The day after major bike failure…
I googled, read forums, checked the manuals, got some ideas via mail from a colleague, but nothing would help.
Yesterday, I got a phone number of a local bike guy from the nice lady in whose garden I currently camp.
Sadly, the guy wouldn’t answer his phone. So I called the retail store in Berlin, where I bought the bike, to get support. When I was there the last time to get some spare parts for the tour, I left with a bad feeling, after noticing they sold me used spokes for 1,00 € a piece.
However, today they positively surprised me. I spoke with a mechanic who first wanted to guide me through the basics of adjusting the gear hub. As soon as I told him that I’m familiar with all this stuff, he thought about other possibilities and gave me a hint that would later turn out to be the actual problem: the noses of the sprocket, which grab into grooves on the axis, could have worn off. I didn’t think of that because it looked like the sprocket would still turn the gear hub, but that was only the metal dust cap of it. He told me that I would have to remove the sprocket to check this. And that’s what I did.
It was a little tricky and took me some further reading to get everything apart without causing damage, but I managed. Swiss army knife for the win. It looks like only the sprocket is broken, the 3 holding noses are ground off completely.
The gear hub’s counter part looks fine.
The sprocket also has cracks.
On the left side, the gear hub leaked some oil, but it doesn’t seem to be mission-critical quantities.
I performed an oil change before leaving, and some leakage is not unusual under extreme conditions. The mechanic told me that there will always stay some oil inside and that the gear hub wouldn’t stop working from that.
I’m now waiting for the bus to Luleå, to pick up a spare part from a shop I called earlier to check if they have it in stock. If everything goes by plan, I can continue to one of the camp sites I had it mind for yesterday in the evening. So I’ll do at least 30 or 40 kilometres today. Effectively one day lost, but also one day of recovery, which I had none of since Copenhagen.
I got a new sprocket. Same number of teeth, but more dished than the original one. I’d say the latter has a lateral offset of at most 3 mm, while the new one probably has 8 mm.
When I returned from Luleå, there was some more oil leakage. I had left the wheel lying flat with the leaking side down. Bad thinking on my side.
Back home, I’ll do another oil change and measure how much oil loss there was during the tour.
I quickly reassembled everything.
With the old sprocket, the teeth where set off away from the wheel. With the new one the offset points towards it. The other way around it would have interfered with the gear hub’s shifting mechanics.
This has two consequences. First, the chainglider doesn’t fit any more, and second, the chain line is a bit diagonal since sprocket and chain ring are no longer in the same plane. But it’s still well in the range of what is normal for derailleur gears.
With the right tool, I could move the chain ring to the inner side of the crank, but it’s not in my limited road kit.
Somewhere in the process I must have lost the cadence sensor’s magnet, that was fixed to left crank with a glue pad and a cable strap. My host and her neighbour helped me search the area where I worked, but it remained missing. Luckily, the neighbour had a magnet that would do the trick as a replacement.
After packing up everything, I headed to the closest camp site which was in Töre. That was today’s mini stage.
The camp site at Töre is worth spending some words on. Camping there in a tent costs only 50 SEK, showers included, no camping card needed, main season. And it’s a good camp site, clean service buildings, beautifully located at the coast. A cottage would have only been 200 SEK. I’ve spend that and more for tenting at some other sites. Even the eastern European guest worker camp at the loud road (stage 11) was 80 SEK. Staying with a tent at a camp site has become rather expensive since my last bike trip in Sweden in 2008. At one site, a couple in a mobile home paid the same rate as I did alone with a tent. Strange pricing policies.
Putting my tent up in Töre was the horror. An army of mosquitos attacked me. My bike cloth are not remotely mosquito proof. And that’s supposed to become worse the further north I go. One got me inside the tent.
They are getting slow when filled with blood.
A short note on equipment: gas. You never know how much you’ll need. On this tour, I could have managed without any by just using the stoves in the camp sites’ service buildings. For emergencies, a mini cartridge would have been sufficient for many meals. I packed a not completely full medium one, and a big one.
Today the medium cartridge went empty. I used it nearly once per day for a few minutes to prepare dinner, like cooking some noodles. So the big one, or even a full medium, would have been more than enough for the whole tour. I probably had a trekking tour in mind when packing, where I additionally used gas to cook lunch, tea, and occasionally even warmed up some water for washing.
Tomorrow will be a long stage to reach Pajala. From here on, I can stick to the shortest car route to the North Cape – 786 km to go. Here are some more pictures from the camp site at night.
