Originally Posted by
Artkansas
This is an important point, most commuters do pay attention to their bikes and notice the small changes, and for most, it's only a few miles ride till they can access their entire tool set. It's not like they are 50 miles out when a breakdown occurs.
This is so true. I have ridden on flat tyres the remaining two or three kilometres to the end of commutes.
Originally Posted by
Artkansas
So they can pretty much get by till they get home usually. Though I can remember once when the bearings of my bottom bracket wore out on the way to work. The side of one bearing race popped out. Unable to pedal further, I ended up using the bike as a scooter, pushing it with one foot, the other foot on the pedal. And by a miracle, I made it to work on time. It's good I always left myself that extra 15 minutes to get there. I got a ride home in a co-worker's pickup.
One of the most dramatic failures for me was stripping the threads on a fixed gear hub so I had no drive. The ride was actually a century, but I combined those sorts of rides then with a supermarket visit, still 25km from home, so it sort of was a commute.
The hub stripped about 15km from home. Of course, by this time I could scoot, but there was a lot of walking and pushing with full panniers. I was pretty sore the next day... much sorer than any century of randonnee I had ever done.