Site Map
I've had a couple of rather spectacular mishaps, which I chalk up to bad karma, but which my critics ascribe to poor maintenance. Now, those of you that know me realize I don't always take quite as good care of my bikes as I should, but I usually will do something about those annoying mechanical problems before they become life threatening.
Last winter I was riding with Rich, and my chain was making rather bad noises. My chain is wont to make unpleasant noises in the best of times, but this was pretty far out on the bell curve. So I was thinking, I really needed to do something about this as soon as I got home. Actually, I really needed to do something about it before I left the house that day, because after an inopportune shift and some loud noises from the rear, I realized that evil had befallen the chain. My first reaction was awe and wonder, because the chain was so badly twisted, I couldn't even figure out which way to untwist it. If you're familiar with the concept of a Mobius strip, which has only one side, this was very likely to become the first Mobius chain. So after poking around with it for a while, and since we were pretty close to Carlisle center, we decided to do some walking and call for help. The pay phone there turned out to be out of order, but as I was wearing my NEBC jersey and looking pathetic, a woman who was also a member of NEBC stopped to help. She was on her way to Great Brook Farm to take her kid skiing, but took a detour to Bedford to take me home. I began to feel like Blanche Dubois, who had "always relied on the kindness of strangers."
I thought that would be a hard act to follow, but I was wrong. Several weeks later, I was riding with Ken, and we were doing the Lost Lake loop in Groton. This is basically a series of steep uphills and downhills in rapid sucession, a lot like a roller coaster. So the way to ride this is to go screaming down the last one as fast as you possibly can to get enough momentum to get you most of the way up the next one. At which point you have to shift from a very big gear to a very small gear. I did this a bit too zealously, and heard that series of interesting noises that precedes Total Mechanical Failure. In this case, my shift has caused the chain to somehow wrap itself around the rear derailer, and rip it right out of the dropout! I stopped and looked around to see my rear derailer dangling from the chain. So we extracted the derailer from the chain. Had we had a chain tool, we could have shortened the chain making it into an ersatz fixed gear. But Nooooo! So I got to ride with the chain attached to the cogs by gravity. Which did not work very well at all. On totally flat terrain, I could sort of limp along at 5-10mph (still a lot faster than walking), but at the slighest incline the chain would fall off. It would also fall off on the flats after a while, since it wouldn't stay in the gear I last dropped it on, but insist on sliding off into the space between the cogs and the dropout. Needless to say, this made for pretty slow going. Tried calling Susan who wasn't home, so, since I was pretty close to my office in Westford, I ended up just going there and waiting for Susan to rescue me.
After this last episode, I'm afraid to leave the house. I guess I better either invest in a more extensive tool kit or a cell phone.
Please send corrections, additions, comments and praise to