I'm just popping up here to express a certain frustration with changing standards and sizes... particularly in the world of bicycle parts. This is a familiar story to anyone who plays around with old bicycles.
I am currently working on restoration (to usability, not showpiece status) of a mid 80's Raleigh Touring bike (the text="kodiak/" if you're interested). The chainrings were pretty chewed up, so I intended to replace them and went into my local bike shop (LBC), to order the new ones. We both took a look and guessed it was a standard 110/74 B.C.D. arrangement and ordered based on that. Unbeknownst to us, there were stumbling blocks in the works.
I discovered on getting the new shiny chainrings home that the small one was really too small for the crankset I was intending it to adorn. I returned the next day for a second measurement and hopefully reordering. It was not to be, as we discovered upon pouring through parts catalogs, and my later internet explorations, this lovely Takagi crankset uses the now obsolete text="86" for the inner chainring (just browse around at that link to find the answers to questions you may be having like "what is B.C.D?", "what is a chainring", "just what, when you get right down to it, is this guy talking about?"), and this size is no longer available. It's not made no more.
I checked ebay and looked elsewhere around the strange and mystical world of NOS bike parts on the internet. I'd be paying more than $50 no matter where I went it seems. So, plan #2! The outer chainrings are 110, and that's lovely. I think I'm just going to find a new crankset in the nice, safe, modern 110/74 format and re-buy that 26 tooth chainring I ordered and be done with it (can't even get 26 tooth in 86 B.C.D. I'd be stuck with 28 as the smallest available size, and I'd be hard pressed to find another replacement in a hurry). This is, to some degree, kowtowing to the modern age I guess... but really, sometimes the whole thing with all these different standards and sizes just seems calculated to annoy (or rather, to get you to buy a particular company's parts rather than mixing and matching to your own contentment). Maybe it isn't always reasonable, but I sometimes wish bike and bike part makers would just get together and agree to use a single set of standards for everything so everything would interchange nicely and smoothly, and then just don't change anything... this of course does not solve the issue of all the old bikes out there sporting a wide array of parts in all shapes and, particularly, sizes.
Props to the LBS by the way. In no way is this an indictment of the service available at text=Chain Reaction.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
impermanence
Just finished mending some holes that appeared in a couple sweaters and a pair of gloves, which procedure has prompted a short, not particularly original post about the value of repairing instead of replacing.
Repairing should really take its place as a 4th 'R' in the mantra of 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'. It is an art that has sadly dwindled... who darns socks in this day and age? You just pick up another pack from Shopko... or Fleet Farm in my case. Now, I've never darned a sock myself, and I'm unlikely to when it comes to the sort picked up in packs of 6 for $3. The whole purpose of being for something like that is to be disposable, and I don't think darning would extend the life of such a sock for long enough to be worthwhile. I also have nicer socks; thick, part wool, wintry socks. Those I would mend... will mend, when in the course of human events they develop little holes. My nice wool sweaters I mended this evening. They were cheaply acquired at thrift stores, but they are not cheap items. Both are 100% merino wool and are, I believe, attractive and flattering colors and shapes. They are worth hanging onto. A corollary to the proposal that it's good to repair things because it keeps nice things around longer is that if you have nice things you are more likely to wish to repair them to keep them around longer. A really durable, comfortable pair of shoes is worth resoling. A pair of flip flops... well, that's really only a sole to begin with so that's a poor example perhaps... but a $15 pair of sneakers isn't worth taking to the cobbler even if he could do anything about it (and did you know that Appleton is still home to a guy who makes his living repairing shoes? ... I'm pretty sure he's still there in his little downtown storefront anyway, I haven't been by there all that recently).
[Ranting] Things were once built to last, and to be fixable. Fewer and fewer things are now. Computers are still expensive enough that we have them repaired or learn to do repairs and replacements ourselves. Cars too, and many bicycles. Many electronic devices have cheapened to the point where they don't make economic sense to repair, and have become complicated enough that there's less to repair: a fried chip, or some inaccessible plastic thinger that is half the size of your pinkie fingernail, cost a fraction of a fraction of a penny to produce and yet its loss renders a CD player entirely useless. The day is coming when a computer will be like a VCR I'm sure... well, I guess I mean DVD player, since VCRs are an obsolete technology entirely. Most likely a computer will just be an access point for this cloud processing network we hear about from technological gurus. Hopping back to bicycles, you can buy a completely cheapened and complicated bicycle ('complicated' in this instance refers largely to the use of plastic to make a lot of crucial components, which is also cheapening, but plastic is a much more complicated material to produce than steel or even aluminum... to the best of my understanding), and you can buy this bicycle for an absurdly low price. And when something goes wrong you will buy a new one because even if a bike mechanic is willing to work on the $80 Magna you bought at Toys R Us (they'd rather you bought from them, but would accept at least you buying something that wasn't marketed as a toy for Pete's sake), the poor quality of the components make such a bike not worth servicing in the first place (like the cheap cotton tube sock). The repair will be too time consuming and insufficiently lasting to be worth the time and money. Don't even get me started on the toy store's 'fully suspended' models of 'mountain bikes'...
