Friday January 31, 2014

5:00 a.m. Cebu, Philippines

Just to pick up the story from yesterday: I was sitting in Bo’s coffee shop in Park Mall waiting for the friendly people at Cycle Logic to fix my bike. I had asked the clerk to let me know when they had the grip shifter open so that I could see the insides. I honestly didn’t expect that to happen. People rarely carry out instructions like that. In this case, though, after about two hours in the shopping mall, I got a text message from her asking me to come back to the store so that they could begin repairs on my bike. She had taken my request so literally that they hadn’t even begun the repairs without my presence!

I went back to the bike shop, and there were now two young bike mechanics. Our relationship didn’t begin well at all. In order to work on the grip shift, they had to remove it from the handlebars. That meant taking off the mount for a rear view mirror and a rubber grip. The bolt holding the mirror mount in place had gotten rusty after its encounter with typhoon Yolanda, and after a weak attempt to remove it, the mechanics looked at me and shrugged their shoulders, defeated. They said that they couldn’t remove the mirror, so there was nothing they could do for me. It seemed that this was all the effort I was going to get out of them – defeated by one tiny rusty bolt. The weird thing was that they had tried to remove it with a tiny little tool with an allen key on the end. It wasn’t a full allen wrench but just a little gizmo, so it had no leverage at all. I was trying so hard to be accepting and patient, but I felt so irritated at how easily they had given up that I let my feelings show. I looked at their tool bench and asked if they didn’t have an actual allen wrench. I told them that if I had my own basic set of travelling tools, I could get that bolt out. Surely in a bicycle shop, they could manage the same. I told them that the mirror mount was not important to me. The mirror had been smashed during the typhoon anyway. They could go to town on it and break it – tear it out of there – I didn’t care. One of the guys then tried to grab the bolt with a pair of vice grips. That didn’t work. I was shaking my head in disbelief. It was looking like I’d have to go to a hardware store and buy a set of allen wrenches for this bicycle shop. So strange. But then one of the mechanics found a real allen wrench. It wasn’t a big shop-sized one, but it was better than the gizmo he’d been using previously. He tried that, and with some muscle power and some twisting and turning, they pulled out the mirror mount.

After that, they used some lubricant and a long metal tool to loosen up the grip and get it off. Then they started futzing around with the grip shifter itself. It was clear that they had never seen one before. They were learning as they went. This made me very nervous and I kept wanting to jump in and take over. I had been reluctant to dismantle the grip shift myself. I wanted to leave it to the experts. But as is so often the case, the experts appeared to know less than I did.

Eventually, the grip shift was removed from the handlebar and opened up. It was clear that the two mechanics had no idea how it worked normally and why it wasn’t working now. They just poked around and moved things and otherwise tried to figure it out. There was one curved metal strip that seemed key to the whole operation. They took it out to examine it and put it back in a few times. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I walked away to look at things in the store and leave them to it.

A few minutes later, I was called over by the store clerk. In her hand, she held that metal strip and it was now snapped in half. Here is the problem, she said, triumphantly. This metal clip was broken and that was the problem. Now, I had seen this metal clip, and it wasn’t broken then. The mechanics had clearly snapped it in half while playing around with it. Now they were hiding that fact by claiming that it was always broken and that was the problem. I didn’t even bother to point this out to them. There was no denying that the metal strip was broken now however it happened. So that was it for the grip shift. There was no hope of repairing it, and we turned to alternatives.

The previous day, the clerk had talked about the necessity of changing my entire drive train. She told me that it would cost something like 7,000 pesos. I can’t remember the exact figure. That was all she said, and I pressed for more details. I wanted to know what brand of products she was talking about and what level of quality. She told me that it was a Shimano Alevio set. It had been a long time since I had thought about these things, but I remembered that Alevio was the Shimano’s cheapest and lowest quality set. So I asked her about the other levels and what they would cost. I had a half memory that above Alevio came Deore, then LX, and at the top of the heap, XT. I tended to go for LX as being just right. The XT line would be overkill for a bike like mine while something like Alevio would be too cheap and not durable or reliable enough. The clerk did not mention LX, but she said that the next step up was Deore, and that would cost about 11,000 pesos. I didn’t ask about XT, because I knew it would be too expensive.

I assumed that now that my grip shifter was officially “broken”, we would discuss replacing the entire drive train. However, the mechanics said that wasn’t necessary. They said that it was true that they didn’t have any 8-speed components to match my bicycle, but a 9-speed would work just fine. All I had to do was replace the shifters and the brake levers and the cables. All the rest – the freewheel, the chain, the crankset, the derailleur – could remain the same. This seemed like the ideal solution, and they produced the 9-speed units they were talking about. It was a Shimano Acera. I could tell just by fiddling with it that Acera was another low-end line for Shimano, and I asked about using a slightly better product. However, they said that this was the only option, as it was designed to be used with V-brakes, which my bike had. The Deore or XT product lines came only with disc brakes. Using them definitely would mean changing everything. Using these Acera shifters and brake levers, I could get away with paying just 1,000 pesos ($22). I was surprised it was so cheap, and I agreed to give it a try.

