October 10, 2006

The machine stops

As an update to last month, in fact I raised about £215 altogether from doing PfS. As a team of five from my work, we raised £1500 for Leukaemia Research. How about that? The guy on the blue trike was of course Eric, and the guy with the grey Speedmachine I think was Phil from various online places including Velovision, and he was from Montrose, or Arbroath or somewhere else Scottish.

More maintenance this month. This time it was Annie the Blue Bike whose chain wear was way over the precise numbers I talked about a year or so ago. The amount of stretch meant that every time I cranked away on the pedals, the chain skipped over the sprockets, in just about any gear, so for a couple of days I had to ride very gently! Since adding the Scottoiler to the bike, the chain had been staying pretty clean and I'd been lulled into a false sense of everlastingness, and I hadn't bothered to measure the chain in over a year's commuting. In the end I bought a new chain, then discovered that it wouldn't engage because the sprockets were too worn as well, so I had to buy new ones of those too. One day I'll learn, given the way I'm putting the miles on.

The big news was that for the very first time ever, I bought a workstand. Edinburgh Bicycle was having another sale, so as well as picking up some new Endura shorts, the mountain bikey ones I really really like, for half price, I decided that the half price workstand was too good a bargain as well. I don't plan on buying another workstand, ever, and hopefully I won't need to given that this one's made by Park. It has a bright blue vice-shaped clamp that opens wide enough to accommodate the big tube of Speedy, and the even bigger tube of the Stealthmachine. It's equally happy holding Annie or the little Helios at various unfeasible angles. It makes such a difference not having to kneel or crouch on a concrete floor all the time when you're fiddling with brake block alignment or trying to thread a chain through a derailleur!

My trusty Cateye Mity computer, as fitted to Annie, and formerly to the Rockhopper, and to the Trek 850 before that, is still (mostly) working but its bracket and its sensor finally gave up the ghost this month. I was quite sad really because it was only 15 years old, but can you buy a spare bracket nowadays? [3] The computer attached to the Helios is a Cateye Enduro 2 which I really didn't like at first, save for the nicely chunky cable, but I eventually got used to the different way it worked and now I quite agree with the reasoning of grouping just distance, time and average speed together, with the odometer and the clock and things shunted into sub-modes; after all, the first three are the modes you tend to use most. So I hunted around on eBay and eventually found a second hand model for really not very much money. A few minutes' work and it was nice to know my speed and distance again.

[3] Actually, you can: SJSC sells them. But when you can buy a newer second-hand computer plus bracket for less than a replacement bracket by itself, what are you meant to do?