Not a Torque Wrench in the Whole Country
cyclingessayI have an advanced bicycle mechanic certification. Twenty hours of instruction, and I loved every one of them. The man who taught me was a retired mechanical engineer, and I mean an actual engineer, not the kind who puts it in a LinkedIn headline. He invented the missile rack that hangs on every F-16. Had his own company. Worked directly with Lockheed. Ran a firearms company for a while as CEO. Now he runs a bicycle nonprofit, because apparently when you've spent a career hanging ordnance on fighter jets, the natural retirement plan is fixing kids' bikes.
The nonprofit takes in donated bikes, lots of them. And he told me something I have never been able to forget. When a new bike arrives from one particular country, and I won't name it, he didn't either, the first thing they do is take the entire bike apart and put it back together. Every time. Brand new bike, never ridden, straight to full disassembly. Because the factory doesn't lube the bolts.
"There's not a torque wrench in the whole country," he said.
You have to lube bolts. This is not a preference, like saddle color. You cannot have metal sitting on metal. You need molecules of lubrication between the two surfaces. That's the entire operating principle of a car engine, which is just a collection of metal parts that would weld themselves together in about four seconds without oil. A dry bolt lies to you. It feels tight, and it isn't.
Some context about me: I like bikes. I have a gravel bike that cost more than both of my cars. Combined. My cars are embarrassing. My kids have confirmed this, at school drop-off, with their faces. I should probably buy new ones. But the bike is the priority. This is a value system, and I stand by it. I will always own a better bike than a car.
Good bikes, for the record, are made in Taiwan, or Germany, or the UK, or the States. Designed somewhere else, manufactured by someone serious, and then assembled either at the factory or by a mechanic at your local bike shop, which is to say by a human being with a torque wrench and a tub of grease who cares whether your front wheel stays on. Hold that thought.
Three months ago my youngest son bought an electric dirt bike with his communion money. First major purchase of his life. His money, his decision, his bike. I was ridiculously proud of him. Then I tried it, felt my first electric motor pull, and thought: this is amazing.
I need to confess something here. I have spent five years shitting on e-bikes. Solidly. Publicly. With conviction. So everything that follows is karma, and I accept it.
I bought an e-bike. Technically it's a moped. It's literally a moped. For the story we'll call it an e-bike. I loved it. I put a hundred miles on it in one week, running errands, barely touching my car except to drive the kids to school. In the embarrassing car. They've weighed in on that too.
One day I'm leaving the pool. My wife had just bought me Ray-Bans, the Meta ones with the electronics inside. Side note: I grew up in Florida, I'm 46 years old, and I have never worn glasses in my life. A standard pair of Ray-Bans weighs 30 grams. The Meta ones weigh 53. Keep those 23 grams in mind. We'll come back to them.
Before I got on the bike, a little voice in my head spoke up. I'm a helmet person anyway. I wear mine, my kids wear theirs, I own expensive ones. But this voice was specific. Bring the helmet today. Wear the glasses. And tighten the helmet, the one with the little dial on the back. So I did. All of it.
Cut to me riding home at 20 miles an hour. I like bikes, I like jumping things, so I took it off a curb. When the front wheel left the curb at about a thirty-degree angle, it also left the bicycle.
I flew roughly fifteen feet and landed face-first on a steel sewer grate.
I was unconscious for a few moments. When I came to, I dragged myself onto a patch of grass and lay there. I could feel cold air reaching places on my face where air is not supposed to reach, which is how you know, without touching anything, that you have open wounds. And I lay there terrified that I had mangled my face forever.
It doesn't matter. I'm married. I'm finished anyway.
But I still don't want my face mangled.
I'll spare you the injury inventory. Seven hours in the hospital. A CAT scan. An MRI since. A cognitive brain test, because there have been some odd side effects.
Now, those 23 grams. The difference between regular Ray-Bans and the Meta ones is the electronics inside, and every gram of it was on my face when it hit the grate, right under the helmet the voice told me to cinch down. That extra hardware absorbed the impact that was headed for my eye socket and my eyeball. A collision is just an argument about who deforms first, and steel never loses that argument. My glasses stepped in like a cheap lawyer and took the deal so my face didn't have to. I'm giving the voice full credit. The dial and the glasses can split the rest.
But here's the part I actually want to tell you. When I woke up on that grass, concussed and bleeding, feeling the chill hit the inside of my own skin, my first thought was not my wife. It wasn't my kids. It wasn't my life flashing anywhere. My brain went straight back to bicycle mechanic school, to a retired engineer who used to hang missiles on F-16s, and it said:
Not a torque wrench in that country.
These are dark times. Tighten your bolts. Wear a helmet.