Now that we were simply installing new components, the two mechanics were in their element and they started working quickly and efficiently. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing and before I could blink, I had a new shifting and braking assembly on the bike.

Oh, I forgot to mention the main twist to this long story. While installing the new set, the mechanics also had to remove the left grip shifter – the one that controlled the front derailleur. This one wasn’t broken. It worked just fine. They looked inside it when they removed it and had an “ah ha” moment. Inside this grip shift was a thick coil of spring wire with hooks on each end. This coil of spring wire was the key to locking the grip shift in place and making it work. And this spring wire was missing from the other grip shift! THAT was why my other grip shift wasn’t working. So the culprit in this whole story was the mechanic in Tacloban. When he had worked on my bike, he had forgotten to put the spring back in when he dismantled the grip shift. That is what had caused all these problems. Interestingly, my two young bike mechanics at Cycle Logic triumphantly showed me this thick coil of wire and announced that THIS was why my other grip shift wasn’t working. It was missing this coil of wire. This, of course, ignores the fact that they had just as confidently told me earlier that that “broken” metal clip was the cause of my trouble. They clearly had no idea how a grip shift was supposed to work and were just making it up as they went along.

I was annoyed, of course, that all this trouble and expense and lost days were the result of an incompetent bike mechanic in Tacloban. But I tried to look on the bright side. The grip shifts were, in fact, 15 years old, and it’s possible that they were going to break down and malfunction at some point anyway. Replacing them might not be a bad idea. And it was kind of fun to have these new rapid-fire shifting levers. I’ve never had a bike with these kinds of levers and I was eager to give them a try. To be honest, I’ve never really liked the grip shifters. They caused me a lot of trouble. The biggest problem is that it took a lot of force to turn them, and when I was cycling in hot countries, my hands would get sweaty and it was impossible to turn the grip shifts. My hands just slid around them. So I had to wrap a towel around the grip shift and do other things to be able to manipulate them. Here in the Philippines, I had purchased cycling gloves for this reason. I usually don’t use cycling gloves, but they gave me some friction so that I could turn the grip shifts. With these rapid-fire levers, I didn’t have that problem anymore. I took the bike out into the parking lot of the shopping mall and gave the new system a try and it worked flawlessly. At first blush, I found I preferred them to to the grip shifters. Of course, this was on the very first day when they worked perfectly. I can imagine them developing problems over time – especially since the Acera is in the low end of the Shimano line. And as I rode away from the bike shop and started cycling back downtown, I realized another, much bigger, disadvantage. With grip shifters, you can go from one gear to a much smaller or larger gear easily. You do it with one smooth motion and can do it quickly. So I could go from first gear to eighth gear almost directly. With these rapid-fire levers, I had no choice but to cycle through every one of the intervening gears. I had to go to second gear with one click, then third gear with another click, then fourth gear with another click, and so on. I had to physically change gears seven times in order to go from first gear to eighth gear. In the past, I would accomplish that with one smooth turn of the grip shift. The chain would just glide over the sprockets and go from the biggest down to the smallest. Using the levers is much slower and more finicky, but, I reflected, this might be an advantage. I noticed that as I rode, I was using the full range of gears. With the grip shifter, I tended to use just a couple of them – usually first gear and eighth gear. I almost never used the gears in between. But with these levers, I was actually cycling along for periods of time in all the other gears. That means that the sprockets will wear more evenly and more slowly. Using only first and eighth gear means that all the wear takes place on those two sprockets and the whole drive chain would have to be replaced earlier. These rapid-fire levers might extend the life of my system by quite a bit. In any event, it was fun to try out a new system, and it worked well.

While I was out and about, I did a bit more shopping. I bought a small bottle of mosquito repellant – finally! I really could have used that in Tacloban for all those weeks. I also bought a smaller and lighter soap dish to replace my big heavy one. I also went to the giant SM Mall. I knew that Habagat – a local outdoor gear company – had an outlet there. I was hoping to track down some camping equipment that I needed. Unfortunately, shopping malls don’t really work for a person like me. There was a Habagat outlet, but it was very small and poorly stocked. There was also a North Face outlet and some others. Both of these carried mainly clothing. In fact, the mall as a whole seemed to be 80% clothing. Most malls are like that. For someone like me – more interested in technical and electronic items – going to a shopping mall is generally a waste of time. The things I want and need are rarely found there. Still, it was interesting to see the SM mall. It’s a huge place and packed with people. In an interesting twist, I was listening to podcasts at the time, and while at the mall, I heard a BBC documentary about the history of shopping malls and their development around the world. It was fascinating to get that insight while being in a huge mall.

I’m not nearly done with the work I need to do on my equipment, but I’m getting there. I’m considering also replacing all the spoke nipples on my wheels. It makes me nervous that two of them broke on the front wheel. It makes me think that they are all worn out. I will probably go back to Welson to ask about that. Cycle Logic had no spoke nipples to speak of – just one small jar of green lightweight aluminum ones.

 

 

 

Tags: bike, Cycle Logic, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Tacloban, XT