A Sad State of Affairs

Recently I’ve been getting some flack around the office for the sad state of my commuting bike, the approaching-venerable Mountain Cycle Stumptown cyclocross steed adorned with street tires, lights and fenders. It’s currently in a sort “dinglespeed” mode, with only the front shifter working, and generally sporting more zip ties than any bike should. Pretty freaking sad for a bike magazine employee...

Flash back to early September: The weather was fine, lotsa nice rides to be had. I noticed that my rear shifter was not returning (shifting up) as smoothly as it should, even though it was shifting into the lower gears just fine. I assumed it was a simple derailleur adjustment problem and tried to correct it by turning the barrel adjuster to bring the derailleur back in line—only the barrel adjuster wouldn’t turn. I didn’t want to hit it with PB Blaster or other such rust-eating solvent without taking the cable and housing out first, since I didn’t want to destroy the plastic housing. So I forgot about it for the moment, until I had some time to go over it more thoroughly.

Then came the week before Interbike, which is a fairly crazy time ‘round these parts, what with getting ready to be immersed in a different mode of work for a whole week, in the midst of the normal making of magazines. On the way home one evening my rear shifter stopped working altogether. I disconnected the cable and blasted the barrel adjuster with solvent, but it still wouldn’t budge, even after waiting until the next morning for the solvent to work its magic, and even after attempting to turn it with a pair of pliers (plus a rag to keep it from getting too gouged up). Then I noticed that the derailleur cable was completely stuck in its housing. Wouldn’t budge. The barrel adjuster would’ve been of no use anyway. Huh.

At that point this repair was looking more major, but I had to get to work. So I simply left the rear derailleur cable disconnected and headed out, thinking the gear would be fine. Well, after about a mile of mostly flat gravel and pavement, I realized the gear was not so fine for my state of fitness (tapering off, after starting slow for the year) and for the journey (several hills yet to go). So I looked for a way to get the derailleur at least stuck on a more manageable gear than the highest one. At the edge of my local park, I pondered what to do and took inventory: five or six zip ties, not much else. I glanced down aimlessly at the boundary between gravel and asphalt—a-ha! I wedged a carefully-calibrated piece of stone in the parallelogram of the derailleur to keep it about midway up the cassette in a reasonable gear, then zip-tied it in place.

And there it stayed, for a fairly long and embarrassing amount of time. It would have been a simple thing to just replace the cable and housing, except for that dang barrel adjuster...you can’t very well make the cable work without it. One evening I finally got it to move with more solvent, more time and bigger pliers, but before it was completely free, the end snapped off in the derailleur body. “FML,” as the kids text these days. Various evenings since then have been spent in attempting to remove the bolt fragment with a Dremel tool, and would have been also spent in trying to use EZ-Outs to remove it, but instead I’ve spent some time trying to find the dang things in the basement shop here at the office, wherever they are hiding.

Although I must admit I kind of like dinglespeed mode—it sure is simpler, and has probably led to better fitness—it’s getting old at this point, especially when combined with heavy loads and lots of singlespeeding on my current mountain bike. There’s only so much of that abuse my legs can take.

This sad tale only accounts for one of the zip-ties sprouting from my ride. The other two are currently holding the rear fender on. It seems that about five years of getting bent back and forth will make L-brackets break, who knew? Fortunately these are SKS Beavertail fenders, for which spare parts are available (thanks Crystal!).

Things are winding down for the year around here, and it looks like I may actually get a day this weekend to work on bikes. Farewell sweet zip-ties—you’ve served me well.