Even though I felt subpar, I pedaled 25 miles on pavement and gravel, gaining 2,700 feet in elevation. Not a bad day for touring but around mile 18, I hit malfunction junction. My gears jumped and slipped, moved independently or not at all as the chain skated all over my rear cogs. I stopped twice to address the issue but couldn’t tell what was going on. I checked the obvious things — cable tension and general attachments (you’d be surprised what can break loose after seven months of jostling on rocks).

I stopped for a while at an auto repair place and waved off the useless help of the mechanics who were ready to take a hammer to the fragile metal and springs. I stopped a second time around dusk and realized what was really going on. The b-limit screw (officially known as the body angle screw), which sets the spacing between the derailer’s top pulley and the cogs, was caput. I was now without the use of several of the easier gears, which meant that I could not pedal over the snowy mountains I was heading towards. Damn.

Having ridden for almost six hours uphill and not wanting to backtrack, I considered my options. Thanks to the far reaches of technology, I knew that a fellow bikepacker and new friend, Brian, would be coming my way from Huaraz the next day. Communicating on a tenuous cell connection, he agreed to bring a new derailer from the only bike shop in Huaraz.

Calling it a day, I camped on the edge of “El Silencio,” a stunning landscape that lives up to its name. The hushed, muted grasslands far above treeline with snowy peaks in the distance made for one of the most peaceful nights of my seven months on the road. 

Fixing a Broken Chain on the Go

I traveled another half-day towards Huascaran National Park, pedaling when I could and walking when I couldn’t. Up and up I went until I reached the ranger station on the edge of the park. I set up camp and made several rounds of tea while I waited for Brian to arrive. The frigid winds whipped my tent, and a stray dog endeared herself to me. When Brian arrived, we drank hot chocolate with the rangers. It tasted like warm velvet on my tongue and served as a mental and physical respite in the brittle, numbing air.

I tackled the derailer swap before dark, calmly remembering the necessary steps and channeling my experience as a bike mechanic many years ago. It’s a pretty simple exchange, but despite doing everything right, I could not make it work no matter how hard I tried. I adjusted the cable tension, b-limit screw, limit screws, and ran through the gears clunkily over and over again. It wasn’t working. I realized too late that my SRAM shifter would not work with the Shimano derailer Brian had brought. Damn again.

I settled in for a shivering night, shifting a hand warmer and a hot water bottle around my sleeping bag to keep the chill at bay. In the morning, I gave a despondent farewell to Brian. Back down the mountain I went. In two and a half hours, I covered what had taken me almost two days going uphill. I felt a small scratch at the back of my throat and went first to the mercado, an open-air market with many stalls found in most sizable towns and cities in Latin America. I loaded up on oranges and bananas, hoping to ward off whatever cold might be creeping in. I unloaded my bike bags at a hostel and took my bike to the bike shop. I knew the parts were incompatible but I was so tired both physically and mentally, just this once I desperately wanted someone else to figure it out and make it better.

I took to bed for days with strep throat. So there I was, throat burning, too weak to fetch myself a popsicle, alone in a foreign country, with a broken derailer. The bike shop called to say my bike was ready. I skeptically went to pick it up, feverishly sitting on upturned milk crates to keep myself from fainting. It wasn’t fixed at all, and simply shifted poorly and not into all the gears, the mismatched brands still fastened to the bike. Damn again.

I took the bike “home” to the hostel, got back in bed, and delved deep into bike forums full of obscure fixes and recommendations from middle-aged bike nerds around the world. I was grateful for their attention to detail and concern over the capabilities and limitations of derailers. I read research from MTBDaddio and Haggeredshins524, my new friends in this isolated existence of illness and mechanicals. I tried to use different bolts and screws in place of the b-limit screw, but that didn’t work. I wracked my brain for far-fetched solutions — could a welder weld a tab onto the contact plate and make the original part work? Why was it slipping off? Could I somehow make it stay put?

