I’ve come to the conclusion that I'm a hoarder. Maybe being born in the bomb shelter generation has something to do with it, or coming from poor but honest Irish peasant stock. For whatever reason, I don't want to run out of stuff.
Take my inventory of bicycle patch stuff. I was looking for a long patch to repair a slit the size of the San Adreas fault when I unearthed all manner of interesting things. Nashbar used to make a patch kit with black patches and the glue in bitesize little rubbery ampoules. You were supposed to cut the top off and out would come one flat's worth of glue. My ampoules has shrivelled up to look like something you would find at the bottom of a hamster cage. I'm not sure what the shelf life of patches is, but these are definitely past their prime.
Another of my economy measures was to buy a giant can of tire glue, reasoning that I would never lack for tires to patch. This is kind of the other end of the spectrum from the ampoules. I did get a number of uses out of it, but even I didn't get enough flats to use it up, so before the can was half gone it had turned into a lump with the viscosity of well chewed bubble gum.
I decided I needed to change my rear tire the other night. It had gotten akilter and had rubbed the stay enough to visibly fray the sidewall and produce a noticeable bulge. After riding around rather nervously for a while I decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valor, and I could part with it. I did find a suitable candidate among my collection of used tires. Now my used tire collection started when I removed a tire from a bike for some reason. I would't actually throw it out unless it had a three inch rip in the casing (even then I might try a boot first). So when it comes time to replace another I have all these suspicious looking tires that I can't remember why I took off the bike in the first place. Of course, I will always use a good used tire first, so I have a collection of brand new tires that will be totally ozonized before they're ever used.
My freewheel collection is legendary. Freewheels, like tires, I retire for one reason or another, then refuse to throw out. So I have a garage full of used freewheels that all have some fatal flaw, which I am likely to try and redeploy next time I perform a freewheelectomy. Of course, I know in theory the problem with used freewheels, that when you put on a new chain, it skips. I've also found experimentally, that if you tough it out for several hundred miles of skipping it will usually wear in. Hence the used freewheel collection.
But I had a breakthrough recently. I came upon two old freewheels that had been lying in state on my workbench for about two years. One had sort of square teeth, once you got through the rust, the other had teeth in all sorts of interesting shapes, but very few I suspect were as the manufacturer intended. Of course, the reason I saved them was along the lines of "well, I could just replace the few bad cogs, or in any case the body's good." Of course it would cost more to replace the numerous bad cogs than to buy a whole new freewheel, assuming you could even find one of these collector's items. So I breathed a deep sign, and chucked them into the trash bin. I have a new motto now, "Just say throw."
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