Shop tools

I do not esteem bike shop owners and their employees different than I esteem doctors and their nurses. I pray I'm wrong, but I am of the opinion that the great range in competence evident in bike shops holds true for medical offices as well. I don't see why we should expect any industry to be immune from great ability, and a substantial lack of same (when I think of some of the really inept bike shops I've encountered, it gives me pause to contemplate their surgical analogs).

I am sure every industry affords us clues allowing us to divine the degree of compentency of that industry's practitioners, and parse the able from the less well-equipped. One way is to consider the tools of the trade, and the inventories carried. Does this specialist arm himself in a fashion that ensures he's keeping up with the state of the art?

While I'm sure I don't know what that means in the medical field, I have a pretty good idea what a first-rate bike shop ought to have on hand, especially if it sells to triathletes. We have in this industry what we call "A+ retailers." If you're a seller of high-end tri bikes, or wetsuits, or race wheels, these A+ accounts are the 25 out of the 250 in North America to which you sell that constitute half your annual domestic revenue.

Yes, of course they'll have one or more flagship tri bike lines and we all know the names of these bike companies. They might carry wetsuits, and apparel, and so on. It's the other stuff, the less visible stuff, that really tells me whether they know what they're doing. I'm going to present part of that list below, both for you the end-user, and for the shops themselves, should they want to know how they score.

SADDLES

The one area that tends to pain triathletes more than any other is the place on which your weight rests when you sit. This is somewhat mitigated by the smaller impression on your bum made by your wallet, which is measurably lighter after paying for a season's worth of entry fees. Still, the pressure of one's weight applied downward, resting upon a part of the anatomy (if you're riding steep) God did not intend as a body weight supporter, cries out for a solution.

The problem is not you, it's your saddle. You need a new one. But which one? There's the rub (so to speak). The quickest, sure-fire way to discern your LBS's ability to solve the problems that ail you the most is to inquire into his tri-specific saddle inventory. Your retailer will not know which saddle works best for you. So he has to carry all the usual suspects, so that you can try them out, perhaps on a bike on a trainer in his store.

He ought to carry Profile Design's Tri Stryke (above). This one is moderately popular among male triathletes and wildly so among the women. He ought to carry Selle Italia's SLR and the tri-specific version, the SLR T1. He ought also to carry the Fizik Arione, and the Arione Tri. It's not enough that your retailer carry the tri-specific varieties of these saddles, the road versions of the SLR and Arione are just as likely to be preferred by triathletes as the tri models. He also probably ought to have ISM Adamo or two in stock (at left). This saddle is either hated, or loved. Enough love it that it should be inventoried.

AERO BAR HARDWARE

Swedish pro Jonas Colting showed up at my house earlier this year with a set of Profile Design bars mounted on his Argon 18 Mercury. He had the underside-mount favored by his friend and countryman, which Profile itself has taken to calling the "Bjorn mount." But he complained of the hex head bolts he could feel through his armrests.

So I went to my garage and pulled out of a tray some M6 x 5cm countersunk machine bolts, and in 5 minutes I had the things mounted correctly. Jonas said he looked all over San Diego for these bolts before coming up to The Ranch. How sad.

Me, I'm not a retail store, but I've got my own little home shop and I'm a tinkerer. I'm frankly suspect of bike shops where there is no tinkerer in residence. You've got to be able to solve problems. Sometimes creatively. Still the best tinkering job I ever saw was at Ironman in, oh, '89 or '90. Wendy Ingraham's shift boss broke out of her carbon bike the day before the race. Shimano's then-mechanic Kim Wilde glassed it back in for her overnight. Imagine that.

I don't have a lot of patience for shops that don't have reams of spare bolts, nuts, ferrules, brackets. Especially the specialty stuff. What about that soft metal oblong piece that your Syntace armrest tray bolts into, the piece that sits on the inside the aero bar? What happens if you strip that out, which is a common occurrence? Does your shop have extra? The best makers of great little hardware pieces are VisionTech and Profile. I like to call up these companies every year or two and beg for a bag of spare bolts, shims, brackets, so that I can play. I can't guarantee where these parts will go. I might end up with a bar that's part Profile, part Oval, or maybe a Full Speed a-HED.

STEMS AND SEAT POSTS

Tri bike companies, as an industry, are always trying to stymie us by selling us bikes that make no geometric sense. We must defend ourselves using an arsenal of spare parts designed to make right what they design wrong. We need stems that are 5cm long and point straight up, straight down, and straight out. We need seat posts that we can flip, turn backwards, forward, upside down and inside out. When we need to stick a tab A into a slot B we need it to fit. It's a war of geometry, and we need weapons.

The bike shop equipped to fight this war has to have the parts. Stems in every possible length and pitch is a start, and these stems have to be in stock in both 31.8mm and 26.0mm sizes. Your shop needs seat posts. Most importantly, it needs straight, zero offset posts in the Thompson design, and it also needs that same sort of post in a dogleg set-back style, because it's one of the few posts you can turn around, so that it's a set-forward. Your shop also ought to carry Profile's Fast Forward post, because this'll get you more forward than the Thompson post will.

