I’ve been saying it for a while but yesterday it happened (again)…
We were about to start a mountain bike ride on Sunday. My third in as many days and all deep into poaching territory. Thanks Cesar Chavez! (SF Official holiday) The morning turned into an utter train-wreck. I like to be very prepared before rides. Obviously. I had discovered, earlier in the morning, that my SRAM Guide sintered brake pads were well worn after a long hard wet and muddy winter. No problem. I have spares. I swapped them out. I even took the time to raise my bars 5mm to try something different. I was prepared. Windy’s bike was lubed, shifting great, and we were good to go.
Shea and Ronen arrived. As we were about to depart, Shea mentioned that her headset was loose. Still, as it had been when I told her to get it fixed after the last ride. We were at my shop still so I had an easy time of working with the bike. Upon further investigation, it was found less the headset causing issue but that her wheel was not fully tightened and was shaking around in the fork. OMFG! I lubed the axle and made it easier to tighten down. Shamed her. Done. Girls really need to stop relying on men to care for their bikes.
Ronen was also complaining about his rear brake. He had been having issue with it for a while. It was full of sludge a month or two ago when we bled it. Better now but doing weird things. Another bleed maybe? We figured he could get through the ride with it as it was and we started rolling.
Within the first block away from my house, Windy seemed to have something stuck on her tire. Like a ball of tape or something. We stopped to pull it off but it wasn’t that easy. The tire had a massive blister on it. I hadn’t seen it earlier but who looks for that? How often does this happen?! We needed to change the tire. Back home 1/2 a block. The first tire I swapped in was a repaired slashed tire that hadn’t taken. It leaked out immediately. So, another tire needed to be mounted. Ugh. What a morning.
While the tire fiasco is going on, Ronen decides to mess with his brake. The master cylinder fails, right then. The lever is suck down and not returning. I tried to bleed it figuring that maybe a massive air pocket or vacuum had initiated this. I quickly gave up that idea. The brake needed to be swapped out. Luckily, I had a bled rear set on my shelf. We cut some zip ties and some electrical tape. In a few minutes, the bike was good to go. If this had been an internally routed hydraulic line, we would have had to add a bunch of work and hopeful bleeding to the job.
We were finally rolling on our ride….
The point:
This is exactly what happened at the start of this ride. Usually, this doesn’t happen. It was a mess, and we were right at my shop. On trail, it would have been murder. Luckily, nothing else happened on the ride of not other than me getting my ass kicked up every climb. Shit goes wrong at the worst time….at the last minute. Add to that, Ronen and I are extremely hard on our bikes. It’s amazing what problems creep up when a mountain bike is treated like….a mountain bike.
This would have been far worse if the line were internally routed. If it were, there would have been more tears and and time to get a working setup sorted. A ride would probably have been cut very short. The same concept applied to derailleur lines, although easily separable, can be a pain to thread. In emergencies, they need to be changed quickly.
Internally routed brake and shifter lines simply don’t have a place on a high performance, high up-time bicycle. There is very little upside to internal routing and a lot of downside. It makes emergency, and even maintenance, service more difficult, time consuming, and lousy to do. We are discouraged from getting into a solution because we know it may take most of an evening just to thread a line. What we lose when when we go internal is modular repair solutions. We make it harder to solve problems quickly. I’m a total bike geek but my priority is getting on the ride, not into the shop.
One exception to all of this is dropper housing/hose. Since a dropper will have it’s control cable entering from the bottom, it must enter the frame at some point. You may as well choose a convenient point for that if you are going through the bother. It also comes from a different direction to the external housings, so it doesn’t get to gang up well. Life isn’t perfect but we can minimize the suck.
I put my brake and shift lines on the outside of my bikes. I can quickly service them if the above case happens. I think that this is important. Quick replacement of a sealed hydraulic system. Quick replacement of connected derailleur system. Quick troubleshooting of problems. Smoother line routing and housing arcs. It’s just so much nicer on so many levels. Slick looks and a cool factor aren’t really that great when a ride is about to go off and you’re messing with some bullshit.
Combat bikes are different from show bikes.
If internal routing is very important to you, then answer: why?
Epilogue:
…even after all this, when Ronen tests the brake leaving my shop, riding down my back staircases, he busts a front spoke. We all heard it go. Fuck. We taped it in place and left. Still having to stop down the road to mess with his pad contact on a bent rotor.
