Old Man, New Tech, Part 1: STI

One bad thing about being a cheap curmudgeon who no longer works in a bike shop is that I very rarely get to fondle all the new toys on the market. I read about them, sure, but my own fleet is (for the most part) stuck in a time warp out of the mid/late-90s, those halcyon days when anodized colors were cool and a 10-speed was a 70s dumpster relic, not an entire cassette and/or fodder for a "sweet fixie conversion."

Last Fall, however, I did a bit of a fleet shakeup here at The Cycle World Headquarters (you can read about it in the aptly-named post Fleet Shakeup at The Cycle World Headquarters) where I cast asunder my main retro-ish ride for a new Raleigh Clubman (a bit of a retro-ish ride in itself, but bear with me). As a result, I find myself adjusting to technologies that your average club-ride-Fred has taken for granted for over a decade. I'm like the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer of bike tech.

One of the newfangled gadgets I'm learning on the Clubbie is the mystical STI shifter. Yes, I know, STI has been around since Rick Astley's pop chart heyday. I told you, I'm a Luddite geezer:

Gratuitous frontal cockpit shot.

The Clubster comes with Tiagra 9-speed and a Tiagra compact double up front. Just how curmudgeonly am I? I actually went hunting for the 2011 model because it only has a 9-speed cassette instead of 2012 Tiagra's 10-speed. And, gol-durn-it-all (that's curmudgeon-speak for "surprisingly"), I actually like it... with just a few reservations.

Shifting the rear is about as brainless as a shifting system gets. Push brake lever in, get an easier gear. Push inner lever, get a harder gear. The action is light but precise. You can grab a bunch of gears going lower, but higher is one at a time (though the action is quick enough to make this a theoretical quibble for me). Like a lot of Shimano stuff, the ergonomics are just ridiculously well done, so my hand is nicely supported and the buttons sit right where I'd expect them. I could do without the weird pointy-bulbous "Bullet Train" aesthetics of the front of the shifter, but oh well.

Front shifting is a bit less intuitive, though. Part of this can be attributed to the compact double; a 16-tooth jump (from 34 to 50 and vice-versa) is quite the leap, even with sculpted chainrings. The bigger issue is Shimano's continued insistence that front shifters have to index. Uh, why? It's a double. You got high, you got low. If you can't tell the two apart without a click, you might consider a less-challenging hobby (like "napping"). The workaround on this shifter is a trim position just inboard of the big-ring click... so I usually end up shifting across the entire travel to really lock it in on the big ring, then tapping the downshift button to find that trim spot and quiet chain rub.

Oh, and there are optical gear displays. I am contractually obligated to loathe these, but under duress, I will admit that I look at them sometimes. Sue me.

One thing I can't speak to yet -- and one major concern of the Cantankerous, Curmudgeonly Chorus -- is the long-term durability of STI. Since Tiagra is not exactly top-o-the-heap, I'll be interested to see how it holds up over the long haul. Right now, I only have about 400 fair-weather miles on these shifters, so I'll have to report back. I don't subscribe to the Chicken Little school of, "Tiny, fragile parts! No friction option!" If a shifter fails catastrophically (and really, how often does that happen?), you deal. Get off the bike, find one good gear by hand (like in days of yore), and keep riding.

So, low-miles impression: The ergonomics have sucked me in, the mechanicals  work like Shimano (maybe not perfect, but predictable and effective), and the jury's still out on reliability. We'll see after a few more digits tick over on the odometer. 

Darwin Awards

I tried to stir up a helmet kerfuffle a few posts ago, but to no avail. How do you know your blog is unpopular? When you can't even get a decent pro-/anti-helmet flame war going in your comments. But, undaunted, I will try yet again.

Usually, I take a pretty laid-back, semi-agnostic approach to what one wears upon one's melon while riding. I wear a helmet when I ride, and I ask that anyone on the back of my tandem do the same. Beyond that, what you do on your bike is like what you do in your bedroom: sweaty, marked by a lot of grunting, and none of my dang business.

My agnosticism collapses into pure zealotry on one point, however. If you ride around with your helmet hanging from your handlebars, I will harangue you relentlessly until I am out of earshot (which won't take long, because I'll be trying to ride away from you at my laughable excuse for top speed). Why? Because while I can see some validity to both the pro-helmet-on-head argument and the leave-helmet-at-home argument, there is absolutely NO rational reason for riding with a helmet hanging on your bars. You're still carrying the weight of the thing (albeit not on you), so it's no lighter. And what happens when (not if) the helmet falls off your bars into your front wheel? You're going down, and you're probably taking out several people around you... and the thing that would protect you in a crash is the thing that sent you over the bars in the first place. Irony, thy name is concussion caused by protective headgear.

