It is an open question how much longer my bike will hold up. Here’s the problem in order of descending impact:

NUMBER ONE OVERARCHING PROBLEM: I’ve been carrying way too much stuff. (Hello lotsagear guy!)

2. I’ve been carrying too much stuff, too many miles.
3. I probably shouldn’t have let Kulshan Cycles increase the spoke tension on my rear wheel. (Too tight!)
4. Day before yesterday I hit a piece of iron shaped like a 3:4 ratio railroad spike. (It punched a dime-sized hole in my tire, acted like a door stop to the rear wheel, and knocked the wheel seriously out of true.)

I spent a good hour-and-a-half roadside booting the tire and bringing the wheel back into some semblance of true. But this, really, is the least of the problems. There are small stress-fractures developing in the rim around the spoke holes. This means the rim is on its way to inevitable demise, and that it will be harder and harder to hold the wheel true in the process. Basically, it’s got a deep wobble in it, and the now very tight spokes are fighting a losing battle to hold it true while it crouches full of potential energy, waiting to unleash at the next pothole or railroad spike.

The solution? Really, none. Replace the rim, build a new wheel. Very expensive, special order, wait for the build, time consuming.

In the interim, I’ve unloaded everything “extra” from the bike and will just ride this into the ground. What’s the over/under for it surviving? I’d say one day. I’ve got a half-an-hour of riding on it now. So far so good. If it makes a full day in good shape, I’d expect a lot more wear out of it. If it uncoils in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll have to reassess, but I’m probably done.

Alas.

Alack.

So the highlight was picking up my wheels from Kulshan Cycles the other day when I had them trued and dished.  The employee who fetched them for me recognized them as the unusual items they are and waxed into flattery,  “Wow, forty-eight spoke wheels, you don’t see those much anymore.”  Later, “I can see you guys are looking at these bikes, and if you have any questions, please let me know.  But, you know, obviously, with wheels like that, you know what you are talking about.”

Now, I had ordered the spokes and hubs and rims and nipples and tape and tires which make these wheels.  And I had choosen the pattern and laced them together myself.  So they are, in a way, a reflection of my tastes, my knowledge, and skill.  Part of me glowed in the attention.  At the same time, these are products I have bought.  Products which are good for their purpose, and which I bought because they are good for their purpose.  And so, it brought home to me a sense of my attenuated existence, that this is my highlight, to be praised for the product I have bought.

La Push

My Uncle Danny thinks he and I look similar. This photo confirms it.

Of course, Danny sees in me a young, dashing version of him. A comparison he likes to trot out whenever attractive young women are around, so that he can vicariously not have sex with them through me. But now I see my future in Danny. Here I am at the coast at the Quileute village of La Push, the Pacific Ocean allegedly stretching out behind me. I’ve ridden a hard second day from Port Angeles. My legs are gone. I’ve been soaked by down-pours all day. Yet I am dehydrated from the exertion. My lips are curling back from my teeth, no longer enough moisture there to hold them in place. And I’m standing, off-kilter with a shapeless sack-of-pinto-beans torso, my spindly arms projected somehow backwards and down. All I need is a character adding hat.

This photo was taken by Alan Jacobs of Chico, California. He’s an affable guy who struck up conversation with me as I tried to take some photos of the ocean and as he returned to his 48-foot vessel the “Beverly J” (named after his mother) with a refill of his propane tank. He’d been up in Alaska for a few months touring with some friends, and now he is very cautiously bringing his boat back solo to San Francisco where he plans to moor it.

Alan offered to let me spend the night on his boat and I gladly took him up on it. Avoiding the difficulty of cycling fourteen-plus miles up to Forks and/or avoiding the difficulty of finding a campsite and/or giving me some promise of a dry place to sleep without the expense of a motel room.

Haystack off La Push

This good fortune almost turned into a disaster. I followed Alan down to the docks wheeling my heavily laden bike. I’m wearing bike shoes and trying to navigate down the gangway. I slipped and simultaneously the bike’s rear wheel slipped into a crevice between the boards of the ramp. I’m lucky, really, that I or the bike didn’t go into the drink right there.

But the bike made an awful cracking noise, and I’m trying to wrench it, pull it up and out of the crevice before the whole weight of the thing comes down on the rear derailleur or some other vulnerable part. I manage to pull it out, but not straight away nor straight up, and I fear the torque has done some irreparable damage. I get the bike up onto a level part of the dock and Alan and I give it a quick examination. It’s obvious that the wheel has come at least slightly out of true; but no other major damage. And nothing to do about it then anyway.

Alan and I work to stow the bike and my gear on his boat. I will deal with it in the morning.

Alan sets out early in the morning, about 6am, and I am on the jetty trying to assess my bike damage. At first I think maybe it is just brake drag, none of the spokes are broken and it seems like the wheel should be *more* damaged if it is damaged at all. After playing around with the brakes for a little bit, I get the wheel to spin smoothly without dragging on the brake. I’m momentarily elated. But the brake drag quickly returns. (I attribute my brief success to the cheap springs in my entry-level Tektro brakes.) I end up doing some minor truing to get the wheel rolling freely. Thinking I have the problem solved, I begin riding up the hill out of La Push, but I find my lowest, bailout gear is unavailable to me. The chain is not shifting all the way into this gear. I get off and assess. I figure either the derailleur got dinged in some way or that the strain on the wheel was enough to affect it’s dish (the side to side adjustment of the wheel between the dropouts). I adjust the derailleur’s limit screw a bit and regain the lowest gear.

I continue up the La Push road and to Highway 101 toward Port Angeles. So far so good. No creaking of spokes detensioning, no ping of spokes snapping, no brake rub. I think these wheels will get me to Bellingham, but when I get there, I will take them to a shop for truing and dishing.

I wasn’t 100% confident in the dish of the wheel before the trip. When I built them, they seemed okay on my dishing tool. But the rear wheel was clearly offset a little bit from center in the Xtracycle frame. I thought it unlikely (though possible) that the Xtracycle was out of alignment. So I wondered if my basic dishing tool has a high tolerance for error. (Like, it looks dished, but really could be a couple millimeters off.)

I ended up taking the wheels to Kulshan Cycle in Bellingham. There service was really great. First, they are in the middle of their busy season, and were scheduling repairs to be completed about six days out, but were able to squeeze my wheels in the same day. Second, they were extremely affordable, charging $45 including tax to true and dish both wheels.

The good news, no major problems with the wheels. And the dish came out the same (relative to my brakes) as they had been before. So either I had dished them properly in the first place or they didn’t really do any work on them. But I’m fine either way. They added some tension to the rear wheel. (I intentionally build my wheels on the low-side of the recommended range of tension, as I believe this makes the wheels more resilient. But I am happy with the added it tension, the wheel feels more solid.) And they definitely did smooth out some of the minor truing hiccups which developed over the first 400 miles of use on these wheels.

This gives me more confidence about the equipment going forward. Though I still don’t know what the *crack* was, and hope there isn’t some important injury yet undiscovered by me.