: I broke my bike

By: g | No Comments » |

If you’ve been riding for a while, and especially if you’ve crashed your new bike, you’ll know the feeling. Something nice and shiny (and probably expensive) is no longer that way. If you’re lucky it’s a couple of scratches that give your bike character, but sometimes it’s really broken.

If you’re out on the trail you really ought to be carrying a few spares. At the very least a tube, pump and tyre levers, and the knowledge to use them, even if you’re on the road. As soon as you head off road it becomes a lot harder to bum a lift home, so it’s worth carrying a basic toolkit – a few allen keys, a chain breaker (or a multi tool), a few spare links and maybe a handful of zip ties is all you really need. On longer trips you may want to carry a few extras, like spare jockey wheels, and you’d be surprised how often a small roll of gaffa tape can be useful.

Park tool’s website offers good advice on how to use most tools and perform most repairs the proper way. You can also get really detailed information from Barnett’s manual, and you can get a chapter each month from Specialized.com . Generally following the advice of experts is a good idea, but what if you don’t have the right tool, or the right part?

The most useful trail tool is ingenuity. Broken the clamp off your seatpost? Drop it right down, zip tie the seat on top and wrap a bit of gaff around it, and at least you can get home without having to worry if your bum hits the bike. How about ripping the bead away from the sidewall of the tyre? Well, a whole lot of gaff and releasing the rear brake (or having discs) will hold it together to ride back to the trail head. And if you think those are unbelievable, I’ve seen both happen on list rides, as well as one idiot who broke his derailleur hanger midway through the Xmas ride, so zip tied the derailleur to the chainstay of his duallie so he could singlespeed the rest of the way.

If you don’t have a part in your toolkit, you may be able to scavenge something useable from somewhere else. The bolt from a rear LED clamp has been pressed into service as a jockey wheel bolt before, and sometimes you can use one bolt out of a twin bolt stem in the seatpost. Another interesting point is that a 3mm allen key is just the right size to fit the hole left when the pin holding the derailleur parallelogram falls out. Remember that you have to be very careful after this kind of repair – You’ve probably weakened the bit you’ve nicked the part from – but at least you can ride home.

Dave Hughes

 

Tags:barnett,bikes,Brakes,derailleur,park tool,singlespeed


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