering from an injury, but I did lose quite a bit of strength and ability last year. I'd like to believe it's coming back (I've had some evidence of that). So while the specific information in her presentation might not have applied to me, her vision and her attitude certainly did.

 

So, what did you do this Sunday?