Restoration Teardown: Drive train

No surprise that there's plenty of wear to be seen in the drive train. Here is the significant wear on the chainring teeth,

and here's the matching wear on the 8-speed cassette.

I've ordered replacement chain rings and cassette. I'm staying with the 8-speed setup, although tempted to upgrade to 9-speed. Two reasons: I'm not sure if there will be room for a 9-speed cassette on the Bionx wheel's hub; and anyway I don't think the extra gear choice would be that important with the "electric stoker" behind me.

There is interesting wear on the crank arms:

That's the result of my right shoe polishing the arm for many revolutions. Here's similar wear on the pedal.

I don't plan to replace these parts. Now that I've cleaned and lubed them, they are perfectly functional. Well, maybe the pedals should be replaced, just for looks. The outer ends are heavily scarred, especially the right one, which (along with my right elbow and buttock) took the load when I wiped out on dry pavement last summer.

Restoration Teardown: the Frame

As I said, I don't have a picture of my white Gold Rush in service. Strange. But here is its frame, stripped.

This is the classic Gardner Martin frame design that he built in many variations for 25 years or more and his company still builds. This version, the Gold Rush Replica or GRR, is aluminum. As shown here, with the bottom bracket still installed, it weighs just 6.8 pounds! That light structure has supported my weight for 17K miles and shows no sign of cracking.

It does show wear, though. The paint's scratched and peeling all over; here's one of the worst areas.

The bottom bracket is still in it because although I have a tool that mates with its teeth, I couldn't loosen it, even using an 18-inch wrench handle. So I'll have to ask Easy Racers to remove it when I take the frame to them next week.

The Electric Stoker

On a tandem bike, the rider in the back—the one who doesn't do the steering or braking but just pedals—is known as the stoker. If you are in front on a tandem, you appreciate your stoker. His or her leg strength is added to your own and makes you feel powerful.

My plan is to add an electric stoker to my recumbent. Specifically, a Bionx motorized rear wheel.

Unlike some other bike motors, the Bionx senses the rider's input torque, and adds to it proportionally. The harder you pedal, the more it tries to help. If you stop pedalling, it stops assisting. You can adjust the assist level with the whizzy-looking computerized control panel.

The first step is to restore the old Gold Rush to a condition where I'll want to ride it! Fix up its tatty paint and scratched and dirty components. After it's rideable again I plan to have Velolectric install a Bionx system on it.

I hope the result will be a beautiful bike that I'll enjoy riding, and that with the aid of the electric stoker I can take and enjoy the longer rides that I couldn't even attempt with my typical fitness level.

We'll see. But first, bike restoration.

The Impossibility Of Maintaining Fitness

Back when I was commuting to work several days a week, I was keenly aware of how quickly my aerobic fitness could fall off. I kept a log of rides, and the times and average speeds. (Yes, I'm a nerd.) After a few months of making a round trip of about 20 miles, three to five times a week, I would have a certain level of speed, say 17.5 mph for a typical run. (You realize, to average 17.5 for a 10-mile ride to work, which I routinely did, I had to maintain 20+ on a lot of stretches.)

Then I'd take a vacation, or would get sick, or for some other reason would be off the bike for two weeks or more.

When I returned to the commute, my speed would be down by 10% or more, say 16.0 mph. And the apparent effort would be much higher; what had been a pleasant challenge would be a miserable slog. After as little as a two-week hiatus, and although I felt perfectly healthy for normal activities, my ability to cycle would be sharply reduced. I would need to ride for at least as long as I had been off, to regain the former level.

As my life presently is, in a very pleasant retirement, there is never an extended period of regular riding as there was in the days when I worked. We travel often, and for long periods. And I was riding less in any case, typically only three days a week. So no sooner would I manage to build up some kind of level of aerobic fitness than we'd go away and it would evaporate. Back to square one.

So as I said, when we returned from a long trip last fall, the thought of getting on the bike and finding out how weak my legs and lungs had surely become was just daunting. So I moved the recumbent out of its privileged spot in the house next to the front door, exiled it to the garage, and left it.

I started jogging, first on a treadmill at the gym during the rainy days, and then on the street, and gradually built up to two-plus miles. It's an OK way to get exercise...

But it's spring, and I can remember the fun and feeling of adventure that comes from a long ride through California countryside in spring and summer. But if I tried it, could I even climb a hill? And if I did go through the pain and effort of building up some minor sort of cycling ability again, I would just lose it again when we take a planned road trip in May, and a European trip in September.

