Overcomplicating the Most Efficient Transportation Machine
I started wrenching on bikes from an early age. From changing flats on my original Mongoose 20" bike to overhauling loose-ball headsets and bottom brackets on my dad's old Cannondale, wheels-up on the basement floor. Those times taught me basic but fundamental skills that landed me a job as a mechanic in high school, got me through almost a decade of working on bikes, and ended up with me here at VO. While most of those times and much of my early mechanic years were filled with changing flats, basic 7spd derailleur adjustments, and regreasing simple older tech, times are oh-so different now, and so are the bikes.
My dad's copy of Todd Downs' 2005 encyclopedia of bicycle repair- the foundation of my wrenching as a yoot
Even back then, as 11spd was beginning to make the rounds on production road and MTB bikes, the unattainably high end Dura Ace and SRAM Red gear that seemed so intricate and flawless then, now looks and feels no different than any other gear of its time when on a bike in the repair stand - especially looking through the scope of what's available on the market today. Much of which, folks are having a harder and harder time even approaching as a home mechanic.
SRAM Red 11spd rear derailleur. The best of the best at the time, while still taking design cues from far cheaper and simpler gear
Bikes, from the early stages of mass production through to the 1990s, had been largely the same. Rigid frame, pressed-in headset on a straight tubes, one-piece or three-piece cranks, and rim brakes. Nit pick and identify the outliers all you like, but that describes most of the bikes during that time. However, with the trickle-down effect of materials engineering into cycling in the late 2000's, things began to change - and get more exclusive. Suspension forks became normalized on off road bikes, cartridge bearings found their way into everything from headsets to jockey wheels, carbon became the gold standard for racing bikes, and model-year innovation became the standard.
I'm not one to groan about progress, though. Aside from the anecdote of "chasing the past," (e.g. riding a rigid hardtail mountain bike or pulling out your old downtube shifter bike) to gain some fleeting taste of the "good ol' days" of bikes, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that new bikes coming out today from almost any manufacturer aren't some of the best bikes made yet. Disc brakes, quality frames, excellent suspension design and kinematics, and tubeless tires offered in virtually every size imaginable. If you think about it, there are more options for folks looking to buy a proper bike today than ever before.
But with that innovation comes an increase in the level of technical know-how required to even attempt to maintain modern bikes. Shimano has a virtual school devoted to teaching mechanics how to work on their products. SRAM has something quite similar. Want to bleed your hydraulic brakes? You'll need to buy a proprietary kit and oil, and you better not screw it up or it'll be a mess. The same goes for suspension forks and frames. I've owned probably 5 full-suspension bikes, none of which I, personally, serviced the shock or fork on. I'm fortunate to have a shop nearby that specializes in suspension service, another area of bicycle servicing that has become specialized in the last 15 years.
This is on your bicycle.
Bikes of the 1950's to 2000's could once be stripped down with nothing but a tri-tool and a 15mm box wrench, assuming you hadn't lost your 10mm. Aside from a very short list of special tools (which you could pick up at any bike shop) like a crank puller, bb lockring wrench and puller, and a cassette tool, there really was nothing to it. As I started my time as a mechanic affordable two-piece cranks flooded the market, and with them came every bottom bracket standard under the sun. 142 Thru-axle spacing was quickly followed by Boost 148, and subsequently Super Boost and thus an arms race of new, bike specific tools and components began.
I type this all out not as a protest (though I come from a fortunate position of well over a decade of technical experience), but rather as an illustration of how complicated things got, so quickly. If you bought a road or mountain bike in 1985, you had a considerable number of options in terms of models, but you could take any bike home and maintain it properly yourself with a minimal number of special tools or specialized technical knowledge. Heck, that rings true even for bikes as new as the early 2010's.
My first 'real' mountain bike- a 2008 Vassago Bandersnatch, with SRAM X9 and BB7M brakes
Today, however, if you wanted to purchase a mid-grade road bike off a shop floor, you'd be likely ending up with something that uses a press-fit bottom bracket, internal routing that goes into a void, tubeless tires, hydraulic disc brakes, and maybe even electronic shifting that needs an app and special software for diagnosis and updating.
Heaven forbid you want to service your bottom bracket in a year or two. You'll need the proper tapered punch, an oversized bearing press, a torque wrench and bravery to take that on without fear you'd crack your carbon or destroy your aluminum alloy shell. It gets worse when you consider mountain bikes of today. We haven't even touched on e-bikes! There's just too much special knowledge and risk tolerance required for the average at-home mechanic.
