As an old-bike enthusiast,  have always liked traditional cup-and-cone bottom brackets. If they're properly adjusted and cleaned and re-greased periodically, they can last for hundreds of thousands of miles. They're generally easy to work on. If you switch cranksets and need to adjust your chainline, it's a simple matter to do so by installing a longer or shorter spindle, while keeping the original cups and lockring.

Simple, that is, if you can find the right spindle for your particular bottom bracket. To some extent, it's possible to mix and match parts between manufacturers, but there are a lot of variables to reckon with, including shell width, spindle taper, and cup thickness. In short, the whole thing can be quite a can of worms

I'm not going to get into all that stuff here. The "Installation Notes" tab on this site provides some more detailed information, although I'm the first to admit that it's far from a complete reference on the subject.

But if your goal is to make an old bike into a reliable everyday rider--as opposed to "correct" restoration with all original-spec components--there's nothing wrong with replacing an original cup-and-cone setup with a modern
square-taper cartridge bottom bracket. Trust me: no one will think the less of you for it. And if they do, the hell with them. Just hang onto the original BB (assuming it's not worn out) in case you or someone else wants to reuse it later.

Okay, full stop. No more about cup-and-cone stuff. From here on, we're only going to concern ourselves with the best way to install  modern cartridge bottom brackets--and better yet, to remove crusty old ones that would prefer to stay where they are.

The photo above shows everything you need to install a cartridge bottom bracket: the bottom bracket itself, a frame to receive it (in this case a damaged old Holdsworth frame that has been hanging on the wall of my shop for years because I can't stand to put it in the steel recycling), a bottom bracket tool, and a big wrench. (Ignore the bolt and washer for now--we'll get to that later.)

In principle, there's nothing to it. You grease the threads in the frame and on the drive-side end of the cartridge (you could use anti-sieze compound instead of grease, although I never have), and thread it into the bottom bracket shell. English-threaded cartridges thread in counterclockwise, French or Italian-threaded go clockwise. Assuming that the threads in the bottom bracket shell are clean and in good shape, you should be able to thread it most of the way in by hand, at which point it will look something like the photo below.

Now take in hand whatever version you have of the ubiquitous 20-splined Shimano bottom bracket tool, fit it into the splined end of the cartridge, and tighten away. Most bottom-bracket wrenches (including the Park BB2 shown here) have a square-drive fitting at one to accept a ratchet handle or a torque wrench. The latter makes it easy to determine when  when you've reached the proper torque of about 60 Newton meters (Nm), or 500 inch-pounds--take your pick. (If you don't have a torque wrench, either figure translates to "about as tight as you can get it.")

It sounds simple, and it usually is. But trouble is never far away as you approach maximum tightness. The design of the Shimano splines is such that the tool engages the cartridge something like the way a phillips screwdrive engages a screw: You have to exert a lot of downward force (which in the case of a bike frame mounted in a stand amounts to sideways force) as you turn it, or it will cam out of position. If that happens when the tool is under load, it can strip the splines, leaving ugly marks on the cartridge and possibly costing you some knuckle skin.

In general, I try not to find fault with engineers. They have their job, and I have mine. But I admit that I have never been able to figure out Shimano's reasoning here. Why not design a tool-to-cartridge interface that makes a solid, non-pressure-dependent fit? It can obviously be done, because Phil Wood bottom brackets use a different spline system that does just that. I'd use their stuff all the time if I could afford it to.

Fortunately, there's and cheap, fast, and simple way to work around the limitations of the Shimano design. Have a look a the photo below. See the bolt and washer threaded into the spindle? It has the same M8x1.0mm threading as a standard crankarm-fixing bolt, but it's longer--35mm as compared to a standard 15mm crankarm bolt.

What do you suppose will happen if we remove the bolt, fit the tool onto the splined cartridge, insert the bolt through the square-drive hole, and thread it back into the spindle?

I don't know! Why don't we try it and see what happens? (Actually, I do know what's going to happen--this is what's called a rhetorical device.)

Criminey! Look at that!  Get out the big adjustable wrench, fit it onto the hexagonal body of the tool, and
reef that sucker down as tightly as you want--there's no way the tool is going to slip now. Some BB tools, unfortunately, lack wrench flats, and in that case you're out of luck unless you want to take a pipe wrench to it. But c'mon, that would be barbaric. Just get a tool with a hexagonal body.

