Oscar

... from me.

I ride hundreds of miles per week and am a good bike tech. However, I'm sloppy, and when it falls apart, it falls apart all over the place.

Exhibit A. I was very excited about my new skinny tires that I put on my classic Italian road bike. I just hummed along the smooth bike path. About 15 miles into it, I my cranks felt "shaky". I looked down and realized that the bottom bracket that I installed a year ago was coming undone.

An Italian bottom bracket fixed cup threads in clockwise, so you have to tighten it unbelievably tight. Otherwise, the bearings will unscrew it when pedaling. I remember a year ago saying, "it's tight enough". I also remember blowing off looking at it earlier this year. Now 15 miles from home, I'm finger-tightening the thing every mile.

Exhibit B. Those skinny tires need skinny rims. I was making up time by riding the streets, tired of turning the fixed cup every mile. Two miles off the path, I'm flat from a snake bite puncture in the rear.

Redemption. It could have been worse if I had not stopped to help a couple fix with their kid's "add-a-bike". Without that opprotunity to help someone, I surely would have snapped a brake cable or something stupid. I made it home in time for Sunday dinner.

aerobat

Concur with redemption!
:thumbup:

mike

That's how you learn and it's how you get good at fixing bikes.

The reality is that ALL bikes shake loose and need some tuning once in a while. Even the old Ashtabula cranks wiggled loose after a year of steady use.

The rims probably didn't cause the puncture so much as not having the skinny tires inflated enough. I ride skinny tires with trad 1.25" rims without problems. You really have to make 'em hard with air, though.


Keep on truckin', baby.

JonR

This really sounds familiar! Plenty of times it seems I've been saved from disaster by some little unusual thing happening along the way--helping somebody with their bike, or going someplace I didn't intend to--and finding out later that, if I'd just kept to my original plan, my bike would probably have exploded or something.

I normally don't check my brakes before I ride. The other day something told me to, and I found that the front cable had pulled completely out of the lever, from transporting the bike in a car trunk the day before. Not that it would have caused me to wreck, probably, but it would have been a nasty surprise.

aerobat

I had a similar experience going to work one day. I had the front wheel off the bike to put it in the car, and forgot to hook up the brake cable when I put the wheel back on. At the same time, the cable for the rear brake hooked on something as I was taking it out of the car, and pulled it out of the cable guide on the crossbar. I was in a hurry to get going to work so I didn't check anything and quickly found out I didn't have any brakes, at all! As my total commute is on the highway with little chance I have to stop, or even slow down, I left it that way all the way in to work. You can bet I check things a lot more carefully now though.