Got home from the family reunion, unloaded the still practicly new bike off the rack on the front of the teardrop, removed the protective handlebar cover - and found a handfull of loose shifter parts dropping out of it.
Well that's not right!
The tailpiece of the 1Up bike rack has this fancy ball & wedge setup for a rattle-free connection into the hitch reciever.
The wedge is tightened with this security-hex fitting. Only thing is, no matter how hard I crank on this thing, it has a habit of loosening up again. Sometimes as quicly as within a hundred miles of driving.
Not disasterous, except that a couple of photos ago you may have noticed that instead of a hole for the locking pin that prevents unauthorized separation of rack and reciever, the rack's tailpiece has a slot instead. This allows for adjusting the in&out position of the rack relative to the vehicle before tightening said ball & wedge.
All pretty nifty. But after a few hundred miles of driving, when ball isn't wedged anymore, the looseness combined with slot allows the rack to slide in or out the full length of that slot.
Out is no big deal, but when it slides in, like in this photo, the shifter bashes itself to bits against the front of the trailer.
Which kinda sucks!
Fortunately I still had the cut-off bit of the reciever tube I added to the teardrop, so I sliced off a 2" section of that,
Slapped some paint on the raw edges so nothing rusts too bad,
and slipped this spacer-sleeve over the rack's tailpiece before stabbing it into the reciever. This didn't fix the loosening ball & wedge issue, but now, because of the spacer, the rack can't work its way back into reviever far enough to bash the bike-bits against the trailer.
But I'm still stuck with an inoperable shifter - which ain't good!
Now I'm not a bike repair guy and was expecting some serious wallet pain to be involved in rectifying the shifter issue, so was somewhat taken aback when I found out a replacement shifter costs less than $20.
It wasn't untill I cut the little nibby-thing that keeps the cable from unraveling off the end of the original shifter and unthreaded it from the tube, that I discovered the new cable was way too short so I had to swap it out and put the old cable in the new shifter.
Fortunately I had made the cut right up tight to the nibby-thing so there was still enough length to get the job done. But note to self, next time make sure to check cable lengths before punching the "add to cart" button!
The cable-adjuster on the rear derailer has a range of about 60 quarter-turns. Since cables never get any shorter during use, I ran the adjuster all the way in then backed off 10 quarter-turns before snugging everything up and clamping the cable down.
To fine-tune everything after all was said and done I probably backed it off another 3 - 5 quarter-turns.
In case I ever have to do this again, rather than crush the fresh nibby-thing that came with the new shifter down on the exposed end of the cable and risk having to cut it off even shorter someday,
I put a bit of shrink-wrap on the end of the cable instead. Something I can remove without shortening the cable again.
I even managed to get all the bits and pieces back on the handlebar in functioning order! - Well, I'm not 100% on the throttle since I have the ebike configured as a class 1 so the throttle is disabled. For now I'm just assuming it still works.
I've put a fair-few miles on the bike since this repair and so far everything is good.
Now - what the hell am I going to break next?
No comments:
Post a Comment