The required bolt will vary in length depending on the specific tool you're using, and perhaps the length of the BB spindle. The 35mm bolt shown here works nicely with my old Park BBT-2, but the current production version, the BBT-22 might require a slightly longer or shorter one--never having tried it, I can't say.

Fortunately, the length is non-critical, provided that the bolt isn't too short to thread four or five turns into the spindle. If it bottoms out before the head comes into contact with the top of the tool, just use a stack of washers to take up the extra space.

Finally--and this is important--the bolt only needs to be finger tight. If you crank it down with a wrench, you're going to destroy the seals or bearing races in your nice new cartridge. So don't.

When I got ready to sell my first batch of triplizer chainrings--originally I only made them in the 122 BCD Stronglight pattern--I gave some sustained thought to what I should call the business, such as it then was.

I almost went with Verismo Components.  I have long been something of an opera fan--though far from an opera nerd, still less an opera dweeb--and verismo was a late 19th-century Italian movement in to steer opera away from the doings of kings and the nobility and more toward the lives of the common people. My Italian is extremely limited, but I do know that "verismo" is derived from "verita," meaning "truth."

That's for me, I figured--I'm a truthful man of the common people. Problem solved.

The fellow pictured above, incidentally, is Pietro Mascagni, whose 1890 opera Cavalleria rusticana was a huge sensation when it first appeared, and is still regarded as a great classic of the verismo style. It's still performed today, usually on a double bill with Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, which debuted two years later. (Both are short operas, and stringing them together brings them up to a more typical operatic length, and gives the audience the feeling that it's getting its money's worth.)

That pairing is familiarly known as "Cav and Pag." That being so, it hardly seems fair to give Pietro Mascagni a photo without doing the same for Ruggerio Leoncavallo, so here he is:

He looks quite a lot like Giachomo Puccini, doesn't he? Actually, it's not that strong a resemblance physically--it's mostly the wonderful moustache that makes it seem so.

Well, heck, now having said that, I guess I also have to include a photo of Puccini. Okay, here he is, at stage left:

Eventually, though, I gave up on Verisimo as a potential name, mostly because I thought it would be confusing to give an Italian name to a company whose only product was triplizer ring for French cranksets.

Instead, I came up with Red Clover Components, for two reasons. First, red clover is the Vermont state flower. I live in Vermont, and that's where the chainrings are made. Also, clover plants have three leaves, which struck me as nicely emblematic for a product called a triplizer.

I assumed that lots of people would want to know where the name came from, so I have had that explanation cued up and ready to go for the better part of a decade. But since no one has asked yet, I'm just putting the explanation out there unprompted.

For the sake of symmetry, I suppose, it would be best if I also had a third reason for the Red Clover Components name. No doubt I could come up with a plausible-sounding after-the-fact one if I tried, but that would be slightly dishonest of me. Verisimo!

I was really looking forward to going to Eroica California for the first time this spring. I was going to be there as a vendor, not a rider, but I had still figured out a way to get some riding in: the plan was to fly from Boston to San Francisco on March 26 with my friend Dave, then visit with another friend in Santa Rosa for a couple of days before embarking on a little camping tour down the coast to Cambria. We figured on arriving by mid-day on Thursday, in plenty of time to set up the booth.

Everything was ready to go. I modified the cabling of my PX-10 so I could disassemble it (in a sort of bastard rinko fashion) for easy transport. I put together some snappy-looking chainring displays. I picked up a new batch of 144 triplizers from the polishing shop. I bought a new pair of pants.

But then...well, you already know the rest. You had plans, too, right?

My special Eroica deal was going to be the inclusion of a free bolt kit with any triplizer purchase--something that ordinarily costs an additional $12. Anyone buying a 37-tooth Stronglight ring (which doesn't require the triplizer bolt kit) would get it for $12 off the usual price.

In theory, the event is going to be rescheduled for sometime in September or October, although it would not surprise me if it doesn't happen at all this year. But here's the point: order a chainring between now and July 4, 2020 (a date I just now pulled out of thin air), and you get the same deal--a free bolt kit with a triplizer, or twelve bucks off on a 37-tooth double ring. And, what the hell, the same $12 off on the Freewheel Key.

