I started the day heading into town on the GT3. I have been having trouble with the gears sometimes. I took it in to the Clarence Street Cyclery and then headed off to do some shopping and get lunch. The gears had a clunking noise when I was in the top gear. I suspected lots of things. In the end, it turned out that all my suspicions were wrong. It was not the Shirmano 9 speed Cassette. It was not the SRAM dual drive. When I got the trike back, they claimed to have fixed the problem. But as I rode away a few blocks it became clear that this was not the case. So I took the trike back expecting that I would need to leave it there. But no, they fixed it while I was there. Well, the told me what the problem was. I have a case of Stiff Link. One (or more) of the links in the chain is not bending properly. So it comes trough the gear set unbent and when it straightens out it causes the clunking noise. Well, there is still a problem. I just spent some time looking at the chain, but could not find the offending link. I will have to keep looking. Maybe there was more than one. They are a bugger to find.
On the way in, I passed the graffiti walls where I am sure they have official permission to paint Graffiti. This time there were no painters, just the jetsam of the act.
After this I headed home and then back into town again. On the way back there was a man feeding his goats in Prince Alfred Park. He was talking to some mounted police women. I am guessing they wanted to know if he had a goat feeding permit or some such thing. But they were out of ear-shot.
This time I went to PMA, photography show event, at the Sydney Convention Centre. It was interesting, but after an hour I was a bit bored. I met speedy on the way out who told me James was still there. James and I went to the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel for a beer. While we were there a storm came over the city. There was a double rainbow, and the main rainbow had many bands. I got my first ever picture of such a rainbow.
I was delayed as I did not have a rain coat or umbrella. After the rain I headed off to Karyn’s Critical Thinking Lesson 8 – The Argument From Ignorance. There ware two new people and I got to get to know some of the others I had only met briefly. There was a man who had once been a fighter pilot in the Taiwan Air force, and the new people, one was a woman form Singapore and the other a woman from Barbados who had lived for quite a long time in Canada. The debate was quite intense this time and we went until the pub closed.
Well the man from Greenspeed thought I had not put any grease on the chain and said that a stiff link was not a known problem. Anyway it has stopped. What stopped it was when I had to adjust my riding position to the one recommended by the factory. When I did that, I shortened the length of the trike. This meant that I had to remove 8 links. Either the problem was that the chain was too long (which it was) or that I, by pure luck, managed to remove the faulty links. I do not know which it was, but the problem is cured.
Well, yesterday I reused the chain that I had taken off after I broke a link and sure enough the stiff link returned. Now I know which link it is. I have ordered a new chain as this one has 4,000 km in it. I have worked the link a bit looser, but I have not managed to fix the problem.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yewenyi/4466262378/
I think I may have fixed the problem. I removed one link to shorten the chain and I have discovered from “this good web site that the middle bit of my chain breaking tool, the bit I did not know what it was for, turns out to be for the purpose of fixing stiff links!