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High technology
When big trees, the kind that are cut for timber, are standing, well, they're pretty darn high. Yup, I'm playing on that with this post's title. Even before I was an amateur logger on my current land, I had a history of using wood for bike parts. At the end of the 2003 race season, I thought I'd had my fill of competing on two wheels, so I set about assembling the bike I'd long said I would build at that point: one with as few fragile things to break as possible. I wanted no suspension, no hydraulic brakes, and for shifting, that would be controlled with a simple, light, durable thumb shifter.
I found an offering of my desired eight speed Sun Tour shifters, brand new, from Bikeman.com , owned by Davis Carver, whom I highly respect, in Woolwich Maine. The only issue, they had only rear shifters. Ok, most of my shifting is rear, and I'll eventually find a front shifter. Until then, one will do. Instead, I learned that one chainring is plenty in the woods. Who knew I'd be such a trendsetter, running a 1x drivetrain before anyone had invented such a term?
Of course, the narrow-wide chainring hadn't been invented yet either, so to keep my chain in place as I bounced without complete finesse down trails, I ground the teeth off an old chainring to retain the outside. The inside didn't have clearance for an extra ring, so I pirated the clamp from a front derailleur to mount an inverted-L-shaped block of plywood that would retain the chain on the inside. It worked plenty well, the wood ground to the perfect final shape by the passing chain within the first ride. After changing my mind on retirement, I raced that set-up the next spring, even starting the season on the old, used, steel hardtail I'd bought for the simplicity project. True to my excessive valuation of my endorsement by riding a product, I had partially removed the brand stickers from that frame, which fittingly left "O K MOUNT". With so little to break, that bike was pretty much always ok!
Jump forward more than two decades, and I'm actually relearning to enjoy riding a suspension fork, and a lot of one at that. I've also gone against the industry trend for hybrid utilitarian bikes and readopted triple chainrings for bikes that spend lots of time both on the roads and in the woods. To quote a Matt in Connecticut, "Add gears to add years."
The 27.5" mountain bike that I just converted to a 700c hybrid, it was running a single chainring when a woods bike, and that crankset stayed on the bike for almost the first month of the conversion. I finally swapped that and mounted a shifter. Alas, I also need to find a reducing housing end cap to mate with the shifter I grabbed. The plastic housing guide is broken. I may even have to drill out the hole for the cable to fit that reduced ferrule, and that all takes effort. Luckily, I remember a trick I developed decades ago when a rear shift cable snapped, and I didn't have a screwdriver to turn the limit screws, and I didn't want to ride home in my hardest gear. I wedged a stick in the rear derailleur parallelogram, spreading it open to a position that shifted to the middle cog.
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