The heat of the sun

as in, “Fear no more”, although “With a little help from…” would be more appropriate.

 

I finally got the stuck left pedal freed, after leaving the crank in the sun and giving it various doses of de-grip spray. I had been clamping the crank in my vice and putting a 15mm open-ended spanner onto the pedal spindle flats and giving it a hefty whack with a 2lb hammer (and yes, I was trying to move it in a clockwise direction because of the left-hand thread), but the spanner had been springing off the flats with no hint of movements in the spindle. All the googled wisdom was that it was the flat surface of the spindle jammed against the crank which was causing the stick, but I found the opposite when I switched to a Crivit pedal spanner and threw my weight against it. The spindle shifted a few degrees. A squirt of de-grip, another hefty heave, and the spindle shifted a few more degrees, to the point where the edge of it was now no longer contacting the crank face, but it was still stiff. After lots of de-grip fluid onto both sides of the crank I was able to wind the pedal out. It had been galling between the threads which had caused the tightness.

I am now in the position of being able to fully-overhaul the pedals that took me round Scandinavia, and then to refit the Stronglight 99 set, but do I want to? I have already found the delight of running very low gears, and the easier mount/dismount from a 175mm length crank, so going back to a 28-28 lowest gear and 170mm cranks would be a step back too far. The only two reasons I could see for going back were the (slight) reduction in weight that an all-alloy set of chainrings gave, and the pleasure of knowing it was my old setup. That then raised another question, about returning to the past. Is it really worth going backwards from the modern technological advances to an earlier situation for purely mental reasons? Was my Pedersen still the same bicycle if I changed the crankset?

I went out for a long ride, climbing all the way up the lengthy slope from Ludwell to Wim Green, (over twelve minutes laborious work in the very lowest gear), and along to the airfield where I had to do a Quasimodo impersonation at the back door to the kitchens. I had set out with an empty water bottle.

Cooled and lubricated, I set off again on the way to Shillingstone Station. I ran through in my mind all the things I had changed on the Pedersen since the return from Scandinavia and the subsequent resurrection. Wheels, because the 27″ tyres were too harsh on the potholed roads. Freewheel, because the 32-14 Suntour block had worn and the Shimano rear changer seemed happier with 28 teeth to climb up onto. Crankset, because of the pedal problem. Front and rear changers, to get them to work with the new gears. Thumb-shifters, because the old left-hand one had failed. Brake blocks front and rear. Chains. But none of those items seemed to be so unique that replacing it with like or different turned the bicycle into a different machine. It was still my pride and joy number one.

This of course is the old philosophical question of what defines a person. I have accumulated many new experiences over the past 32 years, dropped several habits, and yet I am the same person. The cells in my body have (with very few exceptions), been themselves replaced many times in that period. Legally, I am regarded as still answerable for things I did all those years ago. But how can I be the same person when I have changed my mind on many issues that I used to regard as major influences on me? What is it that defines me as unique and unchanging? Physically only the cells in the lenses of my eyes have not been replaced (assuming the 1953 Oak Ridge study with radio-isotopes is correct). I have enough of those fist-in-mouth memories of my crassness to know that I still have all the memories of my past stored somewhere inside of me. The memories remain, even though the cells which provide the support mechanism have changed.

I found I could partly-answer the question about the Pedersen and say that the frame was the unique part that made it my bicycle. However, without wheels, gears, brakes and all the other replaceable parts, it wasn’t really my Pedersen, it had to have a minimum collection of functional accessories before it changed from being a frame to my actual bicycle. I couldn’t however come to a similar conclusion about myself, because I don’t know exactly what memories are. If the bones of a person are taken as analogous the the frame of the Pedersen, would an amputee claim to be no longer the same person? “Your honour, I plead not guilty to the murder of my wife twenty years ago, because my right arm has since been amputated?” I don’t even know if those memories could exist independently of the support system, because at that point we depart the area of rational thought and enter the realms of belief, where ideas are held not only with no observational basis for having such ideas in the first place, but often against common-sense ideas suggesting they were just wishes.

