The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:46am on Monday, 9th September, 2024:
Anecdote
My new puncture repair kit arrived in time yesterday for me to have a go at repairing my bike's puncture.
I'm not very good at puncture repairs. I don't know why, I follow the instructions, but there always seems to be some route for the air to escape from under the patch. It normally takes me two or three attempts to strike lucky, but yesterday it was still leaking on attempt 4. Attempt 5 is now sitting in a vice, more to punish the inner tube than in the belief that pressure will stick the patch down. It's only a pinprick, I couldn't even find where it had come in on the tyre.
I did manage to fix the bike, though, by using a spare inner tube I had from the last time I failed to fix a puncture. The price of a new inner tube is only about double that of a puncture repair kit, so this is clearly the way to do it next time.
Getting the inner tube into the tyre without damaging either posed its usual problems, but after 15 minutes I managed it. I would have done it a little faster if it hadn't started to rain and made me move everything under cover in the garage. Putting the wheel on the bike was a job because I had to take off one of the brake pads, which had four different curved washers on it and no indication as to which one went where; I had to use the other brake pad as a model.
The gear system on the bike is some kind of derailleur system. The bike I had in my teens and the one I got at university used an internal gear system, so I never learned how to align derailleur gears with the grip shift settings. I had a guess, but I think I'll have to look that up — if only to find out where the piece of plastic goes that fell off when I removed the wheel.
Anyway, once all this was completed and the rain had stopped, I took the bike out for a spin. The gears clicked and when I put the brakes on they didn't go off again upon releasing the brake handle, but I can probably sort all that out.
I won't be doing it for a while though. It turns out that the foam padding inside my cycle helmet lines up exactly with where I cut my head last week and it's unpleasantly painful to wear.
I don't know what I did to offend the universe, but it's definitely not happy with me.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).