Well it (the rear wheel) waited until the worst location on my trip to work. I got a flat tyre in Redfern. Why is this the worst? Because it is almost exactly the half way mark.
I did not actually realise I had a flat tyre for a while. What was happening was the rear derailleur was scraping on the ground. I thought that was not normal, and suspected a failure of the derailleur. A woman offered to help, but I said I was ok. It was after that, I realised that the tyre was flat.
I quickly discovered there was a flaw in my toolkit. If it had been a front tyre, life would have been fine. But it was the back. I have a hex key set that fits all the hex bolts on the bike, but for some reason I had forgotten to put in any spanners. So I called Monica from work, she brought out some spanners from work. Once this was done the flat was quickly fixed and I was on my way. So there were several learnings:
- I need a spanner to get the rear wheel off. Greenspeed say in the Gt3 manual: in my tool kit I need 2 x 9 and a 24mm wrench. But, I replaced the rear wheel with the SRAM dual drive. So I need a 15mm spanner for the rear wheel.
- The SRAM dual drive gear changer is easy to remove once you realise that you need to put it in 1st gear. It then just slides off. Clearly I need You tube access while on the road side to look up these handy videos.…
- The trike is easy to turn over and the wheel easy to remove and put back on.
- The old tyre pressure gauge from my car, which I thought I could use to measure the pressure in the trike tyres only goes to 50psi. The tyres are rated up to 100 and greenspeed recommend 60-80.
On a different note I was measuring the trip clearly the to work trip was completely useless as a measurement, but for the outbound here are the stats:
Total Time: 42.94 minutes (38.41 moving, 4.53 stationary)
Moving average speed: 16.2 kmh, average speed 14.4 kmh. (I was not really pushing it.) Maximum speed: 33.4 kmh.
Distance: 10.46 km.