Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Broken Bike

For those that know me a bike breakdown of some sort is inevitable. I got my bike back from the shop on Fri. and went out for a ride. About 25 miles into a 50 mile ride my left pedal tore out. I was riding up a fairly long hill probably about a mile with varying gradients the first 1/4 mile has some bits that are at least 10% but it levels off to probably an average of 5% higher up. The bit I was riding on was not that steep. I had just hit a short bit of steeper climbing and was standing on the pedals for a bit. When I hit the bottom of my stroke my foot continued on to hit the pavement. Fortunately, I was going slow enough that I didn't fall.


Looks like I'll need at least a new crank arm. This is the kind of failure that I don't want to have on a long ride as short of finding someone that can do some welding it is probably going to be a day or two to get the parts to fix.

I manged to get back on the road with a bit of jury rigging, but that only lasted until about mile 35. At that point I called my wife and told her I would meet her at a location that I thought I could reach by the time she got there.

Pedaling with one leg is hard. I manged to get to our prearranged meeting place about 10 minutes before she showed up.

I'm now on my way to the bike shop to see what my options for repair are. Probably some dollars and a day or two for parts to show up.

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2 comments:

  1. DougSeptember 4, 2014 at 3:57 PM

    Parts on order, hopefully I get my bike back tomorrow.

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  2. DougSeptember 5, 2014 at 2:42 PM

    Bike is fixed! I'll give it a good work out on the weekend and then pack it up for the trip. Hopefully, there won't be any more broken bits.

    As an interesting side note, the ride where I broke this bike has a history of other bike breakage. A few years ago I broke a spoke on my Robaix on this ride when I hit a pothole. And last year I busted the rear hub on my Surly. The area where the spokes go through the hub failed. All I noticed was that the wheel went out of true. When I got home I tried to true it up and couldn't so I dropped it off at the bike shop. They eventually noticed the hub breakage and got me a new hub.

    So this is 3 fairly major failures on the same ride. They all happened in a hilly section about halfway through the ride. The hills aren't particularly bad. The worst bit is the start where I'm pretty sure it kicks up to about 10% for about 1/4 mile. But mostly they are probably not more than about 5%-7% which isn't much of a hill.

    Given that I've probably only done this same ride about a dozen times 3 failures is a pretty big percentage.

    I like the ride because it is almost exactly 50 miles, circumnavigates 2 lakes, in 2 states, has a modest amount of climbing, about 2000 ft of total gain, and a bit of a flat windy section at the start and end.

    Last time I saw about 20 wild turkeys and a couple of deer.

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