Sharpfoot

Recently I blew out another bunch of tubes - about three in nine days. The culprit, after CSI like investigation of tube and tyre was that there was a section of exposed bead that had manifested a sharp edge.  Basically my Vittoria Randoneur has turned into a Vittoria Rando-piquer*.

As a replacement, I’ve gone to a larger Schwalbe Marathon (28c up to 35c), which is a tough tyre, and I’m told the larger carcass will be easier to wrestle onto the rim.  Here’s hoping I won’t find out either way for some time.

I’ve also started carrying a few extra bits and pieces in my cycling kit - a first aid kit and a shock blanket.  I’ve shown up at a few accidents lately (one of them quite serious), and tyre puncture kits don’t work on leaking cyclists.  Again, here’s hoping I won’t find out if my new kit does for some time.  To cyclists reading this: the second accident victim I saw was listening to his headphones and not wearing a helmet when he got up close and personal with a compact car.  Regardless of who was right and who was wrong in this situation, don’t let this be you.  Scalp avulsions don’t respond to arguments about the road code.

Finally, you may have noticed that there hasn’t been a lot about running here lately - the truth is, this is because I haven’t been doing much running… I find the cycling moves it into the background and provides the minimum physical exertion required to keep myself from turning into a thin-haired Robert Smith.  Nonetheless, a combination of factors including two friends asking how my running was going, reading Ben Folds casually mentioning that he used to run eight miles a day when he lived in Nashville and various ick about my body image finally drove me out the door tonight.  It was immediately apparent that:

• I’ve lost some (alright, a lot) of running conditioning, but gained a lot of cardiovascular conditioning.
• Midnight Oil is alright hill running music, and allows for a Peter Garret brolga-dance when you get to the local summit.
• While running muscles are not the same as cycling muscles, if you have aches and pains, they will be “competing in the double” so to speak.
• The good burghers of Barrow Street are still smoking a lot of dope.

It was nice being out running again, even though it hurt and made me want to throw up my meager dinner into some unsuspecting person’s mailbox.  It’s not that the pain feels good, but that not giving up does.  I’ll have to try and remember that next time.

* I have seriously polluted my search history trying to remember this term.

A handful of observations:

• I still can’t get those last four inches of bead on with just my fingers and the heel of my hand, jesus christ. I swear someone has set this wheel to “expert mode” or something.
• When Doug said that putting the last bit of bead on the wheel was “all technique”, he was lying through his teeth.
• I can now remove and replace the back wheel almost without thinking! I even remembered to put a dishwashing glove on so as not to get covered with chain grease.

It took me forever to get this wheel back together.  I’d replace the tube, reseat the tyre, pump it up to 20 PSI or so and spin it to check for bulges or whatever. The sidewalls would be fine, but there’d be a distortion on the road contact surface near the valve. Pull inner tube out. Replace the tube, reseat the tyre, etc, distortion on road surface, etc etc.

The problem is that the bead was sitting towards the center of the rim instead of out at the edge where it belonged. I eventually just cranked it up to 60 PSI, and hey presto, the expanded tube popped the bead out to the edge.  If only I’d thought of doing that first.

The tire is now running one of my patched tubes. Need to pick up more - a bunch more.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Gran Prix Cycles introductory maintenance workshop, which I found on the Bicycle Victoria webpage. While the workshop is generally a hands-off class, as we had a few drop-outs, and I managed to flatten a tire at Albert Park and needed to change it anyway (a slowly tearing tire gives an interesting curve of how much pedal time you get off each frustrated re-inflation), we made it a hands on class.  It was excellent!

Unfortunately, my back tire is once again, flat. (Puncture site has a bulging sidewall - prospective diagnosis is a pinched tube).

The only other major cycling news is that there was a protest at Carlton Gardens yesterday about the ban of cyclists without children from the park paths. I had intended to go along, but I just had too much going on. Some interesting discussion of both sides on the Moreland BUG mailing list though.

… having it’s rear wheel rebuilt after I broke some more spokes. CURSED. CURSED I SAY.

just broke a few spokes in quick succession, mechanic said it was having trouble coping with the riding stresses I put on it
which sounds like secret mechanic code for “you fat”

What I would like to talk about, briefly, is spiders. They are constantly “all up in my areas”, “jacking up my shit”. I went through a web on Poplar Road the other night and hit the spider with my faaaaace. It felt large enough that there was a real question as to who would be riding the bike away and who would be left sprawled on the tarmac… and being next to the zoo, it was obviously some kind of escaped giraffe eating tarantula.