I reached Shillingstone Station having come to the conclusion that it was not possible to pursue this “what is what?” concept further using the current knowledge of things. I did, however, manage to get a clearer idea of the slippery nature of words when it comes to trying to establish what is and what isn’t. Effectively, you can’t. They can’t be used to conclusively prove the existence or non-existence of non-observable things. Going a stage further, I realised that words might be subject to the same limitations that mathematical symbolic systems suffered from: Kurt Gödel’s ideas could just as well apply to language as to mathematics. And the reason could well be that gap between the meaning of the symbols and the meaning of the construct those symbols evoked. “This sentence is false” at the level of the words seems contradictory, but the meaning of the sentence is perfectly clear to me, no matter how the words might force me to switch from one view to another.

Those of you who think I need to get out more might want to consider that it was going out and about prompted that particular pondering.

I came back home by a different route, wandering through the lanes well away from traffic. I’d been out for five hours, and consumed a chicken and mushroom pie and later on an apple, plus half a litre of water. It was one of the hottest days of the month, but the breeze on the bicycle had hidden that heat from me. It was only when I got home and stopped cycling that the full heat of the sun hit me.

Chasing trains

I set off at seven in the morning and rode to where I had filmed the steam special last time, though then I had driven to and from the spot. I got there in just under an hour and a half, and so went exploring another side road to see if I could find a more inspiring location. I chose a spot where there was a short stretch of high embankment framed by trees, where I would be looking upwards and across and so might get a side-on shot of the train, and was duly rewarded by it arriving on time. (The previous visit it had come twenty minutes later than the booked time, and apparently had been held to allow one of the fast HSTs to overtake it).

I carried on with a long circular ride around some of the hills of Somerset. Any worries about having given away my top speed by losing the outer chainring and dropping two teeth on the middle were dispelled when I realised that although there had been three short stretches of road where I would have liked a higher gear, there were far more times when I was down in the lower gears.

With hindsight, I should have taken a small stove and more water and stopped for coffee a couple of times. I ought to have taken more than an apple and a banana with me as top-up stuff as well, I had to pop into a newsagents in Mere for a packet of peanuts and chocolate bar to give me the will to ride the last 30 minutes to get home.

I was out and about for five and a half hours, of which at least four were spent in the saddle pedalling, and I got back worn out and aching from where the saddle and I didn’t agree on who had the rights to which bits of real estate belonged to whom. I’ve not done enough long rides over the past couple of years and so either the saddle or I have forgotten who gives way to who.

I am going to have to make that woven saddle soon. Individual Bicycles never offered it as an option, so I can’t just haunt ee-bah-gum in the hope of getting a used one. If I can lose the extra stone and a bit I’ve put on since 2014 I might have a slightly easier time.

( Update – I discovered that the last few miles home had been ridden with the rear changer cable slack, so I went up the long drag on the inner chainwheel but the smallest rear cog, which didn’t half make my legs ache. This is why I don’t like stripping parts of the bike down, it destroys all the careful adjustments I’ve got used to. I keep telling myself I’m not going to touch the bike each time I finally sort out a problem, and then look what happens.)

Concerning ratios

TLDR: One drawback of owning a bicycle that is out-of-the-ordinary is that you can’t just walk in a bicycle shop and get parts off the shelf. Getting a front changer to work with the cranksets I use has become one of those struggles that put you off further tuning once you’ve managed to get it all working.

 

I went round Scandinavia using a Stronglight 99 triple (42-36-28) with 170mm crank lengths driving a Suntour 14 – 32, giving me a lowest gear ration of 0.875. I used a Shimano 600 rear changer, and a Suntour  front changer. It took me a long time to get the front changer to select all three chainrings. Part of the problem was that there was no downtube for the front changer to be clamped around. Individual Bicycles got around this by a bolt-on attachment to the twin seat tubes which had a small stub of suitable tube around which a front changer could be clamped.

 

I didn’t meet any hills worthy of the name until I entered Denmark, but up until then I had spent almost all of the time on the lowest chainring and largest two rear cogs because of the continual gale-force headwinds.  Even when I came into Denmark I still wasn’t able to ride on anything higher than the middle chainring and middle back cogs, and so I could overlook the tricky shifting I was experiencing between the middle and top chainrings. I concentrated on getting an easy shift between the inner and middle chainrings because of my requirements for a very low ratio. It wasn’t until my return as I came from Norway into the relative flatlands of Denmark that I got a chance to use the outer chainring, and by that time I had just about managed to get a reliable shift from middle to outer, and my legs were now strong enough to hardly need the inner chainring now that I had left the mountains behind.