At the bottom of the rabbit hole of web research, I expected to find Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter and Queen of Hearts. Instead, I found a solution: turn the b-limit screw around, so that the head of the screw would have more purchasing area to connect to the narrow plate. A-ha!

Turning the screw around made it very hard to adjust but there was no reason for it not to hold until I got to a bigger city. The gears shifted, were smooth even. After a few more days of devouring entire books and seasons of Netflix shows, I recovered and left for the mountains again. My little b-limit screw hack lasted for several thousand more miles.

For a great tutorial of the inner workings of the rear derailer, watch this video by Park Tool. It explains how the shifter on your handlebars pulls a cable to move the rear derailer, which then moves your chain to the appropriate cog to keep you pedaling forward in the appropriate gear.

The post Derailer Distress in the Andes appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

While I was still in the planning stages of my adventure in the fall of 2016, I was shopping for the gear that would take me from Alaska to Patagonia. A reputable outdoor gear company (ROGC) had a new ultralight tent, and it seemed perfect for what I was about to do. As a new tent, there were few reviews, but I decided anyway that this was a suitable home for the next couple of years, clicked buy, and waited for it to ship. I was so focused on the weight I was saving that I didn’t stop to think much about quality. This was my first mistake. But past Natalie didn’t care and future Natalie would pay the price. 

So what was my first step when a tent pole snapped in half? I took a deep breath and assessed the situation to ensure my safety.

The second step was going to pee because that pot of tea I had made was filling up my bladder.

Now that my bladder was empty, I could get to work on fixing that tent pole. I thought of this like a doctor fixing a broken bone: sometimes you can stabilize from the outside but other times you need some steel on the inside acting as a new bone. So I looked through my gear to find what I could use to reinforce what was broken. Some odds and ends I kept with me on that long tour were athletic tape, Krazy Glue with brush, and a few zip ties.

The Ways to Fix a Broken Tent Pole

If you find yourself with tent pole problems, there are a number of ways to go about remedying the situation.

If your tent pole only has a small crack, wrapping it with tape and hardening it with the glue should hold it together until you can get a replacement. But if it’s a full-on break, then more drastic measures are required. 

Everybody’s poles and stakes are different. My stakes happened to be square-shaped and were small enough to fit inside my broken pole. If yours don’t, a splint or tent pole sleeve might be your best bet. 

If the break is in the middle of a pole section, try and use a spare tent stake as a splint and bind it to your broken pole tightly using whatever you can, although I recommend the tape and glue combo. If the break is at a join, you can try making a pocket strong enough to be reused, but I suggest affixing them permanently together in a similar manner as before. Sure, it may make it unwieldy, but it will be stronger.

What I ended up doing this first time was very cavewoman-esque. I took one of my unused tent stakes and stuck it in the pole — the squeeze was tight, but it fit. To take care of the hook at the end of the stake, I banged on it with a rock until the hook snapped off. Thankfully, these were also made to be ultralight so it was quite easy to do. With that accomplished, I stuck the stake in the pole, put my tent back together, and crawled into my sleeping bag to get warm and dry.

If you thought ordering this tent was the only mistake I had made, you are sorely mistaken.  

Shortly before I left the U.S. for Mexico, I got the bright idea to contact ROGC to get replacement parts since they have a good warranty and return program. With the new parts, I was left with a spare pole section that I kept in case this happened again. Which it did. Twice. Every time it snapped, it was raining. 

With my final fix, I had to join two sections together so I was unable to properly pack my tent. The pole stuck out a half meter behind my bike until I got to a friend’s house in Colombia where I had a new tent waiting for me, one that had been tried and tested for many years. And wouldn’t you know it — for the rest of my trip, that tent never broke.

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Brake issues can reduce safety and morale, but thankfully simple roadside fixes should have your wheels turning (or stopping) again soon. There’s no precise set of tools to deal with brake issues, but the most common can be solved with some combination of:

• Hex (a.k.a. allen) wrenches (often 4mm and 5mm)
• Brake pad spreader (or screwdriver)
• Brake cable
• Spoke wrench

Whether you’re running rim brakes (calipers or cantilevers) or disc brakes (cable actuated or hydraulic), a little patience and a methodical approach to fixing the problem can go a long way. 

