If you’re new to bikes, the world of cycling can be intimidating. Which equipment should I choose? What clothes should I wear? How should I set up my bike, and where should I ride it?
It’s enough to make you declare, “Fuck cycling, I’m taking a bath:”
Fortunately, the cycling media is full of experts, some of whom have been testing bikes for as long as 25 years! So don’t surrender to the bubbles just yet. Instead, surrender to people who know more about cycling than you ever will, because they’ve been testing bikes for as long as 25 years. (Did I mention they’ve been testing bikes for 25 years?)
Oh, sure, some of what they’ll tell you is obvious. For example, you’d have to be a complete idiot to still be using rim brakes:
Thank goodness virtually nobody will sell you a bike with rim brakes anymore–though there’s still the danger of walking into a bike shop and encountering one with a front derailleur. You may even find yourself contemplating purchase of such a bicycle. BUT DON’T DO IT! Hey, don’t listen to me, take it from someone who’s been testing bikes for 25 years…
…yet in that time has apparently not figured out how to work one:
As good as front derailleurs have got since their inception in the early 1900s, they are still too fallible – whether they’re mechanical or electronic – rasping the chain and still needing fiddly adjustment.
Every so often you read something and wonder, “Are we talking about the same thing?” Like, maybe a front derailleur is something else in the UK? Because here in West Greenland it means the boringly dependable thing that moves the chain from one front chainring to another, and that you adjust once and never have to think about again. It’s not a “fallible” device requiring “fiddly adjustment,” or “pad toe-in” for that matter:
There’s a type of performative home mechanic who will wax lyrical about roadside adjustments and fixes, or the joys of pre-tensioning, cable maintenance and pad toe-in.
I was like this, but I’m glad I’ve been able to leave such thinking behind. It’s this attitude that has kept the front derailleur alive, even when mountain bikers were sensible enough to ditch the tech long ago.
I mean fine, I guess with certain integrated shifters a front derailleur can be challenging to set up, but even then once you do get it adjusted you can proceed to forget about it. Plus, if you use a friction shifter, it’s pretty much the the most idiot-proof drivetrain component on a bicycle. Consider this utter monstrosity:
This funky old front derailleur mounted roughly 20 feet too high shifts a filthy, grimy, chain between a 42-tooth ring and a 20-tooth ring every single time, and I don’t even have to trim it. This absolutely should not work at all, and yet it does, perfectly. I really wish someone who has been reviewing bikes for 25 years would tell me what I’m doing wrong, why the industry should stop making this component, and how I need a single-ring electronic drivetrain with a clutch derailleur and a cassette almost as large as my rear wheel instead.
Maybe I’d be better informed if I placed a higher premium on data collection. Just ask someone who has been hoarding it for decades–two and a half of them, if we’re being precise:
See, while you’re fetishizing your front derailleur and your rim brakes he’s quantifying the magnitude and intensity of his suckage down the teeniest fraction of a milliwatt:
You can talk about the romance and purity of the humble bicycle all you want, but my decades of riding and testing bikes has taught me we’ve never had it so good. I want the myriad metrics my bike’s sensors can transmit and my bike computer can record.
You can keep your simple mechanical drivetrains and last-century tech, I want slick electronic shifting, power, cadence and speed recording, altitude tracking, and radars to tell me about traffic. I want to know everything my bike can tell me. So, bike engineers, bring it on. I’m hungry for more.
Though apparently he’ll occasionally do it pantsless:
Occasionally, though, I like to have a raw-ride.
At least I assume that’s what he means.
Speaking of data, chronological measurements don’t tell the whole story. Sure, you may have been testing bikes for 25 years, but how many bikes have you tested in that time? See, the more bikes you’ve ridden, the more you know about bikes, even if you probably haven’t ridden most of them long enough to so much as wear out the chain. So when I see that someone has tested HUNDREDS of gravel bikes, I sit up and pay attention:
Sadly, my own lack of knowledge prevents me from fully understanding what I’m reading and seeing. For example, what’s going on here?
Has the elephant trunk skid returned for the gravel era?
Or maybe he’s demonstrating the new gravel rule of thumb that your front rotor should be three-quarters the length of your shoe. Or he could be having trouble maintaining rear wheel traction because he’s ditched his saddle pack and the bike is now too light in the stern, even though he’s tested bikes for 25 years tested hundreds of bikes tests bikes FOR A LIVING:
Seriously, the only thing dumber than using a bike with a front derailleur is strapping your tools to the underside of your saddle. Instead, you should buy a completely new bike with a downtube storage compartment, since if your saddle bag gets wet over and over again and you never, ever unpack it then it’s possible that stuff can get rusty:
I unpacked the pack earlier this week and the contents are pretty much totalled. The inner tube has corrosion on the valve, my multi-tool is rusted shut and the glueless patches have glued themselves together – not to mention the C02 cartridge that’s so corroded I’m scared to use it in case it fails.
So, I’m left with a three-figure bill to replace what’s been ruined inside a pack that, despite the claims, does let water in.
I really don’t understand these people who go all-in on downtube storage compartments:
Like, did none of them have toys as children? Everybody knows the first thing you lose is the battery compartment cover. In a few years all these people will be using tape to keep their toolkits in there, like their $10,000 crabon gravel bike is a remote control car from Radio Shack.
More importantly, he missed a real opportunity here. Instead of throwing the humble saddle pack under the bus, he could have penned a searing indictment of the post-Internet media landscape and the disappearance of the living wage. The headline could have been, “I’ve Tested Bikes For 25 Years and This Crappy Media Company Doesn’t Even Pay Me Enough To Buy A New Inner Tube, Some Patches, and a Can of WD-40 to Free Up My Stuck Multi-Tool.”
I mean come on, this is someone who’s tested gravel bikes since their inception. SINCE THEIR INCEPTION. That’s gotta count for something, right?
At first glance I wondered why he didn’t once again say that he’s been testing bikes for 25 years, since the inception of the gravel bike falls well within that window. However, thinking more about it, I realized that it’s always possible someone could have been testing bikes for 25 years yet pointedly eschewed any and all gravel bikes. (Hey, I managed to mostly avoid them until a couple months ago.) Of course, we d know he’s tested gravel bikes–hundreds of them in fact, see above–but still, it’s a good thing he reminded us.
As for me, I’ve been testing bikes since the inception of the safety bicycle. It’s time we dropped listening to people. I can’t wait to ditch giving a shit.