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Thursday, June 12, 2008
Another "cycling makes mainstream" that I missed on my birthday - May 16 in Wired... "five ways to make bike commuting easy" - very ungeeky in a geeky-wired kind of way :)
My puir bike was screaming at me last night ... but then on the veyr last leg home it stopped. It started Tuesday night with a noticeable squeak prob'ly from the front. Then Wednesday it got a bit louder... I was going to take it down to Champaign Cycle (to penguin-on-the-porch fans... yea, that's the one) but had office lunch and didn't remember 'til I got back on and the music started. Heading SOuth on DUncan I stopped several times to diagnose with no luck - it's much more prominent when weight-bearing. It was well into the "incredibly annoying repetitive noise" category, except it was a compatible rhythm to the day's cognitive cacophony so I just sang along in my head. The tones were close to thirds and fourths from each other (two of one and one of the other for each wheel revolution).
By the time I got to Savoy it had graduated into 'painfully loud,' though... which I was still screening out but figured it was the stuff of headaches.
Heading home... it took a while for the sound to rebuild... then it changed on that last leg. There's still something causing friction, but it's as if something in the hub fell off that was sticking into something. I paid close attention to what the ride felt like under me, and remembered reading howmany times this week that steel is real and if it fails, it doesn't do so suddenly... this frame *does* have a few miles on it.
My puir bike was screaming at me last night ... but then on the veyr last leg home it stopped. It started Tuesday night with a noticeable squeak prob'ly from the front. Then Wednesday it got a bit louder... I was going to take it down to Champaign Cycle (to penguin-on-the-porch fans... yea, that's the one) but had office lunch and didn't remember 'til I got back on and the music started. Heading SOuth on DUncan I stopped several times to diagnose with no luck - it's much more prominent when weight-bearing. It was well into the "incredibly annoying repetitive noise" category, except it was a compatible rhythm to the day's cognitive cacophony so I just sang along in my head. The tones were close to thirds and fourths from each other (two of one and one of the other for each wheel revolution).
By the time I got to Savoy it had graduated into 'painfully loud,' though... which I was still screening out but figured it was the stuff of headaches.
Heading home... it took a while for the sound to rebuild... then it changed on that last leg. There's still something causing friction, but it's as if something in the hub fell off that was sticking into something. I paid close attention to what the ride felt like under me, and remembered reading howmany times this week that steel is real and if it fails, it doesn't do so suddenly... this frame *does* have a few miles on it.