Stay safe, everybody!

 A year or so ago, I went on a vintage ride organized by Onion River Sports, the bike shop in nearby Montpelier, Vermont (and a very good shop at that). Eroica it was not. It was basically thirty or forty people with a variety of old bikes meeting up in the parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, going for a 25- or 30-mile ride, and meeting up afterwards for pasta, beer, and commemorative T-shirts. The ride itself was hilly--as rides around here tend to be--and mostly on dirt. It was great.

During the milling-around phase just before the ride started, I wandered over to a guy with a beautiful Schwinn Paramount from 1970 or so. The red paint was immaculate, and it was still equipped with the murderous gearing typical of Paramounts from that time period: Something like 52-49 chainrings in front and a 14-24 5-speed freewheel.

I complimented him on the bike and remarked that I'd be walking a lot of hills if my bike was geared that way.

(In addition to just being friendly, of course, my plan was ease into a conversation that would end with him saying "How I wish there was some convenient way to convert this original crankset to a triple so I could ride effortlessly up even the steepest hills! If such a product existed I would buy it immediately!" I have few equals when it comes to guerilla marketing.)

Alas, it didn't work. He agreed that the gearing was much too high, and that he had to walk a lot of hills. Then he went even further. I don't remember the exact words he used, but the gist of it was that originality had to take precedence over mere comfort.

Before I could think of a response, we were rolling.

I've run into that attitude before, and I have to say that it always leaves me kind of puzzled. I mean, is the bike supposed to serve me, or am I supposed to serve the bike? Should my riding experience today be dictated by the Schwinn product manager who specced the chainrings when I was in tenth grade?

At this point I should point out that I have strong views on maintaining the originality of old bikes. I won't permanently alter old frames or components for the sake of short-term convenience. That position has cost me, too: I spent a shocking amount of money (for me, at least) on a long-cage Simplex derailleur for my Peugeot PX-10, when I could have gotten the same functional result by  by butchering the original hanger and installing a cheap and perfectly reliable Suntour VGT-Luxe. (For more on this, see preceding blog entry "Derailleur Hangers Demystified.")

But I see nothing wrong with swapping bolt-on components at will. Why not? The bike's next owner can always restore it to original condition by removing the non-original crankset or wheels and replacing them with the right ones.

In the exceptional case of a bike with real historic value--Eddy Merckx's hour-record bike, for example, or one of the five surviving bicycles built by the Wright Brothers--it's best leave things completely alone. But that anonymous bike-boom Raleigh International? I say go ahead and swap parts around--just be sure to keep the old ones.

I saw the Paramount guy a few more times in the course of the ride. On two of those occasions he was walking his bike on steep pitches. He seemed to be having a good time, although he was so far ahead of me that I couldn't say for sure.

In any case, I'm pretty slow to begin with, and was made even slower by a loose headset on my newly rebuilt Gitane Tour de France, which I had to stop and adjust. I'd been hoping to see the Paramount again, but by the time I got to the finish both bike and owner were gone.

It's been about four months since my friend Phil and I finished a cross-country tour on the Adventure Cycling Association's Southern Tier route, from San Diego, Calif. to St. Augustine, Fla. It was an excellent trip in pretty much every way, and a feet-first plunge into loaded touring, given that my only prior experience was a couple of one-overnighters.

We started on Feb. 21 and finished on April 14--a total of 53 days overall, of which six were non-riding rest days. Neither of us had any way of measuring mileage, but if the 3,050 mile figure listed by the ACA is accurate, we averaged about 63 miles per riding day. (Coincidentally, I turned 63 about three weeks after the end of the ride.) Our longest daily mileage--based on distances listed on the ACA maps--was somewhere in the low nineties; our shortest was about 35.

My point in mentioning this is not to draw attention to how awesome we are (although we are pretty awesome). What I really want to do, before I forget, is just record some of the useful day-to-day stuff we learned along the way about doing a long bike tour. Given my limited experience at such things--this was my first tour, after all--I don't offer any of this as advice. But here are some things that worked well for us.

1. Food
Just before noon on our first day, we stopped to buy lunch food in a San Diego supermarket, where Phil suggested buying a bag of flour tortillas.