Here's the bind I'm in: the kind of cycling I remember enjoying—that is, rides of 20-50 miles that inevitably have some hills in them—is simply impossible without a certain level of fitness. Not a huge level, I'm not talking about Lance Armstrong stuff here, but definitely more than the typical person of my (ahem) late middle age usually has, even if they are nominally healthy.

I could probably regain that fitness level with a few months' consistent effort; there are plenty of guys a decade older than me out there right now. But as my life presently is, I won't get consecutive months of consistent riding. And if I did regain fitness, I'd quickly lose it over the next vacation.

Oh, wurra wurra, what to do? Answer in the next post.

OK, screw philosophy. Let's talk bikes.

This is me on my first recumbent. That was circa 1947. I've been riding bikes for quite a while.

There was a decade or so after high school when I didn't ride. Then, in the late 60s, I started to get concerned about weight and exercise, and bought a bike. That was a brown Schwinn road bike with lever shifters. It had a little mechanical odometer that was driven by a peg on a front spoke, going tick, tick, tick as it counted distance. I was living in Daly City, and several times a week I would ride up the road toward the top of Mt. San Bruno (tick..... tick..... tick.....). At a certain point I would be completely exhausted, and would turn around and coast back home (tiktiktiktik!). However, each week I could ride a little higher on the hill before pooping out. I can still remember the triumph of the day when I got all the way to the top.

Another cycling hiatus followed through most of the 70s. But by the late 70s, once again concerned about my body, I bought another bike, a Raleigh, and later a second, better one, and began commuting to work by bike.

In 1988 I bought a beautiful Miyata with Ultegra components. I bought it because (I later wrote) "it felt light as a feather and as precise as a scalpel." It was really a criterium racer and completely inappropriate for my abilities, but after I had changed its gearing to match my leg strength I used it for commuting for five years.

In 1994 I commissioned a custom bike, a Rock Lobster by Paul Sadoff in Santa Cruz. I rode many thousands of miles on the Rock Lobster, commuting, weekend fun rides, and organized centuries. I wrecked it badly and Paul rebuilt it. A few years later I wrecked it again.

By that time I was interested in recumbents. Marian approved; she figured if I was closer to the ground I'd have less distance to fall. So I bought a Tour Easy. Here I am with the TE embarking on a solo tour through Marin County. I put over 6,600 miles on this bike in three years.

In 1998 I bought a new recumbent, an Easy Racers Gold Rush. It was almost the same as the Tour Easy, only made of aluminum instead of steel, and painted white instead of black.

I'm sorry to say that I seem to have no pictures of this bike, even though I've been riding it for more than a decade and for more than 17,300 miles. That sounds like a lot of miles, and it is, although it works out less than 1,500 miles per year. After that many miles and years, the bike was looking ratty. The white paint was chipped and scratched, there was ground-in dirt in all the working parts, the rubber bits were tattered, there were scars on the right brake and the fairing from where I wiped out taking a corner too fast. And you know? I wasn't feeling good about cycling, either.

So when we came back from a six-week trip last fall, I just sort of didn't start riding again. Why? Well... let's go to another post for that.

Complete descent into fuddyism

I've been obsessing over the miserable non-debate on health care, dominated by the noise of the crazies and the deliberate liars and propagandists, and finally was driven to...

...yeah, really, I did. Finished a complete descent into fuddy-duddyism: wrote to the president.

Well, they make it really easy at whitehouse.gov. And here's what I said. Frustrated speech-writer that I am, I even told him what to say.

President Obama,

As a nerd myself I generally admire your cool, thoughtful approach to issues. However, that coolness is not serving you well, and not serving the country well, in the intense health care battle.

Your opponents have seized the emotional high ground with strong, gut-level rhetoric and images. Oh, most of their arguments are spurious—and the people who intentionally disseminate rumors like the "euthanasia of the elderly" notion are simply despicable—but they are being effective and, more important, are dominating the discussion, driving out rationality.

Please, sir, it is essential you begin to show heart, emotion, and commitment in your public statements. You need to drive the health-care issue back into the realm of morals, family, and patriotism.

Forgive my presumption in putting words in your mouth, but this is the kind of thing I think you need to be saying, to get on top of this debate once more:

"This is not merely an economic issue.
This is not merely a political issue.
Health care for Americans is a moral issue.

Access to basic health care is essential to maintaining your basic human dignity in the face of adversity.

To deny that access to someone because their employer laid them off is to say, you don't have work so you don't count as a human being.