First, a busted brake obviously needs immediate attention. If a snapped cable has left you without stopping power from one wheel, you have some options. If you’re carrying a spare cable, simply remove the old cable, thread the new one through the existing housing from the lever to the brake (rim or disc), tighten the cable bolt, and adjust as needed. Just remember to trim or otherwise secure the extra length so it doesn’t get swept into the spokes. 

No spare? Depending on what the rest of your day’s journey looks like, you could attempt to harvest a cable from your shifting system and ride with fewer gears, but be warned that the cable ends for shifters are smaller than those for brakes, so a little creative modification will likely be required. 

Thankfully cable and hydraulic line failures are rare — the more likely scenario is that your reverie is interrupted by a steady squeak or grind that indicates a brake pad is dragging on the rim or rotor. For rim brakes, an out-of-true wheel is a likely culprit, and so one option for the mechanically inclined might be to use a spoke wrench to adjust tension to bring the rim back in line. 

Too ambitious? Adjust cable tension or pad placement to back off the offending side and seek a more permanent solution when you can. A hex key or two should be all that’s needed, but remember that letting out a bit of cable or retracting a pad will change the point at which the brake grabs hold, so you might lose a little power at the lever or have to pull farther toward the bars.

For a disc brake, even a tiny rotor warble can become maddening. First, loosen the two mounting bolts on the caliper so it moves back and forth freely. Squeeze the lever so the pads grab the rotor and tighten the bolts. In many cases, this will realign the caliper and silence the squeak. If it doesn’t, you can remove the wheel and insert a pad spreader (or, in a pinch, a flathead screwdriver) to push the pads and pistons back to a wider position. Reinsert the wheel and squeeze the lever to let the pads perform a self-alignment. 

Don’t forget that oil from your hands can contaminate a disc rotor or pads, so try to keep things clean, otherwise you might find a quick fix only adds to your headaches!
 

The post Brake Aches on the Road appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

I’ve got a couple of life experiences that illustrate this.

Great Divide Route 2012

Since 2012, I spend more time than I should thinking about my touring bike repair kit. I always start with the basics, which includes a multi-tool, spare tube, pump, and patch kit; and then add on some extras, such as a spare tire, brake and shift cable, a few spokes, and duct tape.

What I did not bring on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route in 2012 was a binder bolt for a seatpost, and that’s exactly what broke on my wife’s bike. With fully loaded bikes, rocky dirt roads ahead of us, and mountain passes to climb, we wanted the problem fixed on the spot. We scavenged our own equipment to see if we could pull a less important bolt from somewhere else. When that failed, we resorted to duct tape — which lasted a few hundred meters. At that point, I bit the bullet, tossed my seatpost on my wife’s bike, and rode the next day and a half out of the saddle.

One would imagine that when we did finally arrive at a hardware store, I would have bought two binder bolts. One can only imagine — it broke yet again 2000 miles later in the New Mexico desert, where I spent another few days riding out of the saddle.

Giro D’iscovery

Back in 2007, fresh out of college, I did what any unemployed cyclist would do: I sold my body to science. Giro D’iscovery was an experiment to test human endurance and the effects of overtraining. Instead of riding in a lab, a group of us took to the road with a science team. The route was Missoula, MT to Colorado and back in three weeks, which included 100-mile days, 1-hour time trials scattered throughout, muscle biopsies, and blood tests. It was a sick and twisted supported bicycle tour. 

Somewhere out of Rawlins, WY, I struck a piece of metal that was laying flat on the ground. It stuck to my tire, got caught in my fork, and threw me over the bars and onto the pavement. There was a rider that fell on top of me, and pushed my arm into the pavement as I slid along. I ripped a couple good-sized holes near my elbow — the kind where the doctor squirts water into one hole, and it comes out the other. That came along with road rash on my shoulders, back, and hip.

