Cue theme to Top Gear…
As I mentioned in my previous post I have been having issues with my chain and I am as we speak unable to ride my new bike. Something that is extremely annoying.
Dr Velo very kindly supplied a chain but while it got me home it’s a little on the short side, so I have been stealing links from that to mend my original chain, however every time I mend one section a different section then breaks. It broke twice yesterday. Not at all on my way in and out of Settle in the morning, some of which was a quite strenuous uphill section, but trying to pedal up a gentle hill later in the afternoon it snapped almost immediately.
So I am pretty much unable to rely on the original chain and due to nicking bits off it to try and mend the original the new chain that I got from Dr Velo, is too short to do me much good. I am being sent a new one from Tredz, but that will probably not arrive until sometime on Friday – I mean I live in hope that it will arrive early, but I’m not holding my breath.
Hopefully then I can take the bike back to the bike shop and have the gear issues that prompted me to talk to Tredz yesterday diagnosed. The bike is essentially a 10 speed with a 1x drivetrain. This mean I have ten little cogs (sprockets) at the back and one larger cog (chainring) at the front (attached to the pedals), the electric system effectively gives me greater range by increasing the amount of energy put into the pedal strokes, so they’re not really gears – so it could be said that I have more than ten gears, but really I don’t.
In general, I expect that the gears to function pretty smoothly – especially when they have just come from the shop and have been checked for wear and tear and function. However, when I’m peddling in some of the lower (larger sprockets) gears my chain does not bind correctly to the cog teeth, this is the case with either chain. In the lowest/largest sprocket the chain is pulled off the chainring entirely. Now I suspect that the two things are different. The slipping/failing to mech correctly sound I suspect is to do with the indexing of the derailleur, by that I mean that when I change gear the derailleur doesn’t move to quite the correct place, now while I have watched a number of videos on how to do this I have never had much luck in actually doing it myself… plus it shouldn’t need to be done directly from Tredz (IMO).
It could also be caused by worn sprockets or chain, now we know the chain the bike came with is buggered, but I’m also getting the noises on the new chain so that indicates to me it’s more likely an issue with the indexing or cassette (sprockets). But as I said both look okay to me.
The chain coming off the chainring looks to me that the chainring is too far out on the crank, it doesn’t appear (based on the image released with the specifications for this bike provided by Haibike (on their website)) to be the original chainring/crank for this bike. Now it could be that the images are misleading or that the image is for an earlier/older model and so the chainring/cranks were changed. But the fact that the chain cannot reach all the way to the extreme inside cassette sprocket without pulling the chain off the chainring to me indicates that there is an issue with that line.
So the bike needs to have this investigated. Tredz will pay, if it can be fixed for under £50 I can just do it and submit an invoice if it’s going to be over fifty I need to submit a quote and they’ll decide from there. Given the issues I have been having I’m kind of wanting them to switch out the bike with one without these issues – at the same time I just want a bike that works so I can get out on it while this nice weather lasts.
~@~
In other news, I’ve done quite a lot of writing today… not sure if that’s a good thing or not, given why I could do so much writing. :/
A late addition: My chain should in fact arrive today (Thursday) and not Friday as the email I had last night stated… so hopefully I will get out on my bike today. 😀