Thursday, February 22, 2024, 8:21:50AM EST
Doris got rear-ended by a truck and totalled her Subaru Baja. She’s fine, but now we have to buy a new car. I’ve been pinned down in my apartment unable to do anything because everything requires a car. Even then you would think the road planning would keep people from destroying each others cars. Charlotte has the worst highway on ramp interchange in the nation. Everyone complains about it.
Pause for rant: I fucking HATE American priorities regarding transportation. You don’t have to be a “libtard hippy” to want to be able to ride your bike to the grocery store on the fucking corner. I can’t even do that safely. America, in so many ways, is a horribly failed experiment. Capitalism has ridiculously failed. Car-cultured has miserably failed. Democracy has failed. Only money, lobbyists, and guns/power get you any kind of meaningful “vote” in what is happening. Thankfully, however, we are still free to write stuff like this without mysteriously dying in prison (as recently happened to a political dissident in Russia).
The “free” bike I was given has ancient, expensive components. Replacing the rear Campy cassette from 2003 costs 110 dollars to get a used one. Plus I have to buy all the special tools to even change it out. Anything close to new cassette is 500 dollars—just for a single cassette that’s 20 years old! The same new part with SRAM or Shimano would cost 50 bucks. The chain was 40 dollars. Modern chain would be 10.
The only option I have is ebay, which means no returns. I’m forced to replace this cassette with another old but hopefully not worn one from ebay (that I can never return if it doesn’t work). The chain slips all the time even with the new chain. If that doesn’t fix it I’m looking at having to replace the entire group set, and since Campy free hubs are not compatible with anything else I will need to buy a new wheelset as well. Since this old bike is running rim brakes and Shimano officially doesn’t even make them anymore I will have to buy old stuff anyway. Even the old, low-end groupsets are 1000 dollars.
The bike companies have really cornered the market on forcing new shit down our throats. Even though I have this wonderful, beautiful, “retro” bike, it is practically cheaper for me to buy an entirely new bike than to get this chain and cassette to work reliably going forward. This is a perfectly fine frame but they would have me trash the thing and buy a new one, ‘cuz ‘Merica.
The bike industry is also full of complete idiots who over-anticipated demand and are all going bankrupt now. This is finally dropping the ridiculous prices on bikes, but not enough. A brand new Specialized Aethos was just slashed from 5000 dollars to 4000. It was around 6000 not even a year ago.
I’ve concluded that this beautiful, retro bike will one day become my new fixie. The colors are amazing, the geometry perfect, and the weight, well, as a fixie it will easily come in under 7 kilos. Knowing that I can give this bike a wonderful new life in retirement from road and endurance riding does make me rather happy. So I will try to get this cassette to work, and if it doesn’t, well, I’ll put a campy fixie adapter and get rid of everything, including the brakes.