Yesterday I confessed to inentionally stoking fear of a battery-powered, electronic cycling future in which steel bikes with rim brakes cease to exist. But how can I not when it’s becoming virtually impossible to find a normal road bike? And if you’re wondering what a “normal road bike” is, here you go:
See that? Normal! It’s steel. It takes mechanical components. It uses quick-release axles. It’s quite racy and you can ride as fast as you want on it, but you can also set it up to be comfortable as you’d like, and it has medium-reach brakes in case you want to use wider tires or fenders. It’s NORMAL.
Yes, there is the odd company that gets way too much credit for still offering token racy steel road bikes that use rim brakes and are made out of steel (even though they mostly sell bikes with dick breaks), like Ritchey:
And yes, as a fan of racy rim-brake road bikes I certainly acknowledge that it looks like a very nice bike:
But it has short-reach brakes, an integrated headset, and a plastic fork–which is fine! Especially on a racy road bike. In fact some of the bikes I’ve enjoyed riding the most over the years have had one or more of those attributes:
Still, the reason I no longer have that Litespeed but I do still have the Milwaukee is that the medium-reach brakes in particular make the bike so much more useful, and with absolutely no drawbacks. I mean I guess a medium-reach brake might be a tiny bit flexier than a short-reach brake, which you don’t notice. It’s also a tiny bit heavier, which you also don’t notice. Yet it’s the difference between fitting 32mm tires with ease if you feel like it versus maybe 25mm or possibly 28mm if you’re lucky–plus there’s nothing stopping you from using those old 23s or 25s on a bike like the Milwaukee anyway, if you’re like me, you have a bin or two full of them from your racing days, and you kind of like riding skinny tires sometimes because they create the illusion of speed even though they’re not really any faster whilst also being highly impractical. (It’s kind of like stuffing yourself into a pair of tight jeans in a comical attempt to reclaim your youthi.)
That’s why when I moved some bikes along back in 2024 (which turned out to be an exercise in futility since I’ve acquired at least three new bikes since then), the Litespeed went but the Milwaukee stayed. Even in the rim brake days medium-reach road bikes were somewhat scarce, and now that it’s 2025 and increasingly the only options are limited runs of boutique bikes* I’m taking this one to the grave** with me.
*Yes, of course there’s the much-vaunted Roadini, but that’s a long-reach brake bike and therefore extra-normal:
And no, I don’t feel the need to justify owning both the Milwaukee and the Roadini. One’s my regular road bike and the other is my deluxe road bike. Basically, the Milwaukee has everything I need, but the Roadini with its lugs and fancy paint and additional clearance and more comfortable fit is everything I need and more:
**This is not to be taken literally, for when the Cassette Of My Soul is finally detached from the Freehub Of Existence, I will not be buried, I will be donating my body to an unnamed company that uses human bones in its tire sealant.
Anyway, this was the Milwaukee just prior to its most recent update, before the Roadini assumed its role as my plump-tired, friction-shifted all-around road bike:
And here it was back in 2015 when I first got it:
That’s basically how it came from Milwaukee except for the tires and the saddle, and in fact the saddle that’s on there now is the original one that the Cambium replaced
After divesting myself of the Litespeed and several other bikes I figured I’d reconfigure it as a modern (by my standards) road bike, though I still felt like it was missing a little something until I added this sticker yesterday:
That’s irony, of course, because the bike is Shimano through and through:
Right down to the hubs:
Overall I continue to prefer friction drivetrains at this stage in my cycling life. I’m not racing or even trying to keep up with anybody so I couldn’t care less if I mess up a shift now and again, I enjoy the feel and the process of moving levers up and down, and I especially enjoy being able to use whatever cassette I feel like regardless of speeds. But it’s still fun to go back to integrated shifters, and the 105–which basically represents the end of of the road for mechanical rim-brake road bike shifting from Shimano–works very, very well:
In fact it works so impressively well that it’s really hard to imagine why anyone who’s not a professional racer would possibly want a system that requires a battery. Then again I also have a hard time imaging why you’d want the sort of road bikes they’re selling today instead of one you can just breathe new life into every decade:
Though as this represents the last of the mechanical road groups I suppose from here on in it will be integrated shifters from the parts bin…or I’ll just go back to friction eventually.
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