Cranked

Well, today was a day of firsts. I busted a crank. A crank! And I had to call Liza for a ride -- I had a mechanical malfunction that I couldn't fix on the road. That was also a first.

I guess I'll need to start packing an extra crankset and chainring in my tool pouch if I want to be REALLY self-sufficient.

I got this crankset just over a year ago. I put it onto my old Trek a couple weeks ago. They are Sugino XD's. If you're keeping score.

As I walked the bike out of the trails to meet Liza, I tried to figure out how many miles this crankset has on it. It's hard to judge: I ride a bunch of bikes and I never track my miles. I'm not a super mileage person. I ride a lot, but not long miles on a regular basis. The fixed gear has certainly gotten the majority of my time, if not miles in the last year. And much of the riding is very hard. I'm heavy and I'm a grinder and I love racing around on the fixed on the high drive trails and any other single-track that looks interesting. My guess is that these cranks lasted somewhere between 1200 and 2000 miles. Not much.

This calamity befell me as I was mashing up the single track there kind of north of the doomsday hill bridge on the single track that follows the west side of the river -- going towards bowl and pitcher. Anyway, the chain popped off on a grind up a steep little climb. I walked to the top, put the chain back on, then started going down a bit of a hill and back pedaling. Then ca-chank! The crank is done. Sheered. Lame.

I may be ultimately to blame though. I had a bit of chicanery going on with my set up. To get a good chainline, I put spacers in between the crank spider arms and the chainring on the inside of the arms. I think this localized the stress on the spider arms more than they could handle. If the chainring had been seated up against the inside of the spider arms the load would be spread a bit more across the chainrings, bolts, and arms. That's another theory I came up with on that walk out of the trails.

We took a great walk/hike on the highdrive trails this morning. Damn, I love those trails.

Here's Liza: bikes locked up and all ready to roll. Maddie was already halfway down the trail at this point.

And there's Don and Maddie. Post-hike. Maddie ran the entire way while explaining/singing something important (and in great detail) that we didn't quite catch.