A system that denies that access to a child because its parents are poor, is a system that says, poor kids have no value as future citizens.

It is simply wrong that in America, anyone should be forced to choose between buying medicine and buying food.

It is simply wrong that in America, any parent should ever be forced to choose between paying the rent, and taking their child for a routine visit to a pediatrician.

It is simply wrong that in America, infant mortality is worse than in forty-four other nations. (CIA World Factbook)

Let me break that down for you.

A newborn infant delivered in Sweden, or in the Czech Republic, or in Greece, or in forty other countries including even, I kid you not, in Cuba,

that baby is more likely to live to be 1 year old than is an American newborn.

American babies die in their first year almost three times as often as newborns in Sweden or Japan.

Now, is that because American parents love their babies less? Of course not!

Is it because American pediatricians are less skilled? Of course not!

I believe that the greatest part of that difference is due to one simple cause:

That there is a significant number of parents in this nation who have to think twice, have to agonize about whether they can afford to see their doctors for prenatal checkups, whether they can afford to bring their children to clinics for routine checkups,

And when a child gets sick, they have to agonize over what other basic budget item they will have to cut back on—rent, food, clothes?—before they can afford to take a sick child to a doctor.

And too often they are forced by the cruel economics of health care to wait, and agonize, and pray a sick child won't get worse, and finally take the baby to the emergency room of the hospital because that's the only place they can afford to go. Our emergency room people are skilled and caring, but this is not the right way to deal with infant illnesses.

This is one big reason why in these United States, three times as many newborns don't live to see that first cake with the candle on it, as in some other countries.

Is that the America you know?

I think I live in an America that has always been able to accomplish what it needed to do—in style, with class, and spirit, and efficiency. Isn't that the America you know?

I know that we Americans can build a health care system that truly is the world's best—

and one that ensures proper basic care of every citizen,

and we can do with with style, with class, with spirit, and efficiency.

And I say that anyone who says this isn't possible, isn't practical, isn't sensible—they are simply slandering America..."

Yup, that's what I told him. If there's any response, I'll post it here.

RNC: "Retarded, Nitwits, and Crass"

I've never registered Republican (excuse me while I spit). I was Independent for years, switched to Democrat last year so I could vote Obama in the primary. But somehow I've had the luck to be picked up by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for a mass mailing of a push-poll. My opinion, it seems, will count as "representative of all Republicans living in your district."

Oh, goody.

Old Story

A quick Google search shows me that the RNC has been sending out these polls for some time: at least in 2003, 2007 (a lovely presentation, that) and 2008. I didn't find any links to positive reactions to the poll, but these negative ones are kind of fun to read.

Sleazoid Package

This is such a sleazoid package. First off, the envelope is made up like one of those property-tax scam letters, blazoned "Official Business" and "To Be Opened by Addressee Only Under Penalty of Law."

In the cover letter, Michael Steele (or his publicist) does his level best to scare the bejabbers out of me. Sample phrases: Democrats have absolute power in Washington, D.C. ... Harry Reid, one of the most ruthless, liberal partisans in Congress ... Oh RNC, save me from da ruthless liberal! Hey, wait a minute, isn't "ruthless liberal" an oxymoron? ...the gun-grabbers and red tape regulators are emboldened (time to bury my collection of AK-47s in the back yard).

Then he gets down to the lying part: President Obama embraces a socialist economic philosophy... Barney Frank has proposed a massive 25% cut in national defense spending... Democrats plan... to shut down conservative talk radio ... permanently destroy the 2nd Amendment...

Stop Beating Your Wife

Probably the biggest lie in this package is the frequently-repeated insistence that this poll is for "guidance" and without good data from it, "our agenda will be incomplete and our ability to spread the message... will be dramatically weakened." How do I know that that's a lie? Because of the way the questions are phrased. Here's just a small sample:

• Should the Democrats' so-called Stimulus Bill with its wasteful pork-barrel spending be repealed?
• Do you oppose government-sanctioned euthanasia?
• If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

Oh, no, I'm for wasteful spending, euthanasia and gutting the safety of all. Come on, this is about as much a "poll" as the North Korean elections have a "ballot." Do you want Kim Jung Il, yes or yes? If the RNC bothers to tally the responses they are wasting their party's money even more egregiously than they did by sending this piffle to me.

I'm going to mark it carefully "No" in all columns and send it back, not because I think they'll actually count any of the votes, but simply because it will cost them postage on the Business Reply Envelope they provided.