Re: Suspension losses

Am Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:19:51 -0500 schrieb Frank Krygowski
<frkrygow@sbcglobal.net>:

On 1/13/2025 2:48 PM, Wolfgang Strobl wrote:

Am Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:27:27 -0500 schrieb Frank Krygowski
<frkrygow@sbcglobal.net>:

>
As I said, I hate the Kleenex ethic - "It's no good any more, just throw
it away."

>
A strawman isn't getting any more pretty, over time. You won't find many
complex products, machines, vehicles or components with an unlimited
lifetime.  Product lifetime has to be planned. There is innovation,
innovation means change.  There are technical limits. So far, I haven't
heard about bicycle tires that tolerate heavy use over a lifetime of 40
years, as you ask for.  To be precise, I don't know of any that I would
like to use or that I would risk using.

>
I think my Cannondale touring bike qualifies. Of course I've replaced
consumable items like tires, chains, cogs, brake shoes, handlebar tape
and occasionally a chainring.

 
That way, any bicycle qualifies.

>
I agree! Or at least, I agree about most bikes. That's one of the things
I love about bicycling in general, compared to (say) automobiles.

This is mainly because automobile manufacturing is subject to strict
regulations, and rightly so. Some repairs are simply not allowed, others
produce a new, different car.

>

There is essentially no part of a  bicycle that isn't "consumable". 

>
I disagree. I don't expect to ever wear out the frame, fork, handlebars,
stem, seatpost, hubs, pedals, front derailleur, and maybe not the rear
derailleur. I may someday wear out the bottle dynamo on that bike (it's
decades old) but maybe not.

It's not about what you expect, but about what is possible and what
actually happens.

I had to replace two forks, one handlebar, one stem, a set of pedals, a
rear derailleur and a whole collection of dynamos, not limited to bottle
dynamos. I repaired a broken frame, but I'm sure a workshop would have
refused such a repair.

We still own two road bikes from early 2010, having a second life in our
indoor trainer. An alternative would have been selling those bikes or
making these a gift. There are a lot of students and other people in my
home town who use old and somewhat worn race bikes to get around. Our
campus is somewhat distributed, people neither need nor prefer expensive
touring bikes to move between home and school or different lecture
halls.  I still own my second road bike from 1995, a Panasonic PR3000.
It served as a backup bike, after I bought the aforementioned bike in
2010.  I have no use for that, anymore. 

I could put it on the street for bulky waste collection, like I did with
the remains of the Peugot from 1978, essentially the frame. The bulky
waste day is popular with those looking for old furniture, appliances
and even bicycles. Some repair, others are looking for spare parts, and
then there are the scrap dealers who generally collect metals. The
remaining scraps are collected by the waste collection service. In this
case though, I think the bike is still too good to be used for
cannibalization. I could sell it at a bike market for loose change, but
haven't found the time to do that yet. So it's staying in the cellar for
the time being.

But outside an emergency, I don't have a reason to use any of these old
bikes for riding around, anymore. They aged well, because they had good
use. But different from a living creature, they don't get any better by
heavy use. 

>
There were items I changed out of preference (like the original downtube
shifters) but it wasn't because they were worn out. Those would have
lasted forever.

From experience, I very much doubt that.  These might outlast other
components though, when used not used during winter on heavyly salted
roads, like I did with both the Peugeot from '78 and the Panasonic from
1995.  There are a lot of very old bicycles in perfect condition, that
serve as a collectors item today.  Some of them probably never saw a
road again after the test drive.

>
Admittedly, there's an apocryphal tale about someone owning an ancient,
ancient hatchet - sometimes it's been told as George Washington's, or
Abe Lincoln's, or a great-great-great-grandfather's. Is it the same
hatchet, even though it's handle was replaced five times and its head
twice? :-)  A more classical version of that question regards the Ship
of Theseus, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Apcryphal is the correct term. Its just a made up story.  But it
exemplifies that extending the meaning of "repair" beyond recognition
serves no purpose.  A repair stretched over much more than the usual
lifetime of a product is neither a repair nor does it make sense, for
most products. I'm talking about products one depends on, not about
collectors items or secondary vehicles.

>

I've made some equipment substitutions
(saddle, bar-end shifters, "aero" brake levers) but the original
equipment is exceptionally durable.

 
That is a tautology. Of course the remaining equipment is exeptionally
durable, otherwise it would have been replaced earlier, for whatever
reason.

>
Nope, I covered this above. And the shifters and brake levers on my
"utility" Raleigh, formerly for commuting, now for shopping, are far
older. Mid 1970s, still working fine.

I covered that above, see "collectors items". 

>

So why didn't you buy a 40 years old bicycle from somebody who doesn't
need his bicycle anymore?

