I’m pretty sure the first place I came across the term retrogrouch was on The Retrogrouch’s blog. I think I landed there because he had something to say about my Specialized cranks. The blog is a nice and useful collection of information about this and that. The retrogrouch term seems to be older and more widely used, though.

  • Where I come to this from is that I acquired the habit of riding a bike around the countryside in the late 70s to the late 80s. So I got used to bikes the way they were then, both in terms of riding them and teaching myself to do the mechanical stuff. Friction shifting, for example, is just what I grew up with. Beyond being, as an Irish teenager had to be, a fan of Roche and Kelly in those years (but also Philippa York), I wasn’t interested in racing, and the kind of bike I hankered after was what was understood then, in that part of the world, as a good touring bike, as portrayed on the cover of Richard’s Bicycle Book, Cycle Touring magazine, etc.; and also in the marketing materials of makers like Raleigh and Dawes, because for British brands, a touring bike was a thing then.
  • As you can read here, the career of Old Bike aka the Alves was interrupted or was never what I’d intended it to be. So in a way, what motivates me is an itch to turn back time to about 1990 and do some of the cycling I’d dreamed of doing before lots of other stuff got in the way. In that sense it’s not surprising that I have a fondness for bikes and parts from the early 90s.
  • Old Bike is not only a connection to things that might have been, it is also one of the artefacts that link me to my temps perdu, if you will; to remember and in some way understand and resolve the things that actually were. A relic or souvenir, a tangible substrate for, or medium of, biographical reflection.
  • In general I am quite a fan of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. In the rest of life we usually don’t have much choice but to go along with technological innovations, whether they make much sense to us personally or not. But bikes are a field where I get to pick and choose.
  • To my mind, the reliability or adequacy of a technology isn’t only an inherent quality, it also has to do with how well I, as the user, know it. And I’m still learning things about the oldfangled stuff. For example, I only recently experienced a freewheel unscrewing itself on the road for the first time, and now I know how to deal with that.
  • My first professional career was as a research scientist and a lot of it revolved around technical stuff to do with getting certain kinds of instrumental measurements to work with particular kinds of samples. There was a lot of tinkering with spectrophotometers and chromatography systems and mass spectrometers and reaction conditions, tweaking concentrations and timing and stuff to make particular things work. Messing around with bikes partly meets that need to always be puzzling about how I can improve something.
  • In science you spend most of your time being wrong about things, and most of your effort discovering how, and you’d better get to like it. Much of what I do with bikes also involves uncovering how my ideas have been wrong. They say two wrongs don’t make a right. But out of dozens of wrongs, something a bit right may emerge 😉
  • I’m a perfectionist by nature, and doing stuff like this lets me live that out but also requires me to accept things that are good enough. Because nothing’s ever perfect.
  • I do think the idea that some of the best parts for a touring bike come from the late 80s/early 90s has some validity to it. It was the era, for example, when things like sealed cartridge bearings came in (YMMV on that one, but mine have never given me any trouble). Indexed shifting was fairly new, and Shimano won that by making gears whose basic shifting action was very good, even if you weren’t using the clicks – so yes, friction shifting benefited from indexed shifting. Mountain bikes were the trend, while the scope of digital engineering was still quite limited by today’s standards, so for a while, I think, everything was made a bit more solid than it strictly needed to be, resulting in quite a few indestructible parts, ideal for touring.
  • I’ve always been into woodwork, but back in school, metalwork was its poor cousin. I just about learned how to file and drill holes. Recently I’ve been having fun making various little brackets and things for the bikes, and I’m gradually developing more sophisticated ways of doing it.
  • I hope I’m not too grouchy about it. If there was a phase where I was a bit frustrated, it was the years when steel bikes seemed to be vanishing from the face of the earth. I was pleasantly surprised when they came back into fashion. Now there are lots of sites selling vintage and NOS parts, plenty of individuals are selling them from peer to peer, and we have quite an ecosystem of niche companies making relevant new stuff – Nitto, Honjo, Dia Compe, Sugino and TA are still with us, to name a few, and there’s Phil Wood and Paul Components and Gilles Berthoud and Jan Heine and Vélo Orange and Rivendell, and others, all doing things that are a bit outside the mainstream. Odd things like gum brake lever covers and toeclips are easy to find. There’s nothing to grouch about.
  • Another game in this field is the speculation and experimentation on where the development of bikes and their subsystems might have taken a wrong turn, or dropped ideas that are actually quite worthwhile. In the area of derailleurs we have Rivendell/Grant Petersen reviving microratchet shifters and low-normal rear derailleurs, and René Herse/Jan Heine doing the neo-Nivex rear and what may seem like a primordial front mechanism operated by a direct lever. What is the best way to attach luggage to a bike? Modern bikepacking bags have gone one way, KlickFix/Topeak/RackTime/Ortlieb another, and “traditional” rando bags with decaleurs and transverse saddlebags another. I find it interesting to think about the basic issues each of these is trying to solve. I’m fascinated watching the Japanese tradition around names like Alps and Grandbois, where a spectrum of touring/pass-hunter/audax bikes seems to have carried on more or less undented by the mountain bike boom. I like reading about what these guys are up to, even if I’m not directly in the market for their products.
  • Old Bike and indeed New Old Bike are post-’87 and therefore don’t qualify for Eroica, so that particular bullet has missed me. I kinda liked the idea when it first came up. Keeping a bike period-authentic has a certain appeal, but for me it’s not an overriding thing. I have no doctrine as to what category of modern parts I accept; I take what I like. I want bikes that are good to ride, not museum pieces. And even with great old parts, I think the best homage I can pay them is to wear them out.
  • For biographical reasons I enjoy both spending and saving money, and arsing around with old bikes allows me to feel I’m doing either, depending on my mood. Sometimes cheapness wins, and sometimes the sunk costs have the upper hand. Spending € 100 on a threaded freewheel and another € 100 on a bearing press just to keep my old hubs going may be a fool’s errand. Honjo mudguards are an extravagance, a work of art I am barely worthy to own, and the only way to fit mudguards to my bike. Make up your own mind.

At the time of writing I’ve written a whole list of technical posts. But I hope the technical stuff is now more or less at a plateau where I pretty much have the bikes I need and can get down to riding them more.