It was such a good idea we did it again later. And again. And again. For the next seven weeks, in fact, we ate tortillas at least twice a day, and often three times a day. They're cheap, fairly dense in terms of calories, and easy to travel with. They don't break or crumble, and the flexible plastic-bag packaging allows them to slip easily into a even a pannier that is already packed full.

Best of all, they're versatile and really good. We ate them with peanut butter and bananas for breakfast, with cheese and avocado (or more peanut butter) for lunch. We sometimes ate shredded rotisserie chicken with mayonnaise and Cholula hot sauce rolled up in tortillas for supper. That is a good meal.

It was also fascinating to watch the tortilla supply change as we traveled. There were many brands available in California, but even more in Arizona and New Mexico. Some stores in those states had most of one aisle devoted to tortillas. The selection gradually declined as we headed east in Texas. By the time we reached Mississippi, there was often just one selection to be had--Mission brand, the Wonder Bread of the tortilla universe.

We carried a small folding isobutane stove and a one-quart aluminum pot, which allowed us to have hot tea in the morning and cook simple meals. One favorite was smoked sausage boiled with rice and sliced sweet potato. We always carried a couple packages of ramen noodles and foil pouches of tuna for times when nothing better was available.

By the way, you can make an excellent convenience-store gorp by crushing a medium-size bag of Ruffles potato chips until the fragments are cornflake-sized, then adding two miniature boxes of raisins and a small bag of mixed nuts.

2. Bikes, Gearing, and Luggage

Phil rode a long-wheelbase Rans recumbent, and he seemed very comfortable throughout. He was certainly faster than me. Not sure about the details of his gearing, but I did notice that he almost never used his granny chainring. Is that a recumbent thing? I'll have to ask him.

I rode a 1981 Miyata 1000. I'd thought about going with my triplized PX-10, but ultimately decided to give the Miyata--a legendary loaded touring bike of its day--a chance to do its stuff. It worked really well. I had it set up as a half-step-and-granny, with 48-44-30 chainrings (on the original 86 BCD Sugino crankset) and a 14-16-19-23-28-34 Suntour freewheel.

I never wished for a higher gear, but I would have liked to have a slightly lower one during a couple of long climbs. A 46-42-28 crankset might have been a slightly better choice. (As it happens, I have exactly that gearing on the triplized Model 93 on my Raleigh Gran Sport.)

Both of us tried to cut our luggage to a bare minimum, and it paid off. We didn't have anything we didn't need (except for our 6 pounds of tools and spare parts, most of which went unused), and never needed anything we didn't have.

My base load, including the tent fly, cooking gear, tools, clothing, and sleeping bag and air mattress, came to about 32 pounds. That includes my panniers and trunk bag, but not the bike-mounted racks. When we added food and a gallon of water apiece--as we sometimes did in West Texas, where it watering holes might be 50 miles apart--I must have been carrying 45 lbs or more.

Guesstimating by pannier volume, it seemed to me that many of the other riders we saw along the way had to be carrying carrying twice the weight that we were, the poor devils.

I was able to fit all my stuff in a pair of smallish 1980s vintage front panniers and a trunk bag on a rear rack. The steering felt "heavy," but the bike handled very well once I learned to equalize the side-to-side load between panniers. If the load wasn't balanced, the bike developed a bad speed wobble at about 15 mph. (I had heard that it's possible to dampen a speed wobble by pressing a knee against the frame's top tube, and was relieved to find that it does. I'm not sure how I would have managed the 4,000-foot descent into California's Central Valley otherwise).

Overall, I much preferred the setup I used to the feel of rear panniers alone.

Phil, on the other hand, just used a set of rear panniers and a small handlebar bag. At least he started with a set of panniers--he finished with one pannier and a soft-sided beer cooler. I hope someone in Texas found the one he lost and is putting it to good use.

3. Clothes

I have always felt that non-cyclists are put off by riders who are decked out in spandex, colorful cycling jerseys, and wraparound sunglasses. That's not necessarily because they're being unfriendly. If you're dressed like a racer--or at least wearing what a non-rider thinks of as racer garb--the non-rider is likely to assume that you're in a big hurry, and probably don't have time to stop chew the fat.

