Home > Uncategorized > Decrepit is NOT impressed with them newfangled contraptions.

Decrepit is NOT impressed with them newfangled contraptions.

July 26, 2010

This morning I was pushing my bike out of the garage, backwards as usual having pushed it in forward the night before.  Usually this procedure proceeds without perfidy but I accidentally bumped the trigger shifter, causing the dérailleur to shift over a couple chainwheels.  Under normal circumstances in a backwards-traveling bike, it makes a ker-blunkity sound as the chain spools awkwardly off the freewheel into the dérailleur. 

It isn’t harmful and the chain thla-blunks itself right back in line with the first forward circumvolution of the chain wheel.  But not this time; unbeknownst to me, the march of progress had planted a little technological booby-trap on my bicycle chain: a new type of removable link.  It holds just fine when under tension but under compression, it releases.  Clever!

(When did that happen?  How long have I been riding around on one of those kind of chains and not noticed, using my chain tool to remove them for cleaning?)

While rolling my bike backwards my chain broke.  Or more accurately, the clever little link compressed between the freewheel and dérailleur and disconnected itself, its little pieces flying off to parts unknown.  I had to ride a different bike to work today.

Now I’m sure that nifty innovation is a big boost to the whippersnapper set who have not mastered the art of using a chain tool but to me it was a major inconvenience.  I’ve never seen a chain do that before, and I’ve been slightly bonkers about bicycling since the year of the first Earth Day.  Back then my main bike was an English 3-speed.

I fixed the chain this evening by eliminating the modernity.  It’s all strong links now. 

Categories: Uncategorized
  1. July 27, 2010 at 00:12 | #1

    Bicycles are like the internet,
    the most suspicious part is the the links ;-)

  2. David Engel
    July 27, 2010 at 08:34 | #2

    Not all change or improvement really improves things.

  3. SOC
    July 27, 2010 at 14:27 | #3

    Glad it happened while you were walking your bike, and not tearing downhill at 80kph!!

  4. July 27, 2010 at 19:27 | #4

    I think we spent the first Earth Day together as families.  Maybe.

  5. July 27, 2010 at 21:19 | #5

    LOL, Ole Phat Stu!

    David, sometimes a bicycle chain is just a bicycle chain.  :-P

    SOC, the chain is designed not to separate under tension.  And I removed the spamming links from your comment.

    WeeDram, I remember we spent an Earth day together as families, maybe in the ‘80’s.  But the first one was in 1970, the same month John Swigert said “Houston, we have a problem” and about six months before Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence.  And I think the album; Let It Be was released.  And I got a job working in a bike shop assembling new bikes.  Which lasted about three weeks until the owner found out my real age and fired me.  I had told him I was 14.

  6. July 31, 2010 at 18:44 | #6

    Right you are … time flies when you’re getting old.  ;)

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