1980 - Of Bicycles, Bits and Dreams

For the first riding season since 1980, my custom Assenmacher is not ready to ride.  After 44 seasons and just over 50,000 miles, in late 2023, the 20 year-old combination of derailleurs, freewheels and bar end shifters that made up the drive train were all in need of replacement, and it was no longer fun to ride in it’s current state. I took it down to a bare frame, now hanging in my garage.  It still needs a good clean up, but I don’t yet have plan for how it returns to rideable.  

It has been an incredible bike.  While the coast-to-coast ride I had envisioned when planing and purchasing my dream touring bike never materialized, it did dozens of shorter trips and overnights.  At times it was stripped of fenders racks and was my only fast bike.  I have ridden at almost every event distance, up to a double-century on Seattle to Portland.  It even became my long commuter for a few years, fenders and racks perfect for that, when I had indoor parking. Once I had a regular sport bike, whenever I wanted to ride with my various SLR and later digital cameras, the Assenmacher, with an Eclipse handlebar bag, was was my goto bike for rides looking for the next Kodak moment.

Let's go find a sunset!

I ordered the frame during the summer of 1979, talking directly to Matt Assenmacher at his first shop in Swartz Creek, Michigan.  I first heard about Matt in 1975 on the DALMAC overnight in Mt. Pleasant where he was working out of a bike shop.  His frames had already begun popping on rides around Michigan. With their classic British paint schemes and bold white lettering on the down tube, they were easy to spot.  When I moved to Lansing in the fall of 1978, his frames were very popular there, and my new circle of riding friends soon included a handful of Assenmacher bikes.  

By then I was going on 5 seasons on my current touring road frame, and I was getting the itch for a true touring bike.  The idea of a custom bike was very appealing, especially for my future touring plans, up to and including crossing the U.S.  One of the draws of a custom built touring bikes was the option of adding custom braze-ons or “bits”.  On most of the production bike frames of the mid-70’s,  almost every thing that that went on a bike frame: the shift levers, cable stops, housing guides, and water bottles, were mounted using wrap-around clamps.  And no matter how well the clamp was made, or even if they were coated with rubber or plastic, the assortment of clamps were distracting to look at and eventually damaged the bike’s finish.

So along with a frame geometry intended for touring, you ordered a bike with all the bits you thought you needed.  My Assenmacher started out with 3 sets of bottle cages on the down tube, top tube brake housing guides, and cable stops and guides for the front and rear derailleur cables.  I also added rack mounts on the seat stays, and double eyelets on the front and rear for fenders and racks.  So that was 20 “bits” brazed on to the frame, when I took delivery in January of 1980.  I had the frame repainted 10 years later, and made few more changes based on what I had learned.  I switched from side-pulls to cantilever brakes, and the new (late 80`s) low rider front racks.  That added 7 more bits.   And that is the bike I rode for the next 33 years.

With regard to the drive train, it was originally built with a Sun Tour 6-speed rear freewheel, and triple TA crankset.  It was an arrangement called “half step and granny” with two the largest front chainrings just 6 teeth different, and dropping down to a 28 tooth inside ring, “the Granny”.  The freewheeling was 14 to 28.  A few years later, Sun Tour added a 7th cog, and largest (lowest gear) a 34.  But without the frame being updated to allow wider, modern hubs, 7 was the most cogs that would fit.  And for the last 20 years, that only worked with a 8-speed shifter that had one unused click.  That was the arrangement I assembled in the early 2000’s, for use on my Assenmacher and our 1985 Santana tandem.

As fate would have it, the summer I planned the purchase of my dream touring bike, I met a girl.  That girl became my wife, and after that, almost all of our touring was on a tandem.  Linda and I had over 6,000 touring miles on our tandems during the `80’s, on trips throughout the midwest, Southern California, New England and the Canadian Rockies.  As our two sons came along, tandems ruled the day for our riding with them.  The Assenmacher was ridden during the week and a few weekend tours, but anything epic was on the tandem.  

My last true tour on the Assenmacher was in 2014, riding from Columbia, Missouri to Covington, Indiana over 6 days, with the first 100 miles on the Katy Trail.  While the Assenmacher was still great on the road, I knew that time was catching up with it. Its mid-70’s roots could not support more modern drivetrains.  And while a sweet ride on pavement, the 700x28 based wheels weren’t suitable for any-surface, loaded touring, a point driven home by two flats in 10 miles on a rutted section of the crushed limestone Katy; and a few days later when had to choose a busy state highway over a more direct route with 8 miles of gravel.

Crossing into Indiana, 2014

By coincidence, Trek introduced their 920 Adventure touring bike that same summer, (I even read one of the first reviews on that trip on the Katy).  With our boys now grown, and Linda’s interest more in weekend B&B rides rather than epic tandem tours, I was starting to have some time again for single bike touring.  Since 2017, I’ve had a 920, now with over 1,500 miles of touring trips and thousand more of commuting and round town, and even as my camera bike.

