The Birds and the Bees (and the Bikes)

The crank that came standard with my bike has always been trouble. On the last day of my first 1000 km brevet three years ago, after crossing the northern Cascades, I started to panic when the left crank arm started getting loose. It’s been a pain ever since, and on the 600k brevet last month I had to stop and adjust it just about every hour. Which meant getting left behind by whatever group I was riding with. I ended up riding alone most of that brevet. Not fun when you have wicked headwinds.

After we drove back to Oregon I took the bike to the Bike Gallery in Beaverton. I love their service crew, they are knowledgeable and experienced. Just darn difficult to get them to work on your bike. Their standard answer is “We are busy, leave the bike here and we’ll get to it in two weeks.” The guy looked at the crank, and suggested that I get a new crank. He also said that there was something I could do to fix the problem, but for liability reason he could not tell me what it was. That was bizarre. He recommended getting a “touring” Shimano crank, but they did not have it in stock, and none of the other BG stores or their warehouse had one. It would take two weeks to get one, he said. So I wrote down the exact model that he recommended, went to Universal Cycles, and had it in my hands in two business days.

I removed the old crank and put on the new one, but I could not get the shifting to work. So I took everything back to BG. I talked with another person, who gave me the standard “we are busy, we’ll get to it in 2 weeks” answer. I asked if he could at least look at it quickly to see if I was doing something wrong, and he put the bike on the stand, and told me that he could do it, since it was kind of slow at the time. He quoted me $45 for the install, which was OK with me. I don’t mind paying for quality service.

He replaced the shifter cable because it was too short (and that should have been a hint to what was wrong with the bike), and started reinstalling. The crank came with three spacers, and no instructions. I did not put any spacers in, he decided to put two of them in. He tried adjusting the deraileur for a while, but he had no better luck than I wad at getting shifting to work. He asked another couple of service techs, and they told him that it would not work. The crank was not compatible with the 105 shifters. “The parallelogram is different,” said one of them.They recommended installing bar end shifters. I never quite understood why indexed bar end shifters would work, while my brifter would not.

I was really not happy about having wasted $130 on the crank that they suggested, but I paid $5 for the new shifter cable, and went home to see what I could do. I decided to try removing one of the two spacers, and in five minutes everything worked perfectly. Easy, crisp shifting. Wow, that was surprisingly easy.

So the next morning I go to the Lewis and Clark 24hr race with my brand new crank, and right before the start I go to mount the pump on the bike frame, on the attachment for the third bottle holder that is behind the front wheel. That’s when I notice that the new cable is routed over the pump holder, not under it. I don’t have time to fix the problem, so I ride with the misrouted shifter cable.

The kind of riding I do, much longer and much slower than the typical racer that buys road bikes at BG, benefits from parts that are not standard, and fit and adjustments that are often not standard. Even a good service department may not be much help. While I really want to give business to a local bike shop, more and more I am finding that they don’t know how to work on my bike (they make rookie mistakes if you have a pump holder in an unusual place), and that I am better off doing the work myself.