Okay. This is growing longer than I intended. I will conclude with my belief that fixing things also gives you a better understanding of things you use (bicycles are a good example of this, me being an avid bicycle repairman, I can tell you I know a lot more about that vehicle now than I did before I started mucking about in bottom brackets). You might even learn how to make something yourself, using the best materials you can find and constructing it with care, but even the care you put into mending has an effect of adding to the value of your possessions; not, perhaps in resale or antique value (the antique appraisers tend to hate when things are repaired for some reason), but sentimentally surely. Those little mending stitches, glue beads, welds or whatever are better than writing your name on the label for claiming an object as yours (questions of the evils or benefits of private property are hereby ignored for the sake of a more poetic argument).
Mending.
Give it a try. It's more fun than shopping.
Repairing should really take its place as a 4th 'R' in the mantra of 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'. It is an art that has sadly dwindled... who darns socks in this day and age? You just pick up another pack from Shopko... or Fleet Farm in my case. Now, I've never darned a sock myself, and I'm unlikely to when it comes to the sort picked up in packs of 6 for $3. The whole purpose of being for something like that is to be disposable, and I don't think darning would extend the life of such a sock for long enough to be worthwhile. I also have nicer socks; thick, part wool, wintry socks. Those I would mend... will mend, when in the course of human events they develop little holes. My nice wool sweaters I mended this evening. They were cheaply acquired at thrift stores, but they are not cheap items. Both are 100% merino wool and are, I believe, attractive and flattering colors and shapes. They are worth hanging onto. A corollary to the proposal that it's good to repair things because it keeps nice things around longer is that if you have nice things you are more likely to wish to repair them to keep them around longer. A really durable, comfortable pair of shoes is worth resoling. A pair of flip flops... well, that's really only a sole to begin with so that's a poor example perhaps... but a $15 pair of sneakers isn't worth taking to the cobbler even if he could do anything about it (and did you know that Appleton is still home to a guy who makes his living repairing shoes? ... I'm pretty sure he's still there in his little downtown storefront anyway, I haven't been by there all that recently).
[Ranting] Things were once built to last, and to be fixable. Fewer and fewer things are now. Computers are still expensive enough that we have them repaired or learn to do repairs and replacements ourselves. Cars too, and many bicycles. Many electronic devices have cheapened to the point where they don't make economic sense to repair, and have become complicated enough that there's less to repair: a fried chip, or some inaccessible plastic thinger that is half the size of your pinkie fingernail, cost a fraction of a fraction of a penny to produce and yet its loss renders a CD player entirely useless. The day is coming when a computer will be like a VCR I'm sure... well, I guess I mean DVD player, since VCRs are an obsolete technology entirely. Most likely a computer will just be an access point for this cloud processing network we hear about from technological gurus. Hopping back to bicycles, you can buy a completely cheapened and complicated bicycle ('complicated' in this instance refers largely to the use of plastic to make a lot of crucial components, which is also cheapening, but plastic is a much more complicated material to produce than steel or even aluminum... to the best of my understanding), and you can buy this bicycle for an absurdly low price. And when something goes wrong you will buy a new one because even if a bike mechanic is willing to work on the $80 Magna you bought at Toys R Us (they'd rather you bought from them, but would accept at least you buying something that wasn't marketed as a toy for Pete's sake), the poor quality of the components make such a bike not worth servicing in the first place (like the cheap cotton tube sock). The repair will be too time consuming and insufficiently lasting to be worth the time and money. Don't even get me started on the toy store's 'fully suspended' models of 'mountain bikes'...
Okay. This is growing longer than I intended. I will conclude with my belief that fixing things also gives you a better understanding of things you use (bicycles are a good example of this, me being an avid bicycle repairman, I can tell you I know a lot more about that vehicle now than I did before I started mucking about in bottom brackets). You might even learn how to make something yourself, using the best materials you can find and constructing it with care, but even the care you put into mending has an effect of adding to the value of your possessions; not, perhaps in resale or antique value (the antique appraisers tend to hate when things are repaired for some reason), but sentimentally surely. Those little mending stitches, glue beads, welds or whatever are better than writing your name on the label for claiming an object as yours (questions of the evils or benefits of private property are hereby ignored for the sake of a more poetic argument).
Mending.
Give it a try. It's more fun than shopping.
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