Components that cost too much and don’t last long enough make us truly appreciate the opposite

We have had something of a rush of product recalls in recent months: cranks, shifters, some tyres, helmets… the list of your expensive possessions that want to kill you is becoming extensive. 

We never used to have this. No, things used to just break, and we were still grateful. A friend in the 2000s ended up in hospital after his expensive carbon forks broke. After being discharged, he immediately ordered an identical replacement set. "They’re a great product," he said. That pair snapped as well.

Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine. 

But sometimes things were different. Around the same era, I put a Shimano Dura Ace bottom bracket into a newly-arrived road frame. It was 27th March 2007 – I have it noted in my workshop log. (Everyone has a workshop log – if you don’t, I think you’ll find it’s you that’s weird.)

And last week, seventeen years later, it finally gave up. I noticed a selection of strange noises – whines, whirrs, clunks and other things that were difficult to place, but clearly not right. When I got home, I put the bike on the stand. Even without the chain on the chainrings the cranks were almost impossible to turn. The bracket, at long last, was dead.

In the intervening years, the bike has spent most of its time as a winter hack. It’s done maybe 75,000 km. Through mud, road spray, that weird brown goo that has been the council’s recent ice treatment. I’ve ridden through floods and rainstorms and I’ve forded rivers.

The bike has been washed, perhaps as many as 20 times, but I’ve never lavished as much as a second of my time on bottom bracket care. It was an astonishing bit of equipment. It even, God bless it, came out of the shell first pull on the spanner.

There are components that cost too much and don’t last long enough. So I wanted to pause to appreciate a component that was exactly the opposite. I could have thrown it away. But I’ve kept it, in my museum of Objects That I At Last Defeated. It’s a celebration of bike components that, had you recalled them, would have refused to go back.

The cardboard box, which serves as the museum until the grant comes through, contains nine Speedplay X pedals that were provided by a sponsor in 2001, and which were still going strong a year or two back when they stopped making cleats for them. They’re so worn that no two of them really look alike anymore – they resemble something you’d dig up at an HS2 excavation and hide from the on-site archaeologist. But the bearings? Still smooth.

There is a quick release that broke in the middle. It was two decades old when that happened, and I’m the only person in the history of cycling who has accomplished this particular failure.

I have a pair of handlebars that have nothing intrinsically wrong with them at all, other than that they started their life on the bike of Jens Voigt. If you remember old “Shut up legs” you’ll understand my nervousness about them.

There are chainrings that are so worn they look like brake rotors. There are bottle cages that have so little spring left that before retiring them I had to bend them closed a little every time I put a bottle in.

I love these things. They testify to thousands of kilometres. Fitness is transient, but a bottom bracket that it took 75,000 km to defeat is something I can keep forever.

Although one thought is this: a bottom bracket that durable is a very stupid thing for Shimano ever to have made. They could have sold me four bottom brackets for twice the price in the intervening time and I wouldn’t have objected. That model has probably done more harm to their bottom line than the recalled cranks.