>
One reason is in 1986 when I bought this bike, there was no such thing
as a 40 year old Cannondale touring bike.

Who said anyting about a Cannondale?

But ok, there wasn't wireless a SRAM eTap AXS Mullet group in 1995 or
1978, so I couldn't buy a bike having one, at that time. Neither would
it have made sense to even try to enhance the Panasonic or the custom
made bike from 2010 with that group. So I just built a new bike, after I
didn't find one fitting my requirements, after shopping around.

So I still don't understand what you are getting at. Even very old bikes
where new at some point in time.  Needs differ and change according to
circumstances. You can't expect everyone to have your options and
preferences.

>

That some people like you have the time, space and energy
to maintain a bicycle much longer than its useful life is under normal
conditions doesn't prove the opposite.  That is not an argument against
repairing, but an argument against repairing, whatever the cost. I'm not
talking about money only, here. I mostly miss a sense of proportion.

>
I promise to let you know if this bike ever exceeds its "useful life."

This is arbitrary. Your conditions and circumstances are different from
mine, mine cant' be generalized, either.

(We might ask Andrew the age of his fixed gear bike.)

I don't really care.  We both know that fixed gear bikes are exotic. One
of our sons sent me a snapshot of an unicyclist that he took on the way
up to Mont Ventoux, last year.  So, pray tell, why do you need two
wheels on a bike for something much simpler, like for example for
shopping? You do use one of your many bicycles for shopping, right?

>

Anyway, I see no reason why the wireless shifting of our bikes shouldn't
outlive a similar purely mechanical one...

>
I guess we'll see, eventually.

 
If we don't try, we certainly won't see it. Try to see it the following
way: _you_ don't have any reason to try a group with wireless shifting
like the one I built our bikes with, I understand that.  So just let
people like us who experience, like and sometimes need the benefits pay
the money, try this innovation, and serve as guinea pigs.

>
Oh, I'm very happy to do that! :-)  I've been a Late Adopter of many
technologies. I was rather amazed at myself when I bought the EV.

Ah, finally!  I knew that you would get it. :-)

Well, we still own a >25 year old car that we bought used, twenty years
ago. Works well, sort of, because it got well maintained and because we
rarely used it. Given the fact that an EV would be of no use for us, we
currently think about giving up the car, switching to car sharing.  We
haven't done this, yet, because car sharing has its own problems. The
primary use use case and target group for car sharing are people
replacing their second car and people who need a car for short trips. We
fit neither description.

>

About that: A few years ago I got annoyed at the number of remotes. I'd
read a good review about a programmable universal remote, and bought it.
I followed the tedious instructions to program it so I could hit one
button for "Watch TV", another button for "Play CD", another button for
"Listen to radio" etc.
>
It's less than ideal. Part of the problem, I think, is that some of the
devices use the same signal code as a toggle for "power-on" &
"power-off", as opposed to a separate code for "On" and "Off." If a
device is left in the wrong state, things don't work. There was also
some dimly remembered problem where commands from the remote had to
arrive at the TV at the proper instant - not too soon, not too late -
and the program couldn't manage that, despite the nice lady at the 800
help number trying over and over to cure. (I suppose I could dig back
into the programming, but I'm not motivated.)...

>
Knowing neither your universal control, nor
anything about the remote control in question, I can't even guess what
is causing that problem. 

>
It's a Logitech Harmony 650, bought in 2019. I kept my pages of
frustrated notes from trying to set it up. They're interesting to read
through. It doesn't matter, though. I'm getting along with it now,
partly be ignoring what's supposed to be a lot of its capabilities.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Logitechs Harmony series. I
heard about it, but that's it.  Existing open source software for it is
mostly about how to program those remotes using data grabbed from
Logitechs website. A package still existing in Debian derivates hasn't
updated by the original developer since 2015, the website itself doesn't
exist anymore, for some years.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20211204023258/https://www.phildev.net/harmony/>

A short search didn't find any technical info about the internals of
Logitechs IR products, so as a I said, I can't even guess where it may
stumble and for what specific reasons. 

Given that recording and and replaying one or more IR remote controls as
a abstract sequence of commands is quite simple using available open
source software, given some experience with MC hardware and software, I
didn't care how Logitech did that, so far.  But I find it strange that
it doesn't just work.

A large collection of codes of existing products at Logitech's
database/website is the only added value this product has, IMO.  As far
as I understood it, you can or must update the set of products the
Logitech remote understands about, no need to record it using the
universal control.  Perhaps that recording is just a primitive fallback
function that may or may not work correctly?

Debian derivates have a package called concordance, probably based onthe
aforementioned software, that is able to do that updating/programming on
Linux, according to the description.  Some sources are on github, Other
people may know more about it, I don't.


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