Otherwise, I’m just picking them up (as well as low hanging tree limbs) with my face while out jogging. The webs get tangled in your facial hair. It is horrible. Horrible.

Death to spiders, now and forever.

Something I didn’t mention about the last puncture was that it was through the gap in my tyre* that had been torn by a piece of glass back in December last year:

At the time, the consensus was that it was cool to continue riding that tyre because the odds of a piece of glass hitting at the breached point were slender - on reflection, this is pure poppycock.

d = 700mm, circumference = d * pi =~ 2199mm - i.e. any debris field more than 2.1m long was going to cause problems. As the streets of Melbourne are carpeted with shattered tail-light glass because nobody here knows how to drive, this happens constantly.

After patching the tube Thursday night, I had resolved to replace the tyre - I had already upgraded the back tyre to a Vittoria Randonneur (this is the stock tyre on my bike’s more handsome cousin, the Cross City 1) and, knock wood, it had held so far. My hand was somewhat forced on this issue when I punctured through the same hole about 1km out from my house today on my way to a picnic.

Fortunately, I was within carry distance of MTB/Downhill shop My Mountain, who were happy to sell me a Schwalbe Delta Cruiser. They also offered to fit it, but there was going to be a delay while they finished working on a few other bikes. Being in a perceived hurry, I elected to do it myself, which, because I have no skills, took longer than it would have to just sit on their sofas and let them do it, but was at least educational. After eyeballing my handiwork to make sure I hadn’t attempted to mount the wheel onto the handlebars or something, they sent me on my way.

Anyway, about a kilometer down the road, outside the scenic East Brunswick Club, I noticed a sudden kicking of the tire against the front brake, and pulled over just in time to watch the tube detonate like a firework - complete with a little white puff of talc. Naturally, I had pinched the tube between the rim and the tyre.

So, back to My Mountain I went. The mechanic, taking pity on my low condition, kindly bumped me upline and fixed it on the spot. He also tried to explain to me, in very simple words, how to avoid doing this again (kind of important as I only carry one spare tube). After that, everything was fine.

While I was in the store, I saw the most amazing downhill bike - this bright orange monster truck looking thing with tyres thickness about the size of my head. Maybe I should ride that.

Coda: On my way home from dinner, I decided to put a little more climb into my commute by pushing down Poplar Road to Royal Park station and joining the Capital City Trail there instead of on Old Poplar Road. This is a nothing diversion - about 800m out of my way. Nonetheless, I managed to snap a rear spoke during the climb out. A winner is me. (I had actually noticed this spoke was in bad shape the other day, but then forgotten about it during Thursday Night Flat Madness).

* I am going to keep randomly switching the spelling of this between “tyre” and “tire”, even though “tyre” makes me think of Tyre in Phoenicia.

So, I decided that if I wanted to learn how to maintain and repair my bike, I should at least be changing my own tires. With this in mind, I went down to Commuter early this morning to pick up some levers and a few other bits and pieces. Commuter is a really good bike store, and if you live in Brunswick you should, in my opinion, give them your patronage.

I got home, fitted a new tube and patched two other holed tubes I had around the house - it turns out yesterday’s flat was due not to a puncture, but bursting a seam while attempting to bomb a curb that… well. I shouldn’t be trying to do this sort of thing on a road bike.

Off to uni on the new tube, the bike seemed really sluggish - I think I’d overtightened the dropout (in retrospect, this doesn’t seem plausible unless I had overtightened it to the kind of levels where Grendel would have a hard time wrenching it off), but (like an idiot), I stood the bike on its hind wheel and quickly adjusted the quick release.

Now the front wheel was rubbing the brake for the rest of my trip into the office. Christ.

The real craziness starts on my commute home. While coming up past Jewel station, I saw another commuter looking type (“S”) pushing her bike. What would Lance do?? I pulled over and asked if they’d like a hand fixing their flat. Soon after we were joined by a wily old rider of venerable flat repairing experience who gave me a number of useful tips (insert foreshadowing here). After pulling out a two inch piece of wire (that I suggested she mount over her fireplace) we finally got S patched and on her way.

One block later, we came across another broken down cyclist (S: “Your next customer!”) - a fixie rider who had slipped their back axle, causing the tire to jam against the frame. This was beyond my skills and tools to fiddle with (no quick release), as well as the other riders who stopped to see what was going on.

One block after that, I blew my front tire.

This one sacrificed to the broken cement on the border between the rear laneway and my apartment block. Great!!