Thursday, September 27, 2012

Once a week he'd puncture with the silken needle

It seems I'm having problems with the bicycle again and again. The problems appeared about three weeks ago, first the chain getting loose, and I had to tighten it twice to get it fixed.

Today I got a tire puncture, and I had to stop to pump three times until I got home. I don't remember when I last had a puncture, it must be a dozen years ago. The previous tires were Continental Contact, which are said to have "very high puncture protection", and indeed so it was, I rode about 12,000 km with them without any trouble, until they were so worn that I just had to replace them.

Now I have Swalbe Marathon Plus tires, which are said to be as good, but I don't know. I got a puncture in 3000 km. I didn't have energy to look what caused the puncture, maybe it was a shard of glass, or piece of rock, or a screw. In any case, not so good.

Anyway, I'm now rather interested in the bigger repair as well, getting a new gear hub to replace the rather worn out old one. Maybe I won't yet invest in an e-bike after all.

The photographs were taken today rather late, after sunset, when I went to the post office and library with my daughter. It was wet today, although it started to rain properly only after sunset, and the forecast promises quite a lot of rain during the night.

I now have a new fountain pen to replace the old broken one, which I clumsily dropped on the floor so that the cap was splintered. I looked for fountain pens in the local shops but never found one I liked, so finally I ordered one from Amazon.

The new one is Parker as well, but a slightly more upscale version, IM Premium instead of just IM. I don't know whether there is much difference, but the IM was good enough for me, and the first feeling is the IM Premium may be better. But only time and use will tell.

(Posting title is from the poem Better Late than Never by Bin Ramke.)


2 comments:

Rich Gift Of Lins said...

Oh dear! You should try Specialized Armadillo tyres, over the last 4 years I've done over 40,000km without a single puncture.

Juha Haataja said...

@Colin: For some reason your comment was filtered as spam, sorry for that. Thanks for the hint. I'll do a post-mortem on the tire during the weekend to see what happened.

Also, I booked a time for replacing the hub gear, but that will be in early November, as it isn't off-the-shelf equipment. After that the bicycle should be ok for quite some distance once again.