New. But Not Too New

New bike stuff is ace – except when it’s not. John Pensink is contrary in issue 73.

This article first appeared in issue 73 of Singletrack Magazine. Subscribers have full access to all Singletrack articles past and present. Learn more from about our subscriptions offers:

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There’s a brand new bike in the shed with my name on it. It’s been there for a month and all it’s gathering is dust. I don’t want to ride it. The other bikes are still taking their regular turns about the block but, somehow, this one has yet to step up to the plate. We’re not bonding. It’s a problem.

I haven’t bought a whole, new bike for a long time. I doubt you have, either. If your shed looks anything like mine, then the way bike purchasing works for you is probably something like this…

Way back in the mists of time (or 1994), you bought yourself your first proper mountain bike. Your parents might have had a hand in the purchase. The chances are it didn’t fit you very well. It probably had crap tyres, too.

You rode the bike and fell in love with it. You rode it more. You rode it so much you started to wear bits of it out. You saved your pocket money, then the cash from your paper round, and finally started siphoning a percentage of the wage packet from your Saturday job into the shady slush fund marked ‘Bike’ that you didn’t think your parents knew about. (You certainly hoped they didn’t, anyway; it was almost as big as the rent.) One by one the worn-out bits got replaced.

First to go were the ancillaries: chain, cables, brake pads, tyres. Expendable, bread-and-butter parts which seemed to need replacing or tweaking on a weekly basis. You tried your best with repairs but once the inner tubes became more patch than tube, you replaced those too.

Then went the maintenance-heavy systems inherited from the desert dwellers: fork seals, wheel bearings, headsets, bottom brackets, left-hand pedals (if anyone’s short of a right-hand Time ATAC, there’s a whole box of not-quite-dead-yet ones here). All easily silenced with a squirt of WD40, until they imploded in a rusty puff of terminal neglect.

And then there was the bigger stuff. The ‘smash the piggy bank’, ‘early birthday present’ emergency bits that you really couldn’t limp along with for just a few more rides. Seatposts and handlebars, snapped and bent in the war of attrition between ability and ambition. Wheels. Death by erosion and its subsequent razor-sharp curls of aluminium – remember rim brakes? – then bashed to an irreversible crisp (via a bit of banging on a rock/wedging in a door/it’ll be reet for another week or two). By the time you’d been through three rims in a year you realised that you might as well just replace the whole rear wheel with one built onto a shiny new disc brake hub, in the name of future proofing. You could ignore the redundant fittings ’til you actually needed new brakes.

Except you couldn’t. The seed was sown. You needed discs now. Which meant you needed a frame with disc mounts. And a new front wheel to match the back one. And a fork with a threadless steerer. And a new stem. And, just like that, your old bike was gone although you were too busy with the shiny new bits to notice, or miss it. The new stuff is always the best stuff after all. Just not too new.

A whole brand new bike is intimidating. There’s no straightforward access to its magic, no point of reference with which to begin your relationship. It’s like stepping outside the gene pool of friends and acquaintances from which most of us find our partner; it’s a scary world out there without the familiar geography and common connections of a shared history, however tenuous the links. There’s a reason why we inevitably end up boomeranging back to what we know. It’s safe and easy. And us lazy humans do like an easy-in.

So it is with bikes. Take a long hard look at your current favourite, the one you’re riding most. I bet those headset spacers are much older than the steerer they’re stacked on. Those cranks are suspiciously polished, too. And those aren’t matching bottle cage bolts. Stem caps are a favourite for repeated transplant. Mine is blue. It’s also been old, borrowed and new. But it’s not about superstition. It’s about familiarity.

I need to take that new bike out for a ride this week. Just a short one, to get things started. Nothing too taxing, although a few little mud splats will no doubt help the process along a little. And I might just fit that stem cap. Just to give myself something nice to look at while we’re bonding.

Just in case.

You know.

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