The Little Things

Praise for small evolutionary steps

- Mike Ferrentino

I WAS SWAPPING STEMS ON A ROAD BIKE THE OTHER DAY and as I snugged the faceplate bolts I gave thanks for the tiny miracles that we take for granted or forget about entirely, even though they make living with bikes so much easier. Amid the proliferation of wheel sizes, tire sizes, bottom-bracket ‘standards’ and improved hub-spacing dimensions, it’s easy to tap into the confusion and angst that this wealth of choice represents, scream with rage and frustration at the gods of small parts and byzantine SKU numbers, and claim that all this change is for the worst.

Except within all that change are the seeds of great things—things that down the line will make us all happier people. Things like threadless headsets.

Once upon a time, headsets were threaded onto the fork steerer. The fork had threads cut into it, which meant you had to be pretty careful about getting the length right when swapping forks, or you had to have a fork thread-cutting tool. Most fork thread-cutting tools were really only good for chasing existing threads, though, so cutting new threads down the fork almost always carried with it a fair bit of metallurgical cruel and unusual punishment. Then you had to cut the steerer to exactly the right length, thread the headset into place, preload the bearing juuust the