Tourist in MSN

The bike and component manufacturers have been pretty good at cutting labor and associated labor costs from the bike assembly process. They would like you to think that everything was an improvement, but a big part of why they made some of the changes was to reduce labor costs by component manufacturers, bike manufacturers, and bike dealers that sell the bikes.

Cup and cone bearings in hubs were replaced with cartridge bearings that can be pressed in, no labor time needed to adjust bearings. Cup and cone bottom brackets were replaced with bottom brackets that use pressed in cartridge bearings, more labor time savings. But I was happy to see the cup and cone headsets disappear.

Getting rid of triples cut the assembly time associated with getting the front derailleurs and shifters to index right, another labor savings.

By going with 1X systems, that gets rid of several components saving more labor time and it also raises the revenue from selling more expensive replacement cassettes. A winner for the component manufacturers and also the bike manufacturers.

I am a little surprised that some of the Shimano hubs are still sold with cup and cone bearings, they must have figured out how to automate the bearing adjustment, otherwise they would have dropped those from their product line years ago. I built up a new touring bike about five years ago, bought a brand new Shimano M756A rear hub for it, that hub design is probably over a decade and a half old but they are reliable, uses quarter inch ball bearings and a steel axle.

I posted a photo above in post 10, repeating that photo here:



I built up this bike about six years ago, ordered the new frame in Dec 2015, so had all winter to build it up. Parts include:

• Campy road triple, I am guessing 15 years old, maybe 20 years. I have spare chainrings on the shelf.
• Campy bottom bracket. This is probably the only trouble spot for replacements, it uses a ISO taper, not JIS, so replacements are rare. I have a spare on the shelf for that reason.
• Rear wheel, I built that up in 2004, quarter inch ball bearings are easy to replace. I used to tour on that wheel, thus I put a spoke protector on it to make sure I was not stranded somewhere with a derailleur cage in the spokes.
• Rear derailleur is a common Shimano long cage model, this one is an XT from the 1990s. Replacements are easy to find.
• Sram eight speed 11/32 cassette, quite common and cheap. I have several spares on the shelf since I have four bikes that use that cassette.
• Eight speed KMC chain, easy to find.
• Campy 10 speed brifter for the rear. But I am not sure how much longer parts will be available to rebuild those. Have a spare on the shelf.
• Front shifter is a vintage Huret downtube friction shifter. Initially this was intended to be temporary while I decided what to use as a permanent front shifter. But it is still there, so it is looking less temporary.
• Front wheel is however newer technology. When I built this bike up six years ago I used a front wheel that I had built in 2004. But a year later I built up a dynohub wheel, SP PV8 hub. Thus, I have a hub that is much harder to repair if I need to. (There was a post on this forum a couple years ago where someone described replacing the cartridge bearings.) So, this is the one upgrade that I made that improves the bike function, but has made it harder to fix.

When I avoid the two most cross chained gears on each chainring, I still get 18 well spaced effective gears without redundancies. I do not see a reason to change to a 2X or 1X system. The level of technology about 15 or 20 years ago is perfectly adequate in my opinion. I would prefer indexed front shifting on the handlebar, but it is not a high priority to me.

Unusually warm day yesterday, temp up in the 40s, so went out for an exercise ride, that was the bike I chose. Has not snowed for a while, so I left the bike with studded tires at home.



My road bike which I bought as a complete bike is my only bike with a double instead of a triple crank. I was not looking for a new bike when I bought it, but it was an unbelievable price and brand new with factory warranty, so I bought a 2X bike. Since I bought that as a complete bike, the drivetrain was all one grupo, a 2X10 Campy drive train. I am not in a hurry to change any of the parts on that.