Your shop also ought to have a set of posts that allow for a more forward set-up than what comes stock in the bike. Orbea and Kuota have alternative forward-style posts that go into the seat tubes of both the Ordu and Kalibur respectively. Specialized Transitions now come with steeper posts than what came in last year's bikes, and the same with Guru. Quintana Roo and Litespeed retailers have available to them a "Shuttle" that makes these bikes more seat-angle adjustable. The better retailes will have these posts or, at least, have the posts that correspond to the brands they sell.

WHEELS AND RUBBER

Everybody expects to walk into a top-caliber tri shop and see Zipp, Hed, Xentis, Lightweight, Reynolds, and/or any size, style and configuration of race wheels. Fine. But try to find a nice set of cheap training wheels in one of these stores.

You might think it's easy, but it's not uncommon to walk into a shop for a set of beater wheels and walk out $500 poorer. One thing about people who've been riding bikes for a long time, they've got a lot of wheels hanging around. And they should. Wheels are a bit on the fragile side. Spokes pop. Rims get flat spots. Hubs freeze. When any of that happens you're out of commission unless you can pull a wheel off the rafters.

Okay my own home shop might be an exercise in excess (if you think the wheels I have represents overkill, you ought to see how many wetsuits I own that I'll never use).

In part I judge the fitness of a shop on how many common problems it's able to quickly, easily, expertly and inexpensively solve. Is there a set of $200 to $250 Bontrager, Ritchey or Velomax clincher wheels about? Does the shop sell 650c bikes? Okay, then what about a set of 650c wheels? (I can have them here day after tomorrow doesn't count, they must be at the ready.)

This need for sturdy, inexpensive aftermarket training wheels is not simply a luxury, it's a necessity considering how a lot of bikes are spec'd these days. Off the top of my head I can think of Felt's B2, QR's Caliente, and Cannondale's Six-13 Slice 1 that come stock with Zipp's 404. Is the customer going to both train and race on these wheels? Certainly not.

HANDLEBAR PLUGS

Triathletes appear uniquely stymied in their attempts to keep their handlebars plugged. This might seem a minor point, but for some reason I can't seem to find very many retailers that comprehend the scope and the solutions to this problem.

I have written of handlebar plugs, but I need to do more. I see that now. The circumscription of this article confines me to a bare scraping of the surface. Should you feel you'd like to query your LBS as to his available plug inventory, you should look for these two types, one Charlee is sniffing and preparing to chew, made by Velox, the other by Kool Stop.

DRIVE TRAIN RETROFITS

Tri bikes ought to be geared lower than road race bikes, because tri bikes have to be ridden at a higher cadence. Also, that cadence ought never to drop below a given, fairly high, level because the forward tri position is not one that favors the application of a lot of torque. Its power is generated through moderate torque and high cadence.

Accordingly, retailers need to be prepared to gear down the typical tri bike. Were I running a tri shop, I'd have several models of 110mm bolt pattern cranks, such as FSA's Compact designs, as well as those made by Campy and others. It's not the bolt pattern that's important, it's the chainring size or, rather, the inner ring's size. What you need is the ability to put a 34-tooth inner on the bike. Okay, you personally might not want or need this, depending on where you live and who you are. But a shop ought to have this crankset in a variety of arm lengths, with accompanying bottom bracket, sitting in inventory.

The shop also ought to have a variety of cassettes in various price ranges, and I mean up to 13-29 if it's Campy, and 12-27 if it's Shimano. It should have medium to long-cage derailleurs should a wide-ratio cassette be paired with a wide ratio set of front gears (e.g., 34x50).

While this is not tri-specific, I'd also like to see that retailer with Connex-style chains. If the chain your retailer prefers is a SRAM instead of a Wippermann (the company who makes the Connex link pictured at right) I have no beef with that. But, for ease in removing and cleaning the chain, and because this style of link is, according to me, a better technology than a pressed-in pin for narrow 9 and 10-speed chains, it's comforting when I see retailers embracing this technology.

EXTRA CREDIT

It warms my cockles when I go into a tri shop and see a position simulator in the store. It might be a Waterford, Bikefitting.com, Serotta's Size Cycle, it might be the style I most often tend to use made by Ves Mandaric, it could be an Argon 18, it doesn't matter to me. I just like it when a shop considers this sort of tool worthy of the investment. One caveat: certain of these bikes do not work as well for shorter riders. The Bikefitting.com bike is an example. It's especially nice when I see that a retailer has retrofitted such a bike for use for triathlon.

There are other tools of the trade that speak to a retailer's sophistication in bike fitting. The Gollehon Goniometer is a better angle measuring device than that most commonly used in fit studios, and a 48" SmartTool is the best at determing a line's orientation relative to level ground. These aren't requirements, though it would be hard to imagine a shop being a good place to go for a fit if it didn't have a fit simulator.

THE SHORT LIST

This is the short list, and I could go on. But this will give you an idea whether your LBS is up on the state of the art, and it'll give your LBS an idea whether he needs to give himself a kick in the pants.