Messed Up? Screwed? Naw, it's fine.
Getting ready for a bike trip always involves a quite long To Do list. Many of the things are fairly easy to tick off, like decide on the actual route, book the airflight, bring the camera, and such. But the general chore of assembling all the gear, especially clothes, but also things like possible bug spray or a can opener, etc. etc. always results in a mess. This can be on the dining room table, on the sofa, or both. There will always be more than can actually fit, in the plane, or on the bikes. So someone needs to sort through it, and finally to come out with just a few neatly packed and well thought out bags. That someone is Dodie, because this is a science that is beyond me.
I have a lot of faith that Dodie will come up with the answers. She will start well before our actual departure date, and tear her hair for a goodly amount of time. But it is always worked out, and problems can easily be solved. For example, if it happens that I no longer fit my bathing suit, it is quickly remedied with a quick trip to Sport Chek, or equivalent.
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But oh, what about the bikes?
Putting the Bike Fridays into their suitcases is always a bug. To begin, racks, pedals, fenders, and mirrors have to come off. And brake levers and other things on the handle bars need to be loosened so they can rotate out of the way. The front wheel comes off, the hub motor cable is disconnected, and then the bike is folded. The geometry of our two bikes differs, so they each go into the case their own way. But there is only one way for each that works. If an airline or border person takes anything out, they have no hope of getting all back in!
Today (November 30) my idea of fun was going to be to make suet and also seed cylinders for the birds. Dodie pointed out that there were still items on the trip to Do List, like getting the bikes into the cases. I pointed out that we had scads of time for that. So, work started on the bikes! Dodie's bike went first, and it went smoothly, though it somehow took as much as four hours. We have no idea how people, like Scott Anderson, seem to breeze through bike packing and unpacking with little comment , and seemingly no tears.
Finally, after all the disassembly and then Tetris-ing, we got this:
Even if it did take four hours, we still had a month to go. Surely the birds could get their seed now! Well, maybe soon. I started to disassemble bike #2. With the Bike Fridays, taking racks on and off is actually risky. The fittings on the frame have a tendency to strip, as screws go in and out. And of course the screws can get misplaced, or mixed up as to where they go. One thing I do to avoid mixups is to put the screws back into the fittings, once the racks are off. I did that, and moved on to the step of removing the pedals.
It was around there that I discovered that the pedals/chain/rear wheel would not move. And oh, the bike would move forward, but not backward! Puzzling.
After all these years, there is little that can go wrong on a bike that we can not figure out. But the Bafang hub motor has remained a black box and a mystery. Same with that little silver controller box. We just fervently hope that these mystery electronic parts will work.
But here was the kind of thing that gave support to Dodie's idea of getting everything ready very well in advance. A serious bike problem could easily eat up much time. The only shop that even vaguely understands our bikes is always busy, and is a 130 km round trip from here.
Lately, much to Dodie's dismay, I have been checking AI on diverse topics, from ferry schedules to how dehumidifiers work. You have to be careful, because based on its reading of lots of internet nonsense, AI will often give answers that it thinks could possibly be right, but that turn out to be wrong.
But given that no bike shops here even open until the day after tomorrow, I described the Bike Friday symptoms to Copilot. Copilot made the case for a glitched clutch system inside the Bafang hub. It provided instructions for disassembly, and a diagram of the inner workings. But it also gloomily predicted that even if I got it working, it would fail again soon. Dodie's start getting ready sooner than later principle was starting to look good. How long would it take to get and install replacement parts? Were we screwed?
I dragged the bike out to the workshop, a prepared to pull the wheel and no doubt to rip the Bafang apart. I turned on the bright lights, fired up some heaters (because at 7 p.m. it's pitch dark and freezing here), and, wtf? In five minutes, I was back in the house with the bike, fixed!
Yes, we had been screwed. The "mechanic" that took off the rear rack and carefully replaced the screws had diligently screwed them well back in. But with the rack no longer there, the screw penetrated all the way to the freewheel, locking it in place. A few quick turns, and the bike was back in business! See:
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1 month ago
1 month ago
So we are organized, unscrewed, and ready to go. Now we have a month for serving birdseed!
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With respect to packing bikes, I took photos on my phone of each step to pack my coupler-equipped bike into its S&S case. I have never tried to pack it without reference to these photos. Using the Thule case, the steps are pretty obvious and fewer are required as there is no need to remove the fork, bottle cages, etc. In fact, it would be possible to pack the bike and leave the brake rotors, rear derailleur, chain, etc. on, but I prefer to spend the few minutes to take them off and pack them safely.
1 month ago
1 month ago
I admit removing and reinstalling the rotors was more time-consuming with my older bike with 6 screws holding each rotor, but I still did it. Bent rotors can lead to energy-sapping rubbing brakes.
1 month ago
1 month ago
1 month ago