I wholeheartedly agree with this. Make things too perfect and they become, in my opinion and experience, boring, or at least less interesting than a more primitive technology that requires compensation in the form of greater skill and attention -- rather like making bread by hand instead of using a bread machine. When things are packaged and too easy, you need additives to make them interesting -- go fastest, win the race, split times, what have you. Primitive shifting perfectly complements a "just ride" value set,* and the opposite gives you, or can and did give you, that silly woman who wrote soul searchingly about how she had to trick herself into overcoming the malaise caused by too much "training" that made her hate riding.
Principles are black and white and set in stone, but their applications vary indefinitely, as much as do individuals. But I find -- hell, forget about those damned shifty geary coasty things; I find riding fixed -- and not merely ss -- the most fun, most interesting, and most rewarding sort of riding, *precisely because *it is primitive and "less". It is the *less* that makes it *interesting*. If I had just one bike, it would be a fixed gear; as it is, I have 4, and 3 are fixed. Presently my dirt road bike (we have 3" sand to be negotiated) has multiple gears; 10 mismatched (14-28, cobbled from scavenged cassettes, 8sp, 9sp, and 10 sp) shifted by Bar Cons with a 740n low leverage ratio (ie, little lever movement for a lot of derailleur movement) rd. And I like it. The right Bar Con moves less than 90* to sweep the entire cassette. This requires care and learning, and I still have to trim from time to time, but so what? Those of you who like adventure novels, try the Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey series. One of the fascinating elements is the realistic depiction of full-rigged-sailing-ship technology at its high point in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and from reviews I've read, O'Brian gets it all right. But remarkable, fully mature and refined materials, forms, and usages; large sailing ships could stay at sea longer than any modern vessels except perhaps nuclear-fuel powered ones. Of course, this required huge numbers of men doing hard and dangerous manual labor -- out of a yardarm at night in a gale in freezing rain -- but the technology, and the corresponding skills, were undeniably perfect in a way that nothing was before or has been since. * There is a recent Dave Moulton blog that in its own way perfectly exemplified "just ride". Dave is 83 and rides a modern bike; but he does it for fun at his own, and not somebody else's -- or the *zeitgeist's* or the marketers' or the bike mags'-- pace. On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 1:12 PM, Grant Petersen <[email protected]> wrote: > [...] > > Modern shifters-STI, trigger shifters, all that--really have been > perfected. They work perfectly, and from that point of view there's no > reason NOT to use them. It's just hard to argue why not... For me it comes > down to a mix of a philosophical approach that .. is hard to put into words > without sounding like the unabomber, but it has to do with saying no to > ultimate convenience in the interest of integrating your brain and finger > mechanics into the working of a simple compound machine composed of a wheel > (the cable drum of the shifter) and a lever, the shifter itself. It also > has to do with resisting the urge for maximizing overkill in recreational > activities, and not accepting that it's stubbornness or stupidity to do > that (to resist). > > We all know where the tide is going with everything, and I'd vote for more > than half of it, I'm sure, but there has to be a line. This reminds me > right now, of when I hired on at Bstone in December '84 and thought the > tag-line for the bikes was sappy or hokey or stupid. It was "The Body and > the Bike —the Synergistic Combination." Looking at bikes and bodies now, I > think that's not so stupid anymore. Manual shifting--and maybe even > traditional indexing is part of that, in view of what's right around the > corner of the pike--is like digging in your heels at the 50-yard line and > not letting your role in riding the bike diminish as much as the component > makers and the desperate bike industry wants it to be diminished. They can > and are selling diminishment as advancement, but that's funky because it > assumes there's no pleasure in "the synergistic combination." It's FUN to > shift, it's FUN to miss a shift now and then, to be a flubby human, and > then to correct it on the retry. Every time your shift misses or isn't > perfect, it's a reminder that you're a fallible human operating a simple > machine, and of course you want your shifts to take all the time, but > nobody dies if they don't. The Silver2 shifters will be pretty good. > Good enough! I just thought of something to wonder about. Hm. OK! > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
