On Rides

Yesterday I was riding to work when there was a sudden slippery feeling on the pedals, thereafter pedaling backward became considerably harder - not that I pedal backward all that often. When I got to work I removed the chain (gotta love KMC master links) and found the same resistance. Relieved, the issue had to be the bottom bracket (an easy and not horribly expensive part to replace I carried on with my day).

The ride home included a frightful cracking noise from the area of the bottom bracket. When I finally got home, after feeding my boys (the cats) I set to work on Jordan (my ride) and took apart her drive train. Removing the crank took an awful lot of force, and when it finally came free it took part of the bottom bracket along with. (Further backing my theory of a busted bottom bracket.)

Then I walked around to the drive side and removed the other half of the crankset. Behind the crankset on the Specialized Roubaix frame, just behind the bottom bracket on the chain stay is a metal plate that I guess is there to protect the frame from a dropped chain or a really flexible right crank? Anyway for whatever reason that plate has literally folded up and was rubbing against the crank.

In fact the issue with Jordan was not her bottom bracket, the issue is that folded metal plate. The good news is, the plate is epoxied to the frame and the carbon is undamaged, so it should be a simple matter of removing the folded plate and replacing with a good epoxy (Specialized, if you are reading this, use better epoxy for the sake of my mental health please) and new metal plate. The bad news, doing this change will require a skilled machinist, who thank goodness I know, except he is very busy and probably will not be able to fix my poor ride for at least a little while.

I've been having a lot of mechanicals lately, but then it occurs to me, I have been doing an awful lot of riding - more than driving even and when one considers I just blew $650 on auto repair, well I have yet another reason to like my bike.