Bikes Trump Blogs

In case you're wondering why I haven't posted anything since Sunday Funnies 140525, it's because I've been two tired. That's a pun, not a typo.

For the past two weeks, my wife, Pat, her brother Bob, and I have been having a great time riding bicycles, first along the Allegheny Gap Bike Trail in Pennsylvania and then on various rail trails in Ohio.

I'll probably get around to posting last week's Sunday Funnies in a day or two; but, for now, I'll share how bikes trump blogs.

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But Nobody Took Any Pictures

Riding the Little Miami Bike Trail last week provided an adventure we hadn't planned on. Our plan was to ride from Morrow to Corwin and back on Friday, stay overnight in the area, and ride from Loveland to Morrow and back on Saturday. That's upstream (and uphill) outbound and downstream (downhill) on the way back. We're not dummies. 

We might have had lunch in Loveland at the end of our ride if we had been able to start after breakfast as planned, but we got a late start. Pat’s bike had a problem. It was either come up with a fix; or, cancel the Saturday ride, pack up the bikes, and head home. As it turned out, I was able to fix Pat’s bike, but it delayed our starting time by about two hours.

The set screw that holds the 3-speed Shimano shifter on the rear hub of Pat’s bike had stripped the threads in the housing, and it fell off of the hub Friday with three miles left in our return to Morrow from Corwin. Luckily, Pat's brother, Bob, discovered that a screw holding a bike bag on one of the other bikes was just big and long enough to hold the unit on the hub until we got back to Morrow, where the shifter fell off again.

Montgomery Cyclery in Loveland sells and services the Electra Townie bike Pat rides, so we went there to see if they could fix the shifter. It’s a fantastic shop with a huge selection of bikes and a large repair area. Unfortunately, they had no replacement 3-speed unit and nothing that would fix the problem. The young man who helped us and I looked all through the shop's box of spare parts for a screw big enough to grab inside the housing but came up empty.

Plan B was for me to either fix the darned thing or split the cast aluminum housing with a larger, self-tapping screw to rethread the hole.

Now, I needed a hardware store.

Luckily, Loveland Hardware is a stone’s throw away from Montgomery Cyclery.

The manager of the store and I looked, but all of their self-tapping screws were either too small, too short, or too large. Then I found a metric, hex-head bolt that was slightly larger than the original and also the right length, but with a more coarse threading. The manager, whose name I neglected to get, let me turn it into a self-tapping screw. She took me into the workroom in the back of the store, where, with a hacksaw and a vise, I cut an angled groove into the end of the threads to create a tapping edge.

One hand-made self-tapping screw, a 91 cent hex wrench, a bit of elbow grease and sweat produced the desired result. The handmade self-tapping bolt threaded the housing and held the unit securely on the hub.

Pat’s bike was fixed, and we set off for Morrow a few minutes after noon.

FYI: Plan C involved buying a roll of duct tape and...