Last year, I decided to get a bicycle. After researching, I found out about chainless bicycles that are run by a shaft drive. I read about the pros and cons and thought that the pros outweighed the cons. I remember being a kid and getting grease stains on my legs and the chain slipping off, causing any rotation of the pedals to be futile.

It was great. There was no chain, no noise, and shifting was really easy (no coordinating between the two sets of gears), not to mention how cool everyone thought it was. But I made a mistake. I decided I should upgrade from platform pedals. Looking at my options, clipless pedals had a few problems: the expense, the hideousness of the shoes, and the fact that my feet are to big for normal shoes and the shoes for my size are many times more expensive than the regular ones. Finding out about Power Grips, I bought a pair, but when I was testing them out over the weekend, I started hearing these awful noises from the shaft drive. I tried to stop using them, but the following Monday, the gears between the crank and the shaft drive went out of alignment. I didn't know what caused it, of course (I'm very mechanically challenged), so I asked my father to try to see what was wrong. He explained it to me; he tightened it (it's a little disk behind the right pedal). It was only a temporary fix, as it kept coming off and eventually the gears connecting the shaft drive to the crank got stripped down to being unusable.

Now, that I got all of that out the way, I was wondering if anybody knows if it's fixable (I know I have seen a couple posts here by people who use them before I joined, but who knows if they're still around?). Sure, you can get a new shaft drive for $90, but it seems like half of it is a part of the frame. It doesn't look like the crank housing is removable at all. And if it's not, I really would hate to waste $90.