The bakfiets in for repair again. Notice new repair method with bike vertical instead of on its side. This saved twenty minutes of digging the chain out from behind the front cog.
Having repaired the puncture on the rear wheel a couple of weeks back, and -surprisingly- got the wheel back on the Bakfiets again, I discovered the bearings were loose. In theory this meant taking the wheel off again last weekend and carrying same to my local bike shop where they could do some technical jiggerypokery with their astonishingly expensive cone spanners until the bike worked again.
This should have been the end of the matter, but when I rebuilt the wheel this time I forgot to tighten an essential but normally inaccessible bolt, so after another trip to the bike shop to find why bits of the brake assembly were rattling against the wheel, I had to repeat the operation to sort this out.
My incapability with complicated mechanical things is another reason I hopefully won’t ever own a car.
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March 3, 2013 at 2:41 pm
teigl
Looks very daunting. I, too, have a complete ineptitude with mechanical things, probably on a much more basic level and this would be well beyond me. The strange thing is that I always seem to know when something is going to go wrong with the vehicle I’m driving and usually have a good idea what it is….just don’t ask me to repair it!!
March 3, 2013 at 5:29 pm
Phil
I’ve actually found bikes harder to repair than cars. The cones are a pig to set up and since I’ve never been any good at fine adjustment, they always defeated me.