That’s A-1 sauce. Not the bottled stuff people use to ruin a good steak (or save a bad one), but it’s a hill steep enough that you know they laid the asphalt on a cool day, otherwise it would have sagged and lumped up before it hardened. So to make the climb I had to shift down into the A chain-ring (smallest front gear) and the 1-gear on the cassette (the largest low gear on the rear).
When I got home with the crippled mountain bike Saturday, I waited awhile to start looking at the damage. It was worse than I thought. For example, the front derailleur cable was down to one thread. That was the most minor issue. Had God not been merciful, it would have quit rolling altogether. Okay, so it’s not too bad for eight years bearing never less than 200 pounds (91kg) of a hard-riding fool. At one point I had upgraded the shifters and derailleurs to Shimano Alivio and I wondered if I should try to salvage them. Most cheaper bikes come with Shimano Tourney or similar cheap crap.
Here’s the thing: On the derailleurs themselves, the issue is reducing the slop. The parts need to be properly aligned and move freely without changing alignment. With the shifter lever sets, it’s all about precisely matching the ratchet locks with the distance between the gears so that the derailleur hits it right on the money. Alivio is the very best of the low end stuff, two grades above Tourney and doesn’t require taking out a home mortgage to buy it. It turned out the shifters were just one model number different, and my research indicated it wasn’t worth the trouble — and it’s a lot of trouble because I would have to take it apart and change out the cables. But that rear derailleur was just too good to ignore.
And then I really needed to change the positioning of my body on the frame. I salvaged the low-rise handlebar with the bar ends and replaced the grips. Then I studied the saddle and found out how to slide it all the way forward on the rails and reduced the reach to the handlebars, which is what caused me so much misery when I first got this thing. I also tipped the saddle down a bit in front, then compensated for the changed leg position by raising the stem just a tad. (You get an idea of how the camera distorts things by how the front wheel appears smaller, but it’s exactly the same as the rear.)
That took about half of Sunday to get all of that done. Adjusting the rear derailleur is preliminary at best. A shift cable that long tends to need settling in before it act consistently. The only thing you can do at first is visually align the bogey wheels below the intended gear on the shifter. Today I took a 13-miler to shake things out and get that thing fine-tuned. I knew that hill out on Indian Meridian was the closest of the most brutal climbs. There were more good hills on the way, because I took Henney down to SE 44th, across to Triple X and down to SE 74th before heading back.
The Edgewood is geared just a bit higher than the old Schwinn mountain bike. The Edgewood requires the A-2 combination in places where the Schwinn called for A-3. However, the Edgewood’s original rear derailleur was cranky about those lower gears. Now it shifts very cleanly and I have no trouble dropping quickly down to the A-1 for that harsh hill down on Indian Meridian. What’s left of the mountain bike, along with random collected parts from the past two decades, will go to a bike ministry that recycles them to give to homeless people. While I’m glad I know how to do all this stuff, you tend to forget when you don’t do it often and I’m getting tired of tinkering. I’ll do it only when necessary.
FYI, you can see where the road dead-ends at I-40. Just a few hundred meters to the right in this picture is a steep-sided valley bearing a tributary to Hog Creek. That tributary had an ancient earthen dam just about straight westward from where I am standing when I took this shot. That dam broke a few months ago and it held enough water to flood downstream quite a ways for over an hour. It made the local news stations, with video crews and all.
