The other day my front rack broke, sending my bag and basket swinging forward into the front wheel and bringing my forward motion to an abrupt, over-the-handlebars stop. After I picked myself up from the muddy nature-strip I’d landed on and assessed the damage, I felt a bit sore and sorry for myself. A week later, my ribs still hurt if I lie on the wrong side of my body – nothing unbearable, you understand, but not nothing either. The more immediate concern has been getting the bike back up and running, seeing as I use it just about every day: riding to the shops or library, riding with the kids, riding for riding’s sake.
I tell myself that justifies the urgency, but years of data suggest I’d have got onto it quickly anyway. I like a night-time project: something to keep my hands busy, something to narrow my focus to after the kids have gone to bed. As night falls and the dark outside battles with the fluorescent lights of the garage, I work on bikes, trying to get them to run better, even if I’m not really riding them very much at the moment, even if I’m just working on them for the sake of working on them.
Iain Treloar
The bracket on the rack, running from the fork crown to the base of the tray, had suddenly sheared through: unsalvageable. Using a vise and a mallet, I set to work on a replacement bracket stolen from another rack: stainless steel this time, a bit flexy but hopefully a bit more resilient to the excesses of the nightly shopping trip.
I bent it this way and that, trying to thread the needle between mudguard clearance, tray angle, weight distribution. Up a bit here. Down a bit there. Repeat.
If it’s not a rack bracket, there’s always something else: swapping tyres around, or tweaking a saddle’s angle by a few millimetres, or waxing chains (properly, this time). Projects for busy brains and idle hands.
Did we do a good job with this story?
