Supporting my local bike shop
This afternoon I stopped in at my nearest local bike shop to buy a set of ball bearings to repack the bottom bracket with (my last few bike rides came with the constant music of the old ball bearings rattling against each other, and even if that wasn’t killing the spindle I’d still prefer it if the bicycle would STFU), and, while I was there, I decided that I’d ask about 650B bike tires (650B wheels are smaller than 700C, so there’s fractionally less toe overlap, and 650B tires are much larger than the sort of 700C tires I’m using now, which may be better on the horrible chipseal roads that infest Clackamas County) under the hope that they might have some available or would be willing to special order them.
So I asked if they had 650B tires. “Oh, sure, we’ve got lots of them!” and the salesperson scooted me over to the stack of tires and started pointing out lots of 18-23mm “650B” tires. I asked “are you sure you’re talking about 650B and not 650A or C?” and was assured that, no, these were definitely 650B because nobody used 650A or 650C tires.
So I looked at the offending tires, and, not surprisingly, they were all 650C triathlon tires; 571mm rim size instead of 584mm, which would have made for quite a bit of excitement if I had purchased them and attempted to put them onto 650B rims. So I pointed out that none of these tires were actually 650B and that I was looking for 584mm rim diameter tires.
The agent scurried over to a computer terminal, typed away, and said “Oh, we’ve got these tires in 25mm width at our downtown store! Should I have them shipped here?” and I said that, no, I could just ride down and take a look if I wanted them.
Which I had no intention of doing, because I’ve been thinking about 650B wheels since shortly after my birthday and I’ve done enough research into them to realize that the narrowest durable tire I can get would either be a Rivendell Nifty-Swifty, at ~33mm, or a possibly-vapourware ~30mm Michelin tire that, if it exists, doesn’t seem to exist outside of France. If there was a 25mm 650B tire, I believe I would have heard of it somewhere other than the sales floor of a Trek dealership.
It’s useful to have a local bike shop, because if something goes to hell on my bicycle I don’t want to have to either (a) wait for mailorder or (b) go over to the airport or downtown to get components from one of the local mailorder houses masquerading as local bike shops. But it’s slightly annoying when the local shop is staffed by people who don’t know what tire sizes are and think that everything in the world is 559mm, 571mm, or 622mm (even in a shop where you just turn around and there’s a Danish bakfiets sitting there flaunting its teeny-tiny front wheel at you.)
I have this nice gift card, so I’ve got an incentive to face the wall of ignorance again, but next time I want to get things from that LBS I’ll get printouts from the QBP catalog and say “this is what I want. Can you get them and how much do they cost?” instead of hoping that I get assigned the salesperson who has not spent their entire life in a barrel lined with copies of Trek marketing literature.