bicycle repair
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Recently, Mari's old 650b*-based bike has been having some difficulty. The front wheel has developed a wobble around the axel, and after a large tear appeared in that same front wheel's tire I found it beyond repair. I'd have had to replace the tire (again!) and of course get a new tube. I don't know exactly what had happened but it looked like a run-flat situation and I have to say that on those tiny 650b tires I'm not surprised. We've constantly had flats, and when I tried replacing the tube it exploded as I pumped it up to the required 100PSI. There were no foreign materials or other problems (except the tear in the tire), so it looks like I'm at the point of redoing the strong (possibly teflon) tape on the rims on top of the other stuff. So on Sunday we went to Kichijoji and bought a new bicycle.
This being the "age of scarcity", we're now looking at a December delivery time.
So, Mari's riding her old bike with packing tape lining the inside of the tire where the tear is, and all along the teflon tape as well (at least for a stretch to either side of the hole in the rim for the valve stem.
All of this made my recognize that it's long past time to replace the chain and cassette on my old bike. This is something I was doing every six-twelve months in Toronto because I was riding 200++ km a week on terrible roads (covered in salt). But here I wasn't riding daily and not far when I did (except the odd commute to Kichijoji), so I had been living with the chain skipping, poor shifting, etc. Now it rides like a dream, on surprisingly inexpensive parts.
Of course, I got it wrong the first time, and looped the chain outside one of the guides in the derailleur. But I could tell from the sound what I'd done and had a spare pin in my toolbox so I repaired that quickly enough.
I've got to do something about how filthy my bike has become.
*Having a bike on an effectively dead wheel specification is a nightmare. I had to go to Amazon for the tubes and tires, both in Canada and here in Tokyo (which really surprised me since you can get most other sizes, and I mean weird things like 23" or 25" or 27" parts quite readily. And I found that the diameter of the wheels actually matched those of the 650a specification rather than 650b, so I don't even know what to think about the manufacturer. They list the same bike currently with "650c x 25c" tires which is just not the right way of writing it.