This is what a bike with a hangover looks like.
I committed a cardinal sin after the MoMBA XC Classic. I went home, changed clothes, drank some coffee… And didn’t clean my bike. At all. Not even the chain. I know, I know, I’m a bad cyclist. But I just couldn’t persuade myself to go back out in the cold and hose the thing off, and then clean/oil/grease everything.
So today was the day of reckoning. I rolled the bike out and put it on the stand, and gave it a thorough scrubbing, before assessing the damage. The chain wasn’t much worse for wear, surprisingly, with just a few spots of surface rust that’ll clean up with use. The rear brake, on the other hand… It’s totally gone. The reason it sounded like a freight train for the last half a lap was because the pad material was completely gone, and I was using metal on metal to try and stop the bike. The caliper was frozen up as well.
Beyond a simple wash, what this bike needs is to be torn down to the bearings and inspected, then rebuilt. Seeing as I don’t have time for any of those things, I cleaned it up and took it to my mechanic, Chris, for him to sort through. I should have it back in a couple weeks, good as new!
I think my chain might need cleaned.
[…] of the unfortunate discoveries I made while cleaning off my mountain bike the other day was that my pedals had become… crunchy. They still worked, but the bearings had […]
[…] you recall what my bike looked like after the rain-soaked MoMBA XC Classic, you know that this is something of a miracle. I hosed it […]