Re: Extensive article on Rivendell and Grant Petersen

Am Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:25:26 -0400 schrieb Frank Krygowski
<frkrygow@sbcglobal.net>:

On 9/26/2024 3:48 PM, Wolfgang Strobl wrote:

Am Wed, 25 Sep 2024 18:00:21 -0400 schrieb Zen Cycle
<funkmaster@hotmail.com>:
 

>
A down-tube system is even simpler - no ratchet mechanism

 
But still not failsafe. My Peugeot PR60/L from 1978 had only friction
shifters (indexing didn't exist then), but my Peugeot PR3000 from 1995
can be switched between friction and indexing.  Quite a hassle to find a
replacement, after one of both broke, years later.  Found a compatible
replacement from SunTour by asking the owner of a somewhat obscure bike
shop during a business trip to Berlin.

>
First, I'm quite amazed you managed to break a downtube shifter. I'm
very curious about details, both how it happened and what specifically
broke.

I still own the bike out of nostalgia, but the broken parts got into the
trash more than two decades ago. 

AFAIR, some part of the internal mechanism broke during riding in heavy
traffic, while switching, losing retention. Didn't notice it
immediately.

it might have been a combination of corrosion caused by salt (both sweat
and a salt/sand/dreck mixture from riding on wet roads in early spring),
and how one handles gearing when riding in heavy traffic on narrow roads
through the inner city. Perhaps corrosion caused additional force on the
handle, causing a small crack, that after some corrosion finally broke
something, when operanting the handle under traffic pressure,
forcefully. I don't know.  But I've seen a lot of stuff going broke for
no appearent reason in my life, where people swore that this couldn't
happen.

I don't have that many pictures from those times, but dug up two from
2007 and 2008.

<https://www.mystrobl.de/ws/pic/fahrrad/20070328/28032007.jpg> is a
picture taken in my office, with the original part from Shimano on the
right side, while
<https://www.mystrobl.de/Plone/radfahren/technik/komponenten/problemstellen/p1060180.jpg.1>
was taken a year later during a vacation in France, with the replacement
part on the left.

>
(The difficulty finding another is more a condemnation of the bike
industry's "churning" than anything else.)

Yes, of course. On the other hand, there are some developments that I
welcome.  In general, I'm quite open-minded here, but somewhat
conservative when it comes to when to switch to a new technology, or at
all.

>

What can go wrong? How easy is it to repair?
 

... my current
focus isn't on repairability when being stranded somewhere in the
Sahara, but on convenience under our current conditions, meaning single
day trips around where we live, or somewhere in Europe, do single day
trips during our vacation.

>
Ease of repair is still important to me, even though I'm not planning
any long tours in the near future. I know most people just toss out
what's broken and buy a new one, but I almost always at least try to fix
things. See https://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto

Well, yes.  I recently bought a a replacement battery for an old Android
tablet, which included an ifixit toolset for the relatively moderate
price.  At the time I bought the Note 10.1 with S-Stylus was new and
quite expensive, it got a few years of updates and served me well. It
finally got a second life as a photo display display, showing mosty
pictures from our vacations stored on a micro sd-card using a self
written android app. Quite some years of use, all combined.

Last year, the battery failed in a way so that the device wasn't even
booting anymore.   Now, after battery replacement, the device is as good
as new, perfect display, battery holding power for >2 months in standby.
But there isn't much I left can use it for. I had rewritten the photo
app in JavaScript in the meantime, now displaying photos from a local
webserver running inside a tiny VM, most newer apps don't support an
Android version as old as the latest one running on the old tablet,
internet connection became risky.  So I just store it for some possible
future use, like the Panasonic bike from 1996.

Buying comparatively new stuff has its downsides, sure, but I rather buy
something which is old enough for an already large enough userbase, but
young enough to get support and replacement parts for some years in the
future. 

In addition, I like to take advantage of the fact that I can adapt new
bikes with recently developed new oder better solutions to our changing
needs from life circumstances and age. So I did exactly that. Both of us
are satisfied with the result.

>

That's a big if.  Well, the broken part was a tiny spring deep inside
the ratchet mechanism, as I found out much later, after I had partially
disassembled the broken brifter after a shop sold and mounted a new one.
Found out that, while shimano sold most parts of that specific brifter
via their distributor, they didn't have a part number for that spring.
After looking into the disassembly instructions later, just out of
curiosity, I was quite sure about the reason for. Mounting that tiny
spring not only needs complete disassembly, there must be a specific
tool used in production, to mount it inside. In short, it's not
repairable, when broken.

Yep. That's why I don't use those things.

I don't intend to buy or recommend to buy a bicycle having these
mechanical brifters anymore, either. After the shop repaired my old bike
by installing an completely new lever, I treated it carefully, like a
raw egg,  for the remaining years of use. Now that the bike is only used
on the inhouse trainer and as a fallback for the road, the problem has
become irrelevant anyway.



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