Back in England I had taken off the 28-tooth ring and substituted a 32-tooth one, which now allowed me to be able to shift through all three of the rings, at the expense of having a lowest ratio of 1:1. Having a larger inner chainring meant I could raise the front changer on the stub bracket, which seemed to improve selecting the largest ring. After six years I moved to where I am now, stopped smoking, put on weight, and struggled up the hills.

 

When I resurrected the Pedersen in 2007 I found the Stronglight crank arms reluctant to release the pedals, which required at minimum a strip-down and probably replacement. Reluctant is perhaps too mild a word, the crank arms refused to let go of the pedal threads. Readers of the blog will know I experimented with a Biopace triple I scrounged from a dumped bike, but I was forced to abandon this because of persistent problems with the bottom bracket working loose. I realised after the last episode that the oscillating forces produced by the elliptical chainrings were slowly working the bottom bracket cups loose. I managed to get a new bottom bracket set loctited in place, but now found that the Stronglight was too far out from the frame for the front changer to get the outer chainring, and was reluctant to put the Biopace set back on. But as the intermittent sticky pedal on the Stronglight had almost caused an accident twice, I had to do something.

I switched to a Suntour 42-34-24 from that well-know auction site, and after a lot of experimenting with different front changers managed to get all three chainrings reliably. I had already changed from 27″ to 700c rims by now, and with the change had also gone back to a standard Shimano 28-14 rear block. My lowest ratio was now 0.857, and with it I was able to climb a nearby hill that had always defeated the Stronglight setup. I did though have to take off the original Shimano rear changer and put on a more modern version that seemed designed to allow for more variation in chain length that occurred when having a wider range of gears.

So far, so good. There were, however, other hills nearby even steeper than the one I was now able to surmount, and I found myself scheming how to get even lower ratios. I saw another Suntour triple set, this time 42-32-22 with 175mm cranks, and got it. This time, though, things did not go so smoothly with the front changer, in fact, they didn’t go at all. I could get the inner and middle chainrings easily, but there was no way I could make the front changer stretch out enough to get the outer chainwheel. Even with the limit screw removed, the changer just didn’t move across enough for the chain to even start to brush against the outer chainring.

However, there was another benefit which made me decide to live with this issue and ride around on a 12-speed: the increased crank length. 5mm doesn’t sound much, but I found I had to lower the saddle so that I could still keep a foot firmly pressed against the pedal at the bottom of the stroke, and that small reduction in saddle-height made quite a difference to mounting and dismounting. The biggest drawback to the hammock-saddle arrangement on the Pedesen is that you can’t slip forward off the saddle and perch on the crossbar when waiting at a road-junction, because the strap continues to rise from the nose of the saddle. So, I lived with the lack of a top chainring and enjoyed myself wobbling up some ridiculous hills with my new 0.785 lowest ratio.

Two years later, having accidentally retired and begun to cycle a lot more, I began to feel the lack of the top chainring, and switched back to the Suntour, raising the saddle once more and doing a ballet-dancer-en-point impression each time I had to stop at road junctions to wait for a gap in the traffic. I managed.

Four years later (now), I had started to notice issues with the chain jumping when I applied sudden load, such as coming off the points of my toes and trying to get across the road in a suitable gap in traffic. My first thoughts were the chain had worn, so I went in search of a new one, finding I had actually already got one several years back. It improved the jumping problem but didn’t fully eliminate it. I didn’t have a new rear block, but inspection didn’t reveal any worn teeth, at least, none visibly worn. So I decided to try the original rear changer in case the jumping was due to weak springs in the changer I had been using. The changer worked, giving me all six rear cogs, but I could no longer select all three front chainrings.

I spent an evening trimming bits of metal off parts of the front changer mounting where it was bottoming against the stub bracket, and off the stub bracket where the changer arm was contacting it when going into the inner chainring position, with no improvement. So I switched back to the rear changer that had worked, up until my rash experimenting, only to find it wouldn’t get the inner chainring any more. One puzzle was that with the Pedersen up on the centre stand I could change between all three gears, but not when I was actually on the bike and pushing on the pedals. I went to bed feeling moody, with dark memories of how long it had previously taken me to get the setup right.

Next morning, I decided to once again try the Suntour crankset with the 175mm cranks, because my diary recorded I had been able to get the inner and middle chainrings with ease, and after changing them all over (note to self, stop using spray grease to lubricate the chain and pedals, the mess is awful), I was able to go out and ride up and down some of the local mountains on the inner and middle chainring, and have an easier time getting on and off the Pedersen.

