cycling – Lou's adventures Beyond

Anatomy of a bicycle chain

I changed the chain on my bicycle awhile ago and decided to keep the old one and recycle it. I haven’t decided what or if I’m going to us it for yet but was curious about the wear on its components. So I used a chain too to remove 3 of the links so I could completely disassemble one of the links.
Once I disassembled it I could see that the main component that show wear is the connecting pins. They have quit obvious grooves which is probably the main thing the cause train stretch. Surprisingly I couldn’t see any obvious wear on the two bearings. I also saw some wear on the silver coloured connecting links.
It was also quite interesting how the rear sprocket had worn. It looks like some of the teeth have actually bent out of shape.

Disaster recovery

So the last 24hrs has been spent mostly recovering from disasters. The electricity was switched off recently at my flat which managed to take down my little arm server. For some reason it didn’t come back up when the power was restored so had to be manually rebooted last night. This turned out to be an exercise in futility as for some reason icedove (debian version of thunderbird) wasn’t showing any mail folders on my mail server. I ended up having to delete the server resync everything and recreate my mail filters which wasn’t fun.
After this I’m kind of toying with the idea of building a backup power system for it. It should be relatively simple as I can just float charge a SLA battery and use switch mode regulators to provide 12V and 5V outputs for my NAS and home server. I can also use the unregulated 24V from the battery to supply power for my next version of my tube time displaying clock next to my bed.
Of course this wasn’t the only fun to be had as I also had a flat tyre on the Brompton coming into Kings X. I ended up sitting on the floor by the doors on the train with a dismantled back wheel of a bike. The back wheel on my bike is especially bad as to remove it you have to take off the chain tensioner and disconnect the hub gear cable (which then needs to be readjusted or you can’t change gears properly). I did better though then last time I had to change the tire and my tirelever combined with spanner thingy saved the day again as I only needed one tool and it’s a metal tire lever so doesn’t snap (though it is coated in plastic).

I’ve solved the getting the right seat height problem on my Brompton.

Those who know me know that my preferred mode of transport is my trusty Brompton folding bike. One of the lingering problems I’ve found is that the folding process involves putting the seat right down. Since the seat post doesn’t have any way of marking it’s height this means that you can never get the seat to precisely the same height between rides.

Today I found a solution to this problem. I think that if I attach a piece of string to either the bottom of the seat post or the underside of the saddle I can then put then attach the other end of the string to part of the frame when the seat is at the correct height. This will mean that the seat cannot go higher then the optimal height and I’ll have my favourite saddle height every time.

I wonder why no one has ever thought of doing this before!

Added: S said that string would probably stretch when it get wet which I replied you could always use something else such as plastic cord.