Recent events have given me an amusing tale of spills and thrills with my bicycle.
On Monday, September 12, I was riding home from class down a sidewalk when I came upon an entrance to a parking lot. There was a car exiting the lot, so I had to steer around behind it, an action which, given my speed of about 30 miles per hour, made it impossible for me to see the truck turning into the lot until I was about a yard away from it. I slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. My handlebar ends made a dent in the truck’s side panel twice the size of my head. The owner of the truck was able to pop most of this dent out with a plunger, and our settlement resulted in my paying him $75 to go toward paintless dent repair for the three fist-sized dents that remained. I sustained minor scrapes and bruises to my right elbow.
My bicycle was totaled. The diagonal support bar was bent so far down that the pedals were interfering with the front wheel. The top crossbar was shorn open around two thirds of its circumference in response. On Wednesday, I bought a $25 propane blowtorch and some solder, as this was much cheaper than replacing the bike. That night, I bent the diagonal bar back into an operable position and did a very poor job of soldering the tear in the top bar. After these repairs, the bike worked just fine, with the exception that I began to notice a drastic decrease in brake functionality, since the reduced structural integrity of the frame could no longer stand up to such high degrees of torsion.
So that Friday, I was riding home on my soldered-together bicycle on the same sidewalk as before, and still quite fast, when I came to the same parking lot entrance as before. I saw a university vehicle beginning to turn into the lot. At my current distance and speed, I knew that I was probably going to hit it. The phrase “not again” floated through my mind, so my instinct for self-preservation made my hands clench around the brake levers. Tightly.
At this time, three things happened all at once. First, the drive chain derailed. Second, I realized that there had been some shearing in the diagonal bar that I had not seen and repaired as I heard the sound of that bar snapping. Third, my body was thrown forward over the handlebars as the bike flew backwards from under me. “You fucking dumbass, you should have just bailed out,” said my rationality to my instinct in the split instant in which my body was twisting in midair to minimize impact injury. I hit the ground on my left side, catching most of the fall with my elbow and lower leg. Standing up with this new set of minor scrapes and bruises, I saw my bicycle in the sort of position that would make one wince to see human limbs in.
"Fuck!" I said.
Post crash inspection indicated that although injury to the dummy was negligible, the vehicular repair would place an amateur in over his head.
So I took my machine up to the folks at Aggieland Cycling to seek their sage advice. Much to my lack of surprise, they told me that the damage was irreparable, that I was lucky not to have impaled myself on it, and that my best bet was to get either a new frame or a new bike. They recommended University Pawn as a source for a potential salvage frame.
I went to the pawn shop and bought a piece of shit with its shifter wires completely fucked for $50. I took it back to the bike shop only to find that the rear derailleur (yes, that is the correct spelling) attachment systems were incompatible for a frame transplant. So I stood there with the two derelicts for a while and finally said, "You know what, I'm gonna sleep on this."
In the parking lot, the guy who was helping me bring the bikes out to my truck said to me, "How 'bout I give you another frame for freebie? You know, so you've got plenty to think about?"
"For free?" I queried.
"Free." he said.
"You're joking, right?"
Then he walked me over to a junkheap hidden behind a hedge on the side of the building. Basically, it was a pile of fucked-over used bikes (or the largest pieces thereof) that they had accumulated by means unknown and were going to throw away or strip for parts or some such shit. He pointed out the broken-down frame of a red Peugeot and indicated that I should take it.
This series of events drove home the realization that the folks at Aggieland Cycling are brigands.
Upon my arrival home, I did some careful inspection. The bike from the pawn shop was a busted piece-of-shit Magna Great Divide that would sell new at Wal-Mart for about $100, and its frame was incompatible to boot. It would certainly be a trade down from what my old Diamondback Ascent had been.
The Peugeot was a different story entirely. It was one broken-down son of a bitch, but it was a damn good frame. The mechanisms all seemed to be completely compatible for transplant. Like my fallen steed, this had once been a great horse, and it would probably have cost $700-$1000 when it was new. This would be the new frame.
Feeling somewhat like Orpheus and somewhat like Frankenstein, I spent the rest of that Friday night stripping the frames, transplanting brake and transmission components, and allowing the cold I was coming down with to go to fully incubated virulence. (God damn water fountain kissers.)
The next day, I took the Magna back to University Pawn and sold it back to them for $25. After shutting myself into the cab of my truck, I muttered "Cheap-ass, chrome-dome, child-molesting saprophyte mother-fuckers." It would be quite some time before I could get anything more done with my operation.
By Thursday, September 22, I had succeeded in giving the Peugeot (which I had by now christened Eurydice) the Ascent's drink holder, wheels, brake pads, rear derailleur, handlebars, and brake and shifter levers and wires. I had wired the front brakes and couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to wire the rear ones. I had also succeeded in totally screwing up the front shifter mechanism. Feeling that I was in over my head again and knowing that I would need a new seatpost, I took this unholy crimson clusterfuck into Cycles, Etc, whom I know already not to brigands, but they don't take checks. (I don't like to use my debit card. Most of the time I keep it in my safe deposit box.) Anyway, by the end of this round of bike shop dickering, I had dropped $90 on a new set of shifter and brake levers and wires, a seatpost, a rear brake line stop (that was why I couldn't wire the rear brakes,) and a special order of a seatpost attachment collar that would also hold this brake line stop in place. So I took these parts home, put the seat on the post, wired the front brakes, and discovered what a bitch derailleurs are to wire and calibrate. The rear brakes would have to wait.
Finally, yesterday the seatpost collar came in. I went and got it, took it home, wired the rear brakes, and gave it a test drive. This yielded two observations: the brakes weren't tight enough, and the frontal chainrings were so badly bent out of shape that they would not hold the chain. I finally came to the conclusion that I would need to transplant the Ascent's chainrings and cranks onto Eurydice, but, since I lacked the necessary tools, I would need to go to a bike shop again. Having locked up my debit card again, and not wanting to go back to those brigands at Aggieland Cycling, I took Eurydice and the largest remaining piece of the Ascent over to BCS Bicycles. Thirty dollars later, the chainrings and cranks were replaced, the brakes were tightened, and some necessary adjustments were made to the front derailleur.
All told, I ended up spending $170 on a bike that would probably cost upwards of $700 and $75 as consequences of hitting some guy's truck. I'm just glad it's all over with at last and I don't have to fucking walk everywhere.
