Our Own Devices

So I’m away from my family again. When left to my own devices, as I have been twice in as many years, I revert to a kind of primal bachelorism that doesn’t involve binge drinking and strip clubs so much as eyestrain and saturated fats. Without my family around, I think about work and work-related stuff pretty much unceasingly, and I eat really horrible food.

The upside of this is that I tend to find myself waiting in line at Taco Bell at 7:00pm at night, and–having failed to eat anything but a spoonful of peanut butter since 7:00am that morning and just slightly hallucinatory, the world around me becomes one big allegory for the bicycle industry.

Last night, for instance, I’m waiting in line behind this enormous guy at Taco Bell, and I’m thinking about mountain bike pedals when all the pieces suddenly start falling into place.

One of the guys in the office had roasted his Crank Bros. pedals for like the zillionth time–bushings in there, you know–and as I’m contemplating the cost savings of plastic bushings versus some more robust options, I can’t help but notice that the massive guy in front of me is ordering food that isn’t on the menu.

I don’t mean to suggest he’s gotten his Kentucky Taco Hut™ (pretty sure that reference is licensed to my friend, Dan) nomenclature all jacked up and is asking the taco man for fried chicken. He seems to know he’s in Taco Bell and that various tacos are what’s on the menu. It’s just that he’s hell bent on combining the words on the menu in ways that don’t refer to available food. He wants, for instance, “A Supreme Pizza Taco,” or a “Grand Burrito” or just “a Supreme.” Most of these words appear on the backlit Taco Bell menu he’s referencing, mind you–it’s just that none of them appear in the combinations he’s attempting. The poor guy behind the counter has at this point taken out a plasti-covered menu and is doing his best to translate, but the sheer skill with which the big guy is deftly avoiding any word combination of food that’s actually available is sort of breathtaking. Hungry as I am, a point is reached at which I’m essentially rooting for him.

And that’s when it occurs to me that so much of the bike industry is very much like this exchange. There’s a kind of disconnect between what we’re asking for, and what’s actually on the menu.

You know what would be great, for instance? A Crank Bros. pedal with at least some small attention to moving parts. I’m not expecting Chris King hub-like design here, but some form of bearing capable of withstanding the weight of a 150lb rider for a full season or two doesn’t seem out of the question in a day and age when most automobile engines last well over a hundred thousand miles, and your phone can tell your TV to record a show you won’t be home in time to see. You know, just a pedal that actually works as nice as all Crank Bros. pedals look. I think Crank Bros. could probably do it if they wanted to.

Time was the company that started the whole “open rail” pedal design, but it’s become increasingly clear over the years that they just aren’t trying anymore. They’ve taken the ATAC, an initially brilliant idea, and continued to make it worse and worse over the years by accentuating the crap nobody liked (lateral float?) and whittling away at what did (there’s a simplicity to the original ATAC pedal body that’s been completely lost on the current designs). Look entered the scene talking all kinds of game about bearings, but ended up boldly distinguishing themselves from both Time and Crank Bros. by somehow producing a pedal that functioned worse while simultaneously demanding more time and energy to properly set up. The “It’s expensive and doesn’t work, and you’ll like it like that, bitches!” approach to bike component design, while sporadically popular in Europe, never seems to gain traction in the U.S. a country where beer cans have visual indicators to tell us when they’re cold. In fact, it’s almost as if every company but Shimano is circling the ideal pedal but doesn’t want to go ahead and create it for fear of actually making everyone too happy.

Why can’t someone just give us our Supreme Pizza Taco pedal? It’d just be nice to have at least one alternative to Shimano in terms of construction.

Here’s a quick sketch:

• It has a pedal body doesn’t appear to be made from recycled Star Wars action figures.
• There are ball bearings on the inside, like there are on the pedals the DH guys use.
• The end caps stay on, and it uses a collete lock mechanism similar to a Santa Cruz frame pivot, making that high-kick you do when your foot finally pulls the whole pedal right off the spindle a thing of the past.
• It uses a stupid-simple cage mechanism like all the ATAC offshoots do, except the cage is as minimal as possible.
• You can rebuild it, and when you do, you feel like it’s at least better than it was before you rebuilt it.
• Why not 3mm of adjustable Q-factor at the spindle while we’re at it? We are making up our own taco here, after all.

Just some really nice construction is the most important thing, instead of all the bullshit Steve Jobs wannabe marketing-first, product-second, let’s pick out the names and colorways before we even test it crap.

I still think there’s a lot of room out there for new companies who are actually listening to people who ride bikes.