The eponymous Red Green would often offer a very sage piece of advice:
When I have said this to My Lovely Wife she has typically looked thoughtful for a moment and said “well, I find you handsome...”.
Funny how timing and delivery can take a comment that could be flattering and make it, well, not.
With my trikes, at least, I’ve been trying to rectify this. Our rural setting has many benefits, but proximity to bike shops is not one of them, so the more I can do myself, the better off I am.
Back over Independence Day weekend I’d undertaken a maintenance day in order to address a couple of different issues. The first was an ongoing issue with toe-in that I thought I had fixed before. The second was a derailleur adjustment.
Sorting out whether or not I’d been successful with the alignment was not something I could determine right away. It was clear from the tire wear that it was off, but it wasn’t far enough off that it was causing any other perceptible issues - for example, it didn’t seem to be slowing me down.
Now, two months and 720 miles later the tire looks like this:
You can be forgiven if you are looking at that picture and thinking “that’s not in great shape”. Because it’s not.
But the thing is, this is pretty much what it looked like two months ago. I did order another pair of tires just in case - I really wasn’t confident, particularly given that I’d “fixed” it once already. Fortunately, I haven’t needed them yet, and I’m now beyond the mileage I got out of the first set, with some life still left in them. I’m marking this one down as a win.
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I adjusted the derailleur with some help from this video by Utah Trikes. This one was a work in progress. The process turned out to be pretty simple - much simpler, in fact, than I’d anticipated. (I’ve always thought of derailleur adjustment as sort of a black art). But while it was better on my first try, it wasn’t perfect yet, and it took a couple of additional adjustments before I got it right. But once I got there it was spot on - each click of the shifter up or down snapping into the next gear.
This actually made me feel a little like a hero, and reminded me what a joy it is to interact with a properly operating machine. At its best, pedaling and shifting, reading the road, anticipating the need, and selecting the right gear becomes a wonderful relationship where rider and machine become like one.
It also really brought home how much it had been bothering me. I love riding, but every time the gears jumped would pull me out of that moment of integration; each time was a tiny bit of irritation. Multiply that across a 20-mile ride, for example, with many, many shifts, and it adds up.
In no way do I think that I’m even close to not needing a bike shop ever again. But learning more about how to do these things means that I can spend more time on the trike with it operating properly - that’s a bonus.