Bicycle! by Sam Tracy

Author:Sam Tracy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Expired SEC shift lever.

Performance-minded riders may find solace in SRAM’s higher-end rotor shifters, but Shimano’s Revo-Shift inspire no such passion. It is nearly a caricature of a disposable component, especially when joined to the overbearing gear indicator known as the Central Information Deck, which draws in a pair of odd new cables from the shift levers as means to run its super-cheesy plastic display window.

The CI Deck itself is entirely superfluous to the shifting process, and this is just as well; they’re all fragile as eggs. We’re able to remove the decks easily enough, but their wires are dug in a bit deeper. You have to pop of a couple more of Shimano’s odd plates, which are attached with the same ridiculously tiny screws.

Worse yet is the horrible SEC Shift lever. But this may be obvious enough; the shifting action just sucks. The shift up is like climbing a dangerous hill, while the return action feels perpetually onthe-way-out.

“SEC Shift, U.S. Patent” is all we can read on their smug little faces: no model name, no manufacturer, no nothing. There is only the patent number, scratched in far too small to the underside, where it was never meant to be read. This level of communication suggests that these things were probably hashed together on the whims of bitter cynics, which would indicate all you’d need to know about warranty service and replacement parts.

These things arrived on our 4 KHS Tandemania rental tandems early in May, a few summers back: of the eight SEC levers involved, five broke down and stopped working before July was through. So I went ahead and replaced the remainder, lest their failure rate strive on toward completion. The bikes in question sold for $700 or $1,100, new. What the royal fuck? Those enlisted as rental bikes are abused more often, perhaps, but so was everything else in our fleet: in my four years as the rental mechanic, I cannot recall any bicycle component with so atrocious a record. SRAM’s poor little MRX lever, once improved, quite handily flattens the miserable SEC to the ground.

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