hear ye hear ye my tale of woe
Or: how I turned a simple 5 minute bike ride home after work into a 2 hour exodus of life and loss
I have been bike commuting for about a year and a half now, but WOW I still have a lot to learn. My plan for after work today was simple: clean and lube up my chains using the nice bike stand outside my building on campus that has tools and a pump, and then bike home.
With some tips from my brother, I was pretty certain about what I needed to do in order to clean my chain, so it got done pretty quick. The trouble starts when I take a wider look at my bike and say, "well, while I'm here..."
Look at those two screws on my front derailleur! They're not screwed in! I can fix that, so I do. No problem! Nothing bad will happen later at all.
Oh! My tires could use a little extra air- let's just use the bike pump here. Oh, that's weird, the tip of the nozzle is gone and the locking mechanism is just flopping around. It'll be fine!
There is a problem, and it's not fine!! I spend so long realizing that the bike pump nozzle can no longer properly seal that I nearly completely empty my front tire.
I've used this station for so long that I don't actually own my own bike pump, and even if I did, it'd be a long, long walk while standing my bike up on its rear wheel so I don't pinch the tire-- so I start walking up the hill to the rest of campus to see if I can't find another outdoor bike pump to fill up my tire.
Specifically, I'm heading to the campus bike shop a mile away- surely they have an outdoor pump! They don't. They have the tool section of the stand I used in front of my building, but not the pump. I'm devastated. My shoulders hurt from wheeling my bike vertically for so long. I tripped on my own saddlebag straps once or twice on the way over.
In the end, I was saved by a kind cyclist who had stored a bike pump in his office and was happy to lend me it if I could wheel my bike over. That wasn't the end of it though!! I leave on my bike and go to shift up, but I can't?? Did the lube do something?? That's not what lube does??
Thankfully, I realized pretty quick what must have happened, and bike back to the tool stand that previously disappointed me to fix the problem. Do I at one point accidentally send both screws and a plastic part of the front derailleur flying while testing the shifting? Sure do. I managed to find them eventually.
I have since learned that those are limit screws, and that I really don't know what I'm doing. I've also looked into a map of all bike stations on the campus I work on. I hope you enjoyed my hopefully informative clown show.
TLDR: If you think you know enough about your bike to just start screwing with random stuff, no you don't. Put that screwdriver down and make sure your bike pumps actually work before using them.