Cruzing with friction

Among my ever-growing fleet of bicycles, there is a a very much neglected bike from the early nineties that was long ago relegated to the garage in favor of more road focused models. I recently had occasion to drag it out of obscurity and reconsider it. 

The bike in question is a 1993 Specialized Crossroads Cruz, a steel "hybrid". It was the first "adult" bike I ever bought and though it has given me a great deal of pleasure over the years, it had fallen into disfavor be cause in many ways it was a really poor choice. There's nothing inherently wrong with the style of bike, and it was pretty well made, despite being way down at the bottom price point. But bike's frame is way too small for me, the 700c x 35 wheels are way too big for the frame, and consequently there's a horrific amount of toe overlap, not to mention about two feet of exposed seat post! Though it has super low gearing (48-38-28 triple with a 30 tooth low gear in the back), the thing is heavy as sin. 

1993 Specialized Crossroads Cruz

But as frequent readers of this blog will know, my two greatest passions are cycling and deer hunting. Suddenly last year it occurred to me to combine the two, to reduce the miles of walking to and from my stand and possibly extend my range somewhat. There's no way I would use one of my precious road bikes for a hunting bike. It has to be able to sit out in the forest chained to a tree in all kinds of weather. It has to carry a rifle or a crossbow for Krod's sake. And I was not about to buy a new mountain bike for the purpose - the whole thing was an unproven concept. So I dug the Crossroads out of the garage, blew some dust off of it, and gave it a once-over. 

Turns out, despite having languished for over two decades, the bike was in pretty serviceable shape, working, more or less as designed. The one thing that wasn't, and frankly hadn't been for a while was the thumb shifters. The grease meant to lubricate the moving parts had obviously congealed into a thick goo, and though it was possible to shift "up", increasing tension on the cables, down shifts were not happening predictably because the index system's ratchets were all gummed up. I tried blasting them with WD40 (the only application in which I would ever let WD40 touch one of my bikes), but after several applications and some serious soaking, they still weren't shifting right. 

OEM: Shimano 100 GS thumb shifters

Fortunately, the gearing is so forgiving, and most of the riding I did during the season was limited to relatively flat forest roads, so I went ahead and used the bike as-is and it worked out fine. I had a very successful deer season and came back resolved to give the bike the TLC it deserves for schlepping me back and forth through the forest with all me gear. 

The first order of business was new brake pads, immediately followed by a replacement of the shifters. Ardent readers may recall that when I ordered my Cycles Toussaint Velo Routier v2 back in 2018, they inadvertently shipped it with a set of MicroShift thumb shifters instead of the preferred bar-end shifters. When notified of the error, they graciously sent me a replacement, but never asked for the accidentally shipped thumbies back. So out of the parts bin they came, and onto the Crossroads they went, along with all new cabling et voilà! the ol' girl shifts like a youngster.

Microshift thumb shifters

And not only is the shifting as good as or better than ever, the friction shifters weigh less than half what their predecessors weighed. Not that the "saved" grams matter much on a 35 pound bike, but hey, take what you can get. 

Microshift friction "thumbies"

Of course now that I've got the shifting and braking all sorted out and working well, I have started to notice what seems like some pretty pronounced looseness in the headset. And the chain, which I don't think has ever been replaced, seems pretty well shot. Which means I also need to get a new cassette... Oy, it never ends!