Fortunately, Rawlins has a great hospital and I was stitched up pretty quick and back on the bike in two days, just in time for a V02 max test. I spent the next 1,000 miles riding in a lot of pain, while trying to keep all the various wounds from getting infected.

Hopefully, you have better experiences than that! But like I said, if you’re well-prepared with good equipment and surround yourself with good people, you can get through anything.

This story has been updated and was originally published on January 18, 2016.

The post When Things Go Wrong on Tour appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

First of all, make sure you have the key supplies close at hand. An extensive list of tools you might consider carrying can be found here, but for a flat, you’ll need:

• A spare tube or patch kit
• Tire lever
• Pump or CO2 inflator

It’s often easiest to flip a bike over onto its bars and saddle (though if you’re heavily loaded, this can require removing bags and it might be easier to keep things right-side-up), then loosen the quick release or thru-axle to remove the offending wheel. Using your thumbs, press the tire “beads” (the edges) into the center channel of the rim, then either peel the tire off with your hands or use a tire lever to hook a bead and slip it over the rim. If your bike has Presta valves, don’t forget to unscrew the lock nut first.

With the tire off the wheel, remove the tube and pump it up a bit to find the puncture, listening and feeling for leaking air. Depending on the size of the leak, you can either patch the hole or opt to replace the tube entirely. Patch styles include those with a bit of glue or pre-glued sheets, and either work well if you follow the directions. Lightly sand the area around the hole for good adhesion, apply pressure to the patch, and let the glue set.

Ready to put the fresh (or freshly patched) tube back in the tire? Not so fast! Run your hand around the inside of the tire in case a thorn is still inside, and check the outside for any sharp objects looking for a second act. Then insert the tube in the tire and pump it up just a bit — it’s easier to handle if it holds its own shape.

Align the valve stem and slide it through, then get one tire bead onto the rim — the first one is easy. You can usually get much of the second bead on by hand, but a tire lever is extremely helpful for the final 20 percent. Be sure to push as much of the bead as possible into the center channel, it’ll give you more to work with!

With the tire back on the rim, re-inflate the tire to your preferred pressure with a pump or CO2 inflator, reinstall the wheel, and get back on the road!

The post Changing a Flat Tire appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

But should an unlucky break — literally — befall your trip, you should be back on the road in no time if you’re well prepared. An extensive list of tools you might consider carrying can be found here, but for a broken chain, you’ll need:

• A chain tool
• A “master link” or pin

Chains consist of three parts — pins, plates, and rollers. And if your chain just snapped, you’re likely to find a bent plate where the pressure (from your massive strength!) overwhelmed the system. Assuming only a single “link” was damaged, you won’t have to shorten the chain much and can probably ride the rest of your journey on the mended metal. If the repair demands more than a link or two, you might need to find a bike shop sooner than later, as a too-short chain will affect shifting performance and could be more prone to break again.

Use your chain tool to remove the mangled link by pushing out the remaining pin. If you have a “master link,” you should be able to insert it in the gap and mate the two ends by pressing them together, then using the pedals to apply a bit of pressure with your hand to “pop” the replacement plates into place. Note that master links are speed specific, so if you’ve got a 10-speed drivetrain, make sure you have the right spare link! They’re so light, it’s not a bad idea to carry an extra in common sizes in your repair kit — you might save someone else’s day.

If you don’t have a master link, you’ll either need a spare pin or a deft touch. Unlike a master link (which requires two “narrow” ends to mate), using a pin means you’ll likely need to remove more of the chain to get the right match of plates and rollers. Use the chain tool to drive the pin through the hole. Go slow and keep an eye on your progress as driving the pin past the outer plate won’t help! When you’re happy with the alignment, double check to ensure the link moves freely without binding, then snap off the scored guide piece and get on your way!

If you don’t have a spare pin or master link, the best course of action is to almost completely remove a pin from a good link and then re-drive it through undamaged rollers. This isn’t ideal and can compromise the chain’s longevity because it flattens the flared end, but it should allow you to limp to your next stop.

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