I was cycling through town on my commuting bike. At a particular set of traffic lights, the transmission mechanism between pedal and forward movement came to an abrupt halt. I was pedalling furiously away, but the bike only inched forward with its previous momentum. I had to resort to making the bike into a real ‘push bike’ using my left leg to get some momentum, and then freewheeling. It felt a bit embarrassing to be marooned in the middle of a junction pedalling at 130rpm but not going anywhere. It could have been dangerous. Often moving into a junction, requires a certain speed to move out of the way. Some ‘vans wait for no bicycle’ – At least I didn’t fall over.
If I pedalled really carefully, I got a bit of traction and could make some movement, but, any hard pressure and your pedals just span round like a windmill with no resistance. It was a slow pedal / push to get home.
At home, I looked at my chain. It was so worn, you could put a finger between the chain and front chain ring. So I bought a chain from local bike shop and changed that. However, the new chain didn’t fix it, so with a Sherlock Holmes style detective capacity, I located the problem to the rear wheel and saw that the problem was there. I took the back wheel to the local shop and they fixed the broken free wheel. Only £23, including some new bearings.
It would never make sense for me to buy all the necessary tools and repair the wheel myself. One of the great advantages of cycling, is that generally, repairs are really cheap. For the same labour costs for a car, it would probably be close to £1000 minimum. It’s just as cheap to pay someone to do the repair for you, and a lot quicker.
That’s my philosophy for cycling,
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