An example of my most recent rig, a Norco Revolver FS 120. Quite removed from what now seem like "humble beginnings"
That being said, many shops offer lifetime free basic services and tune ups with the purchase of a new bicycle. They did at my shop at least, and it feels like this is the direction the whole industry is moving: "pay a premium up front, we'll cover you for most stuff." In tandem, the manufacturers are designing bikes that are less and less consumer-maintenance friendly, knowing that the customer is likely going to roll it into the shop 9 times out of 10 before attempting to fix it first. This makes the product more expensive, and leaves those of us who like to fix our own stuff hanging out to dry, in a way.
From an environmental perspective, making things obsolete or too difficult or expensive to fix, means that people will buy new things - which means more waste and emissions.
I think shops are going to be more essential than ever with the industry moving towards higher-end, direct-to-consumer business. It's just that their business model is being forced through a change, and they'll need to be mindful of that fact.
What are your thoughts? Do you work only on bikes of a certain vintage or are you able/willing to maintain all your bikes regardless of their complexity?
The proprietary brands of e-bikes could indeed be a maintenance headache with many custom parts. Will the maker be around in a few years? For a long commute, I put a well known mid-drive kit on a 20 year old hardtail 4 years ago and it has been fully maintainable with only an extra spanner wrench and Torx drivers needed. My newest e-commuter uses a hub motor from a leading company built up with a new steel frame, cable discs and a Shimano IGH. This bike should be readily maintainable with the tools at hand as well.
Just like in other industries steering the consumer into the direction of having to commit to a technical challenging (with numerous choices) expensive decisions is resulting in a greater divide between the haves and the haves not. If you don’t have the budget to go for a “modern” bicycle, what do you do? Go to Walmart I guess.
I love my local shop—they’re friendly and competent mechanics, and I’m always happy to bring in a bike if I get stuck on something I can’t fix at home. However, for me, the appeal of travel by bike is that the machines I own are simple enough that I am able to fix them myself. As flashy and cool as so many of these new technologies are, I love being able to wrench on my own bikes. It contributes to a feeling of independence!
I’ve been working on bikes since I got my own Mongoose 20" BMX back in the early ‘80s. and I’ve mostly tended to work on older bikes both for myself and for a volunteer gig at a bike coop since that was what was economically available. I just got my first bike with disc brakes last summer, a new Gorilla Monsoon, and while there has been a small learning curve, there is actually nothing on that bike that is significantly more complicated to work on than the bikes of the 80s through the early 00s. I did have to buy a couple more tools, such as new lockring socket, but not too bad. It helps that it has mechanical disks.
That said I am bemoaning the quickly expanding range of bottom bracket and gear pull standards. For a long time, I liked knowing that I could mix and match Shimano SIS components from 6-9-speed and have no trouble getting things to index properly. Now I need to do extensive research to make sure my Shimano or SRAM shifting components are compatible with each other if I try to upgrade a single component, and I’m somewhat lost as to what all the bottom bracket and axle spacing standards are. Google is less and less reliable with each passing year as misinformation mixes in with accurate info, and Sheldon Brown is not around any longer to help me sort it all out. A good reference guide that cross-references various brands and standards and is regularly updated would be very useful to home mechanics. None of this is insurmountable, and maybe it’s not actually worse than the 60s-early 70s when we had to keep track of French, British, American, Italian, and Swiss standards. Now, like then, what we need is for the bike industry to recoalesce on some new common standards.
Well said. Cynically, I think the movement toward proprietary parts and company-specific standards, at least nowadays, is usually motivated by profit or some sort of sales tactic. Some hyper-specific performance benefit is offered as a tradeoff for being serviceable at home, and that is affecting us in more ways than one. Having just had the pleasure of building up my own bike, I can attest to the fact that not only did it and does it save me a bit of coin, but it makes the experience of riding a bike that much better. Sadly, I think it’s something that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Anecdotally, I have witnessed someone (a triathlete with a 10,000 dollar tt bike) take their bike into the shop because ‘something is creaking’ only for it to be one of the bolts on the saddle. Said shop then charged them 30 dollars as a service fee. It’s a little insane. But where there’s money to be made- I guess.
Ultimately, you have an industry that has a vested interest in cornering their slice of the pie and are no longer satisfied with doing so through marketing and whatever other measures build a sense of brand loyalty. Materially locking you in through proprietary systems might not appeal to those of us who are interested in understanding how these machines work– but we are in the minority. As bicycles become more mainstream, they may mirror the dynamic we’ve seen with cars. Glad to have manufacturers like yourself that keep tradition alive.
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