So, do yourself and everyone riding with you a favor: Either wear the thing or don't. But don't use your bike as a rolling hat rack.

Rim, Shot

As promised, here are a couple close-up shots of the rim that was felled by ninjas. First, the obvious point of failure:

The rim itself is a fairly low-budget OEM Weinmann with no eyelets but three chambers -- basically, a quasi-Deep V exterior shape with a couple tunnels thrown in for added girth and (one would assume) strength. It popped right at the seam, which was (as near as I can figure) behind and above the tire's contact patch, perpendicular to the impact, and right in the worst of the blast zone.

I assume from what little I know of rim construction that this is what's called a "pinned" rim, since there's certainly no sign of a weld here. That wiry looking bit spanning the gap (and barely holding the rim together) is a metal pin with spiral grooves running in opposite directions away from the centerline. My guess is that the pin plus some sort of industrial sticky stuff plus a lot of pressure holds the rim together, at least until some idiot hits it from the side.

(Aside: What you can't see is the big rim decal on the reverse, still valiantly holding across the chasm of failed rim. The moral of the story, kids, is that big, ugly brand labels are actually supposed to be a safety feature.) 

There was also an interesting failure mode away from all the excitement:

I didn't even notice this part until I took off the tire and tried to take off the (miraculously unscathed) tube. Seems that as the rim failed at the bottom, it lost a bit of diameter, squeezing down the valve hole and spoke holes at the top. See the tell-tale wrinkled decal at each hole and funky reflection at the un-decaled hole? So when I tried to extract the tube, I ended up yanking off the valve stem, thus making it unscathed no more.

I dearly hope no one takes this as a shot at Weinmann or their products. Remember, this rim took a pretty nasty lateral smack, the sort of thing that would put just about any hoop in the recycling bin. Even if the joint had been welded, I suspect the force would have potato-chipped it past the point of re-true-ability.

Attacked By A Pack Of Bike Ninjas!

What is a group of ninjas, anyway? A herd? A flock? A gaggle? In this case, I'm going to go with a murder, since a) they were as hard to spot in the dark as crows, and b) that's what was in my heart after the encounter.

So there I was, just a'mindin' my own business, getting in some high-quality after-dark miles on a local rail-trail during this bizarrely early Spring we're enjoying here in the Middle West. Had my most blindingest headlight on, came around a curve (staying tight to the right since the line of sight was ever-so-slight), when KERBLAMMO. Hit head on by an oncoming lightless ninja on the wrong side of the trail... because he was riding side-by-side with ANOTHER ninja friend, and two more were paired up right behind them. It was like Noah's Ark of Idiocy.

It happened fast enough that I can't say for certain who hit what where, but I'm pretty sure (based on injuries to bike and body) that I got my front wheel turned to the right just as I got whacked. The result was this:

 Mr. White: "I'm hungry. Let's get a taco."

Of course, Mr. Ninja (did I mention that he reeked of the products of the local watering hole that he and his pals had no doubt just left?) was firmly convinced that I was the one on the wrong side of the trail, and his pals (even the one who was riding to his right) agreed. Discord ensued. Obscenities were shared.

Now, if you know me, you know I'm not one to back down from a fight. I'm one to run away from it, shrieking and flailing my arms. So when Team Chucklehead determined that their buddy's wheel was fine, I was more than happy to see them mosey on down the trail before those obscenities escalated into something I was ill-equipped to handle both physically and emotionally. In my best passive-aggressive interior monologue, I hoped that I'd damaged his carbon fork in a way that would catastrophically fail at the worst possible moment. And I imagined that moment. Over and over and over. (I'll say three Our Faustos and five Hail Garys for the sin of harboring evil thoughts about thy neighbor's bicycle.)

The tally of injuries to my person won't be complete until an MRI on my left knee in a couple days. And since I can hear the cries of bike nerds the world over as they wonder how the bike fared, here's the run-down:

• Front rim: Toast. Split right at the seam, though the tire didn't blow. I'll try to capture some closeups later, as it's an interesting case study in how rims are made and how they can fail.
• Right pedal: Must have come down on it hard, as the body was jammed up on the spindle enough that it wouldn't turn. A couple gentle whacks with a hammer got it loosened up again, but it now clunks a bit on the spindle. Probably toast as well.
• Right crank: Ever-so-slightly bent from that hard landing... looks like a bent chainring until you realize that both rings are bent exactly the same amount in exactly the same place. Coincidence? I think not.

Surprisingly, everything else looks good, save for a couple paint dings. No telltale paint wrinkles or cracks that would make me suspect frame/fork damage, alignment seems solid, no obvious signs of front-end wonkiness.

So, dear reader, fear the ninjas. They're out there... somewhere.