So I’m back where I was in 2014, able to go out tomorrow and ride fifteen miles to video a steam train as I hoped, but wondering just how long can I put up with riding a 12-speed around with a very low top gear?

And as I said at the very start of this post, I can’t really go into a local bike-shop and ask for a combination of changers to solve the problem, because I have

1. an unusual bicycle for which there aren’t any parts lookup-tables
2. a bottom bracket which is possibly shifted too far towards the chainring side but daren’t be altered (last time I tried to shift it the loctite said ‘eff-off’)
3. not enough money from my pension to just say to a bike-shop “sort this”
4. a determination to do things my way.

What I am doing is going back to 2014 and taking a different course, back then I decided to alter the setup so I could use the bike instead of spending time trying to get around a problem. My task now is to see what needs to be done to get all three chainrings selectable. It might mean dismantling the Suntour and spacing all three rings further away from the crank, it might mean softening the Loctite and shifting the crank axle an eighth of an inch towards the other side, it might mean making up a new stub bracket to allow the front changer to be offset outwards by an eighth  of an inch, who knows? Damned if I do.

Tired of tyre troubles

I’ve just come through a difficult three days where I started to question my ability to do the simplest of all bicycle chores, mending a puncture.

I’ve been riding around on the Pedersen on and off ever since my last post back in 2015, mostly on, but I did have an off the other day which was all my own fault. The handlebar mirror had come loose and was flopping round each time there was a significant jolt, which with our lunar-landscape (potholed) road surfaces was every other minute. So as I started pedalling up the slope past the village hall I yanked the mirror back into position with my right hand, and quickly took my left hand across to try and nip up the nut beneath the handlebar. I thought my right hand could both hold the mirror stem in position and steer, since it sort of had a hold of the handlebars, but a quick lurch to the left proved me wrong. I got a foot down in time to stop myself doing a full somersault into the ditch, but I was most definitely off and because of the slope, way past the horizontal. And it wasn’t even lunch-time.

Back home, I unpacked everything and then saw I didn’t have the small black leather coin wallet. I scooted back out on the Pedersen to the scene of the accident and finally located the wallet in the grass. I scooted back and put the Pedersen away.

Next morning, the back tyre was flat. I found and mended the puncture, spotted a broken spoke on the freewheel side and replaced that, and checked the tyre thoroughly, finding nothing. I went out for a ride, and after an hour and a bit got home, everything seeming fine. The broken spoke hadn’t been the cause of the original puncture, and for all I knew might have been like it for a few days.

Next morning, the tyre was flat, again. I took the tube out and saw an air-bubble right in the middle of the patch. I removed the patch, sanded the tube vigorously in that area, and put on a bigger patch. I went out for a ride, and everything seemed to be fine.

I was a bit worried though about the age of the tubes and the fact that all of them now had patches (I carry two spares with me on the basis that if I puncture it is quicker to slap a replacement tube in and mend the puncture at home), so I took a ride over to a garage where I had previously bought the tubes, and got another new one. One the way back, with no apparent problems, I stopped at a village shop to get milk for the cats. When I came back outside, the back tyre was flat. I popped in a replacement tube and set off home. I stopped and waited at the main road for the streams of traffic to pass, and when I went to remount and scoot across, the back tyre was flat.

After pushing home with an audio book and earphones to make the tedium tolerable, I got to work investigating the two tubes. Neither of them showed a leak when immersed in water, but after laying them out to dry, fully inflated, I saw each had deflated, and in each case, a previous patch had lifted away from the rubber.

I spent the rest of the afternoon testing the contents of the two puncture outfits. One of them had rectangular patches, but no tube of adhesive left. It was one of these rectangular patches I had used first of all after my ditch-diving adventure. The other outfit had different patches and an almost full tube of adhesive, which I had used with the rectangular patch. I found that whatever the red compound on the tube-face of the rectangular patches was, it stopped the adhesive curing fully.

The interesting thing from all this was the observation that the tubes had only deflated when I was off the bike and it was standing idle, so somehow, the increased loading had been pressing the patch firmly against the tube and sealing it, and it was only with the reduction in pressure that the air inside the tube had been able to make it’s way out through the soft adhesive area.

It’s a new one on me.