OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe plan this weekend was to get another load of digging completed so that the garden would look more like a carefully tended vegetable garden and less like a patch of wilderness or the set for a low budget horror movie.

Naturally it snowed heavily on Friday night.

The garden is pretty well inaccessible when it snows, and even if I could get there, I wasn’t about to spend half an hour raking snow back to find where to dig, so we rescheduled the day and worked on the Bakfiets instead.

The Bakfiets is a low maintenance machine but when something goes wrong it is a pain to get at the bit that needs work, in this case the back tyre, which has been flat as a pancake for weeks.

We do have a stand at the bike shop, but this is built for regular mountain bikes, not thirty kilos of wood and steel, so this is the best was I’ve found to get the wheels off the ground. The side of the box is resting on a cardboard cushion.

Fortunately the hub is fairly well designed. There are a lot of fiddly bits to disconnect but most can be unclipped which saves me rebuilding all the brake and gear connections.

Most of the repair went quite well: We found a large hole in the inner tube, but nothing in the tyre that could have made it. I replaced the whole inner tube with one that has a sensible presta valve rather than the silly Dunlop valve that came with the bike. The main problem was that the chain decided to fall off the front cog, so when it came to putting things back together I first had to take the chain guard to bits and retrieve it.

Oh, and the discovery that the axle bearings have worked lose. Of course, I noticed this after putting everything back together, which means I’ll now have to do it all again in a couple of weeks.