Is that a wingnut idea? I have no data to support it, but makes sense to me

Anyway, both Phil and I made an effort to wear fairly normal-looking clothing. He mostly wore t-shirts and a pair of pants with zip-off legs (no need for cycling shorts on a recumbent). I wore a white cotton dress shirt, black long underwear, two pairs of liner shorts, and a pair of unpadded mountain-bike shorts. (The liners were thin and cheap, so I had to wear both pairs to get adequate padding. I washed the outer pair every night, put on the clean pair first the next morning, and moved the previous day's inner to the outside.) I convinced myself that the combination of black long underwear and black shorts looked something like regular long pants if you didn't look too closely.

And we did have lots of fun conversations with the locals at markets and convenience stores. That wonderful talk we had with the overall-wearing guy in Poplarville, Mississippi? Who rode across the country on an Indian motorcycle in 1960? Would that have happened if we'd been wearing cycling clothes?

Heck, I don't know, maybe it would have.

4. Sleeping

According to my notes, we spent 4 nights with friends, 8 nights with Warm Showers hosts (www.warmshowers.org), 14 nights in motels, and 27 nights camping. Our motel stays most often happened because we were in an urban area at nightfall with no other options, but there were a few occasions when we were just tired and wanted to sleep in beds. Two of the motels nights were timed to avoid heavy rain and lightning.

In California, Arizona, and New Mexico, it was simple to get out of sight of the road and pitch our tent out in the desert. Texas was another story. There's practically no public land, and the private land is tightly fenced to within a few yards of the road. We tented mostly at RV campgrounds--often on miserable little patches of gravel--but we also stayed in one lovely county-run campground on the Nueces River and a state park or two.

We could have wild-camped here and there as we got further east, but for one reason or another we never did, except for one night by a levee outside Simmesport, Louisiana. The Florida state parks, we thought, were great.

I was a little bit surprised to find that all state parks and RV campgrounds had showers, which meant that we only went unwashed on our wild-camping nights.

5. Navigation

The Adventure Cycling Association maps are excellent, but they necessarily cover only a narrow strip of territory. That can make it difficult to detour off the established route or put your location into any sort of big-picture context. Digital natives might be able to do that with a smartphone, but the required zooming in and out made us queasy.

We relied on old-school road maps. The problem, we quickly discovered, is that printed road maps aren't easy to find today. Except for Louisiana and Florida, even the state welcome centers didn't have them.

While wandering around the vast urban sprawl of metropolitan Phoenix, hopelessly off the ACA route, we stopped at a dozen or so convenience stores before two helpful women who worked at one of them rooted through the magazine display and triumphantly came up with a tattered Arizona highway map. But because it lacked a computer bar code, they couldn't figure out how to sell it to us. The store manager came out of his office and rang it up manually, remarking "We haven't sold one of these things in years."

It took us until Mississippi to realize that all drugstores carry a wide variety of printed maps, often in regular and large-print editions. Who uses road maps these days? Old people. Who spends a lot of time in drugstores? Old people. If we weren't so old ourselves, we might have figured that out two thousand miles earlier.

6. Coming and Going

At the start of the trip, Phil and I met at a motel a few hundred yards from the start of the bike route. To avoid handing our bikes over to the airline's baggage handlers, we boxed and shipped the bikes to ourselves at the motel a few days before we arrived, using a service called BikeFlights (www.bikeflights.com).

When we arrived in St. Augustine in the middle of April, we considered flying back to New England (Phil to Maine, me to Vermont), but weren't enthusiastic about having to find bike boxes, transport them to the airport on our bikes, and dismantle and pack everything for shipment there.

I had priced one-way car rentals back in February, and found that it would set us back something like $300 apiece. But because this seemed so much simpler than flying, we looked into it again, figuring that it might be worth the added cost.

Amazement! A one-way rental for an economy car--from St. Augustine to Rockland, Maine--was $3 per day, with unlimited mileage. The guy at the rental company explained that there was always a huge surplus of cars in Florida in the spring, and that it was cheaper for the company to get customers to drive them north than to load them on a car carrier and pay to ship them where they were needed.

It ended up costing us a bit more than that, because we needed to rent an SUV to accommodate Phil's recumbent. But at $16 a day plus gas, it was still a screaming deal.