The Bike Shop: Shifters by KimB

So now you can look at a bike and determine if it's a mountain, road or hybrid and you can look the number of gears front and back without glazing over... this is about the time you realize there's a chain that connects the front and back gears and...

How DO you get that chain from one ring to another?
You might very well ask.....

Bike jargon definitions:

Shifter

The connection from the handle bars to the derailleur. When you move the shifter, it pushes or pulls on the derailleur which moves the chain up or down the cogset/gears.

Derailleur

The mechanism that pushes the chain from one ring to another.

Shifters

There are all kinds and shapes of shifters. They can be mounted just about anywhere you can reach and there are even electronic battery powered ones that do the “shifting” for you. They all have the same goal: move the chain from one ring to another.

• Bikes with 1 front gear and multiple back gears will have 1 shifter for the rear gears.
• Bikes have multiple front gears and multiple back gears will have 2 shifters. One shifter will move the front derailleur which moves the front set of gears and the other shifter moves the rear derailleur which moves the rear set of gears.
• The front gear shifter is on the left side of the handle bars
• The rear gear shifter is on the right side of the handle bars.

There are two major categories of shifters: Twist Shifters and Indexed Shifters.

Twist Shifters

These shifters are mounted on the handle bars and you twist forward/back to move the derailleur. Some have “notches” or “markers” to show what gear you in. This is a “by feel” shift - twist until it shifts.

I call these: motorcycle type shifters or "varoom varoom" shifters.

Index Shifters

Index shifters are click to shift. They are designed so that each click moves the chain. You don't have to guess and you don't have to twist anything. Click and Shift is as easy as Swish and Flick.

Some newer style shifters have a single unit with the shifter and brake all-in-one package. The brakes are on a trigger pull and there are one or two side levers that you push to shift.


Integrated Shifters

Derailleurs

Now for the boogeyman of multigeared bikes: The Derailleur

The derailleur is the mechanism that moves the chain from ring to ring. It's very old tech dating from the late 1800s. It just looks “scary”.

The front derailleur has a slightly different design than the rear and is a bit easier to “get acquainted with” than the rear one, which looks worse than it is.

Front Derailleur

The front derailleur consists of a narrow rectangular box. The chain threads through the narrow box. The box is connected via a very tight spring to a cable that goes to the shifter. When you move the shifter, you move the cable, the cable then moves the very tight spring which moves the rectangular box. The long edges of the box push against the chain and “de rails” it until it catches on the next gear.


Rear Derailleur

The rear derailleur is a bit more scary than the front one. The rear derailleur has 2 pulleys on a very tight spring. The bike chain curves around the rear gears and threads in an “S” curve around the 2 pulleys. The chain has to be long enough to go from the biggest gear in front to the biggest gear in the back. When you move the chain to a smaller gear the two pulleys take up extra slack in the chain. Like the front derailleur, when you move the shifter, you move the cable that connects to the derailleur, the cable then moves the very tight spring and swings the mechanism in/out until the chain “de rails” and catches the next gear.

Just like in the song:

Music Goes 'Round and Around

I push the first valve down
The music goes down and around
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho
And it comes out here

The Derailleur Song

You push the index down
the chain goes round and around
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho
And the derailleur makes it come out here

(lol No. There's no such song... yet)

Of course, some of us (ahem, like moi) want to know:

Can you tinker with this?
Yes, you can but no you shouldn't.

At least not at first and especially not if you bought a Pretty Good Bike or a Great Bike.

Tinkering with the derailleurs is a very very fast path to the Not Fun category. Take your bike to a bike repair shop, preferably the one where you bought it, and get them to adjust the derailleurs. It will take them only a few minutes to fix any issues you have. For the amateur it will take hours, days and perhaps never, if you seriously damage the mechanisms. Once seriously damaged your only recourse is to replace them.

There are good maintenance manuals and lots of DYI on the web describing in detail what all the adjustments are. You shouldn't need to make any adjustments provided you take care not to damage the mechanisms. If you have to lay your bike on it's side, always place the gear side up. Don't lean the gear side of your bike against anything that will push on the derailleurs, and take extra care not to bump the rear derailleur.

If you want to learn about how to adjust the derailleurs, REI.com has a great fee based hands-on class that covers the derailleurs. You get to tinker under the guidance of a certified bike repair specialist who can rescue your bike from that “just one more tick will do it” failure.

For a good starting book I enjoy “Idiot's Guides: Bike Repair and Maintenance Paperback (June 3, 2014) by Christopher Wiggins”. Some bike maintenance manuals just have black and white diagrams or photos that are teeny weeny images which may save the publisher on the price of colored ink but doesn't help the reader much as you need an electron microscope to view them. This book is just right: it has easy to understand explanations and lots of big clear pictures.



