I have managed to completely incapacitate my bike by breaking a single bolt, and I broke it two miles from home as well! Although as I was planning a 25 mile ride it could have been worse. Comedy thing is I was looking on websites at bike parts not to long ago thinking to myself that some companies were seriously over engineering this part by making it with two bolts and extra re-enforcements, now I understand why, two bolts are better than one as it provides built in redundancy against total failure, and looking at modern bikes it seems that wherever possible manufacturers have been slipping in two bolts where previously one would do.

    So anyway I was doing the seat post clamp up good and tight after changing the height of the seat, and I sheared the bolt off. In retrospect its probable I was doing it up too tight. Although having looked at some replacements I notice the design has changed a bit in favour of "anti-banana" which I assume is marketing speak for stopping the bolt bend by screwing it into a moving pivot rather than a fixed part of the clamp. I may possibly have been victim of banana, but I was certainly the victim of no built in redundancy on a component that isn't really bodge-able at the side of the road. The only saving grace is that I have a seat post mounting luggage rack, so that prevented the seat dropping all the way down, so I was able to peddle normally, just with a saddle that would spin round wildly before whacking me with the wrong end of the rack. I guess that counts as an emergency fix… but its hardly ideal.

    Of course getting a replacement part is where the fun starts… this sort of thing under "normal" use doesn't break, therefore the replacements are largely luxury bling accessories for people with money to burn. My local bike shop doesn't really go for bling, so my choices were limited to a direct replacement so no anti-banana for me. The broken part was stamped "34" which the shop interpreted as 34.9mm diameter. Turns out that was completely the wrong size… and had I thought about it and done some measuring I would have realised I actually wanted the other standard size of 30.8mm. So due to dodgy labelling, and a lack of Sunday opening hours I still have a broken bike. Now tempted to order a blinged out replacement on the internet… as well as an emergency swap replacement at the bike shop… but that would probably be reckless wasting of money on marketing bling.

    What this does mean is that on Monday morning I will be riding my old bike to work, havn't used it for about nine months, but carefully oiled it before putting it away, so its good to go with a quick inflate of the tyres. I do think its quite timely that I am now riding my old bike… I have been grumbling recently about how my new bike is a bit fussy, the front derailleur refuses the granny gear if it gets covered in mud, and I had to change the brake cables just because they got a bit dirty and seized up, problems I never had on my old bike. Now of course I am reminded that I never went to such muddy places on my old bike and the technology is practically communist in simplicity and hence never likely to go wonky, mainly due to much lower tolerances. What lower tolerances actually translates to is less gears, less powerful brakes and a bike suited more for trails than mountains. But then its not a bike with banana issues so the communists had a lot going for them.

    Monday therefore is going to be a timely reminder not to grumble too much, and also to realise the new bike actually requires less maintenance, but the maintenance it does require happens to differ from the old bike. A quick ride round my driveway highlighted that disk brakes are far superior to cantilever ones. On my old bike stopping fast was a question of being able to squeeze hard enough.. on the new bike it's a question of how far to pull the lever before ending up on just one wheel. The only real quandary is that my new bike is lightweight, but requires a very heavy gold standard U-Lock… my old bike is heavy but requires a cheapo Halfords U-Lock that in comparison weighs nothing. Which makes me wonder which bike is actually lighter? Commuting wise this is also going to prove that my new bike is overkill for just tootling to work… unless I end up in a heap at the bottom of the hill, thereby proving better brakes were a valid reason for a new bike, not to mention the greater controllability of different frame geometry. Anyway enough rambling for now… the proof will be tomorrow as to if £500 really was the money well spent on a new bike that I thought it would be.