Thought I didn’t realize it at the time, my last ride (for now?) on the Assenmacher was when a high school friend and I connected for a ride from my home.  He was on a current carbon frame, while I kept pace on the steel frame of another era.  We rolled back the years since we had last run cross country together to the buzz of Conti’s on pavement. And as always the Assenmacher was just an extension of me, following my lead without a thought.  It was a good ride to end on.

Every time I talk about a new bike, Linda reminds me of a letter I wrote early in our relationship stating the Assenmacher was “the last bike I ever needed.”  (I am sure I would have qualified that with “last hand-built, Columbus tubed, custom touring bike”!)   Obviously, it wasn’t the last bike, but through all the bikes I’ve owned and ridden since, it was the one constant.  Though my first dream bike won’t make the trip I imagined at the time, the hours and miles on that bike are an irreplaceable part of my ride so far.

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2023 - Adventures in Wheel Life

 RAIN 2023 killed my Domane’s rear wheel.  

To be precise, it was the 70 or so miles of riding in the rain on RAIN that contributed to its final demise.  That and the 20,000 or so miles over 10 years I have owned my Trek Domane 2.3.

The wheel finished RAIN without incident, and it was not a catastrophic or dramatic failure. Upon arriving home, I cleaned up the accumulated road grime, lubed the chain and it appeared ready to go.   A few days later I drove to my weekly club ride, unloaded my bike and rode over from the parking lot to the group starting area, and that is when I heard the noise.  The sound that was a cross between a tin popcorn popper and running clothes dryer filled with pocket full of quarters. 

I decided I had better do a quick warm up loop to figure what was going on, and the noise only got worse.  Any hard pressure on the pedals, and the rear hub amped up the complaining.   I started out with my usual group, but the noise seemed to get even worse as I accelerated out into the road, and then tried to match pace with the group.  After just a mile, I dropped off the back and took stock.   It was not something I could adjust away, but I was able to ride with an easy pace, so opted to finish a solo ride before driving home.  The noise was tolerable as long as kept my pedal pressure and pace down. (Not a bad idea for the week after RAIN, in any case.)

Back at home, I put the bike in my repair stand and removed the rear wheel.  The cassette had over an 1/8” of movement side to side.  As best I can determine, the rain on RAIN had washed out all the lube, and most likely one of the free-hubs internal bearing races had failed or was permanently worn.  So I began to weigh my options for getting back to a quiet bike.

This wheel was already on a short count before RAIN, as I had found cracks forming around a couple of the eyelets in the rim.  The rim was not deformed, but it was only a matter of time. So now had a wheel with a bad rim and a bad freehub.  When you figure the cost of the rim, freehub, the spokes to rebuild (and time to find the parts and rebuild the wheel), it was looking like a couple of hundred dollars and a month of downtime. This was further complicated by my not having a spare rear wheel for the Domane. 

My rack for spare tires, wheels & etc.

It wasn’t always that way.  By the time I had my second road bike, and for the next 30+ years of riding that followed, I had multiple sets of wheels that I shared and moved between bikes.  I had narrow rims for sport riding, a set of touring rims with wider tires, and a few early cassette hubs (pre-10 speed).  These all easily interchanged between the 3-4 bikes the bikes I acquired during the late 70’s and early 80’s, and hung onto until just a few years ago.  Many of those were also Freewheel rather than cassette hubs as well; technology that was rapidly evolved away from starting in the early 90’s.  

And also during those first few years (decades, to be precise) of riding, wheels were readily interchangeable between my bikes.  So up until about the early 2000’s, I went through a half dozen different bikes using the same 4-5 pairs of wheels.

Swapping wheels meant a set of wheels was never on a bike that long, and if there was a problem, a wheel swap just took a few minutes. But this wasn’t the case for my Domane.  That rear wheel only came off for flats and new tires.  Riding quality tires, that meant the rear wheel might not come off for full season or longer, since I was easily getting 4,000 miles or more out a pair of Continentals.  (Yes, I should have been doing a better job or routine maintenance, but that is another story.)

And my newer bikes make when swaps even more unlikely.  Between my Trek 920 (2017) and my newest gravel bike, I have two different thru axle standards from Trek/Bontrager and Shimano.  Don’t get me wrong, I love thru axle tech (and disc brakes, offset rims and other improvements), but it just means that unless you have a pro team support budget, you aren’t likely to have an extra pair of wheels for multiple bikes.

Maybe 5,000 more miles, or maybe not.

To put the Domane back on the road quickly, I found a set of Shimano stock wheels, complete with a new free hub.  With the rapid adoption of disc brakes, finding a set of rim brake compatible, standard quick release wheels in stock actually took some shopping around  .  And though I wouldn’t have minded building my own, the factory built wheels, with a mid-line Shimano hub, was less expensive than hand building a rear wheel only.  The original rear wheel is probably headed for the recycle bin, and the front will just be on garage wheel rack for whatever.

The new wheels, with a fresh set of tires, dropped right in, needing just a few tweaks to the brakes for the slightly wider rims.  The spoke tension was spot on, and there were no pings of seating spokes on the first ride. So after just a couple of weekends of downtime,  I was back on road, hearing only the metal-on-metal whisper of the chain and the pleasing buzz of Conti’s on pavement, knowing my Domane was ready for another season, or 10.

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