Bike Diagram

Fade to black

The phrase, 'fade to black' is the customary way of ending a film, or a scene in a film by closing off the light in the camera. In many cases fading to black is done with dramatic emphasis.

The judicial use of music in films to enhance the visual development of a story, and to synthesize the personalities of characters played by actors can be dramatic and emotionally transporting.

These two elements of film making came together in a particularly stunning and powerful way in the final scene of the Robert Durst movie, The Jinx (miniseries). When it was aired on TV, I was attentive to the story as it unfolded, but during the final scene, I was absolutely transfixed as the scene faded to black, with only the sound of Durst confessing to murder on his open mike while he was in the bathroom, away from the camera. As Durst began to realize what had transpired during filming, that he had been shown evidence proving him a murderer, his realization came in spurts, the words interspersed with groans.

My own realization of what Durst had just said paralleled his in intensity. As the fade to black was completed, faint sounds of undefinable musical tones morphed into a wail of anguish that I imagined Durst was experiencing.

I thought the music might be that of a Zen flute or possibly a Buddhist or Tibetan horn, but when I researched the sound track of the movie, Jinx, I discovered the notes were made by a musical saw. It was played by Natalia Paruz, a well known musician who has played the instrument in many movies and TV commercials and street performances.

For a movie that was scripted to end with a mundane fade to black, the unexpected confession combined with the unusual music, created a dramatic and emotionally charged film ending that will be hard to top.

ITER Project

ITER is the name of the project to build a star in France.

ITER, an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and Latin (for the way, journey, or direction). ITER is an international nuclear research and engineering mega project, building the world's largest tokamak fusion reactor in the south of France. A tokamak (Russian) is a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus, a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in 3 dimensional space.

The goal of France's ITER project is capturing fusion energy for commercial use, in essence, creating a star. They are building a machine that can take an import of 50MW of power and produce an output of 500MW of fusion power.

The project is funded by seven member states, European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and United States. EU, as host party for the ITER complex, is contributing 45% if cost, with the other 6 countries contributing approximately 9% each. The project started in 2013, and the construction phase is slated to be finished in 2019. Then, commissioning the reactor and initiating plasma experiments in 2020, with the goal of fusion experiments starting in 2027. If, and after ITER comes operational, the first commercial demonstration of a fusion power plant, called DEMO, is proposed to follow on from the ITER project.

The history of ITER started with a 1985 initiative between Reagan and Gorbachev with equal participation between the Soviet Union, European Union, Japan and United States.

Due to a bureaucratic fight that erupted in the U S government over collaboration with the Soviets, the US opted out of the project in 1999, but returned in 2003.

A consortium signed the formal agreement to build the reactor on November 21, 2006 and announced the reactor would be built in France.



Tokamak Diagram

Go fly a kite

The kites of my childhood are not the kites of today. During conversation with a friend, we talked about activities she could share with her children. I mentioned that kite flying was a lot of fun, but she remembered how difficult it was when she was young. There was always a lot of running trying to get the kite off the ground, and one was lucky if you could even get it to fly.

Years ago, as a child, I too, had experienced the running and failure to launch, only to try and try again. Sometimes the attempts paid off and the kite would soar, but not often enough to call kite flying fun.

I realized that my friend didn't know about the high tech kites of today. I told her of my surprise and delight when my daughter introduced me to kite flying. I had not known about high tech kites either. Whenever I visit my daughter and her husband, they often plan suggested activities and outings for the days of my visit. During a visit several years ago, my daughter asked if I'd like to go kite flying.



Stunt Kite

It seemed a strange suggestion. I mentioned my childhood experiences when my brother and I spent hours after school in the afternoons trying to launch dime store kites. My daughter laughed and explained that no running was required. I was expecting a traditional single line kite, but to my astonishment, we played with a large 5 foot dual line Delta kite known as a stunt or sport kite.

Selections from Wikipedia on Kites

Kites were invented in China in 5th century BC. Using bamboo and silk for the sail and line, they were decorated with mythological motifs and often had whistles attached.

They were also used for measuring distance, lifting men, and signaling. Introduced into Cambodia, India, Japan and Korea, they were unknown in Europe. The Romans used only windsocks and banners. Marco Polo and sailors from Japan and Malaysia brought them to Europe as curiosities.

Scientific research started in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ben Franklin published a proposal for an experiment to prove lightening was caused by electricity, but it is not known if Franklin ever performed it. The Wright brothers used kite research when they built the 1st airplane in the 1800s.

The kites of today are single line, multiline, stunt, quad, power and ultra light; all are designed to be maneuverable in the sky by fliers. Quad kites can hover, rotate in place, and stop and teams lying quads in formation perform spectacular displays.