As easy as riding a bike – but not maintaining one!
OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Riding in Caithness winters and travelling for miles with worn parts, the humble bicycle has become a more complex machine
There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bike, said Jerome K Jerome over a century ago. You can ride it or you can maintain it.
He pointed out that cyclists divide into two kinds of people, the riders and the maintainers. He tells of how he had planned a long ride with a friend, who arrived and noticed a slight wobble in the front wheel.
Before he could stop him, the wheel was off and ball bearings were running everywhere. The maintenance carried on and by the end of the day they had ridden nowhere and the bike was in worse shape than it had started.
I do indeed know a man who rides his bikes and spends just as long looking after them, and they are pristine, but he is really a maintainer at heart.
Living out in the country, it is not easy to get a bike into a repair shop, I can’t just wheel the bike in and walk home as Jerome did whenever his bike went wrong. So I have to bite the bullet and learn to maintain the thing myself…
In the old days when a few of us cycled to work, through all the ice and salt and slush of a Caithness winter, maintenance was simpler. You changed the chain only when it kept coming off, or after it had broken a couple of times.
The back gears were replaced if the freewheel mechanism broke or when the bearings were so loose that the chain would not stay on. So what if the chain jumped or wouldn’t get a gear or two?
Once I rode all the way to Land’s End with gears like that. When the bottom bracket started making grinding and graunching noises, you could keep going for another couple of hundred miles before the thing became so loose and noisy as to be unendurable.
Likewise pedals, a daily squirt of oil usually kept the loosest pedals going without too much noise. If a spoke broke, you loosened or tightened one or two others to make the wheel reasonably true again – only when a few spokes had failed did you think of replacing them.
Brakes? When the blocks wore down to the metal and scraped the rims you eventually changed them. You’d never replace the wheel unless the rim cracked. Take apart and grease the bearings? I have never, ever, done that in all my life!
Cleaning the bike? Maybe once a year. A bit of white showing on the tyre meant keeping an eye on it for the next few hundred miles, only when it was white to the canvas all the way round would you think of changing it.
You’d never dream of replacing cables till they broke or jammed solid. When the derailleur jockey wheels had worn down to just a thin rim you got new ones, only if the spring broke would you replace the whole mechanism.
The upshot was, I rode at least eight thousand miles each year for just a few hours spent on maintenance. But bikes seem to have changed. Now they are more like cars. Hydraulic disc brakes! I didn’t even realise I had them till I tried tightening the “cables” and oil came out.
You need a specialist kit to bleed and refill, and the pads make awful squeals if they get dirty. I had to watch a YouTube video to find out how to change them. No buying a set of brake blocks from Tesco – there are dozens of different pads, you need just the right set for your bike.
The chain? You’re supposed to check regularly with a special tool and replace it at the first signs of wear. Now you can have gears with up to 13 speeds which need an extra-narrow chain. And a new chain tool. And the ‘quick link’ for joining and splitting also needs a special tool.
I rode my new e-bike for several thousand miles before discovering I didn’t know how to take the wheels off. So much for the puncture repair kit I’d carried! You need a hex key, not a spanner.
Fortunately I was at home when the tyre went flat. I couldn’t get the tyre off the rim, my tyre levers just bent, in the end (horror of horrors!) I reverted to a screwdriver. Now I have a new set of strong tyre levers.
Then I had to hacksaw off the little nut which had seized onto the valve, destroying the old inner tube in the process. It took a whole afternoon to mend the puncture.
I will reluctantly maintain the bike when I have no other choice. But the machine is there to be ridden!
