Friday October 10, 2014
6:15 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The big adventure for yesterday was riding back to the Bike Pro shop for more repairs. Getting there was a nightmare. No other word for it. I believe the bike shop is about ten kilometers away, and it took me nearly three hours to get there. I’ve never seen a city like this in terms of how horrible it is for bicycles, and I hope to never see another one as bad. Plus, it has the usual Asian tendencies, such as a lack of street signs. I went out of my mind trying to figure out where I was half the time. I stopped dozens of times to check my map to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. Yet, I still made mistakes and I ended up lost over and over again. And I faced so many deadly highways, it was ridiculous.

I mentioned my troubles to the super-mechanic Jason at Bike Pro. He said that it was easy to get from downtown to Bike Pro and it involved just one street. I doubted this was true, of course, but it sounded like great news. So I got out my map and asked him to show me. Not surprisingly, when faced with the map of the city, he failed to locate this street. He still insisted it was easy and he just sort of drew a line across the map with his finger. “Just go here.” People really are insane. There was clearly no street or even highway that went from Bike Pro to Chinatown. His finger was pointing at nothing. Yet, he still insisted that there was one road connecting the two places. What was going on in his brain that he could just blindly run his finger over the map pointing at nothing while pretending that he was showing me a single road?

Luckily, even if Jason was insane in certain ways, he was a highly skilled bike mechanic. Highly skilled. I had ridden my bike there because I was worried about the headset and the bottom bracket and I wanted him to check them. To my delight, Jason just told me to wheel my bike into the shop, and he got right to work. It makes such a difference to have all the right tools and to have a complete shop to work in. He pulled apart the front of my bike in just a couple of minutes, cleaned everything up of all the rust from the floods of typhoon Yolanda and announced that my headset was perfectly fine. After he cleaned and regreased and adjusted everything, he put it all back together with shiny brand new bolts. All my bolts were dissolving into rust.

It was great fun to watch him then attack the bottom bracket. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was a pleasure to watch him. He encouraged me to just sit down on a stool nearby and watch and learn. He had the exact tools he needed, and he had the left crank and pedal off in a heartbeat. The main crank – the one with the axle and chain rings attached – was stuck and wouldn’t come out. Jason just grabbed a big rubber mallet and gave it a few solid taps, and it slid right out. The cause of the problems I had been experiencing were immediately apparent – the axle and the interior of the bike frame was covered in rust and gunk. Jason cleaned it all up and tested the bottom bracket bearings and he said that it was still good. It’s a sealed bearing, and he was experienced enough to feel its condition from simply turning it in his fingers. He said that it was at about 50% of its lifespan and would last for quite a while longer. It felt so good to see him get everything shiny and clean. He had all the right tools and all the right lubricants for the job. When he had the crankset and the bottom bracket all back together, it was buttery smooth and beautiful.

Then Jason went over my problems with the gear shifters. That was quite a bit more challenging and it took him a long time, but he got that fixed, too. He did everything you can imagine including taking all the cables out of their plastic coverings and cleaning them and regreasing them. He also cleaned up the front and rear derailleurs and then spent a long time getting the shifting right. He had a lot of trouble doing that. In particular, the chain didn’t hop from one gear to the next fast enough for him or sit in the right position, and he quickly diagnosed the problem – the chain had stretched. He showed me how he could hold the chain in just his fingers and lift it off the front chain rings. Jason then got out his chain-stretch tool to officially measure it. It works in such a way that you insert this thing into the chain links. Then you press a lever on the side, and the degree to which it moves indicates just how much the chain has stretched. When he put it on my chain and pushed in the lever, it just went all the way in, meaning that there was no life left in the chain at all.

I found that to be very annoying because it feels to me like the chain is brand new. It’s true that it’s the same chain that Bob put on the bike years and years ago in Sarnia, but I’ve used the bike very little. I used it as a street bike in Taipei, of course. But that was with no load on the bike. And then I’ve only been on two bike trips with a touring load – a two-week trip in Taiwan and then my trip through the Philippines. Granted, my time in the Philippines involved unbelievably steep and rough roads with a fairly heavy load on the bike, but it seems to me that the chain should not have stretched to this extent already. Worse, Jason was saying that if I replaced the chain, I’d also likely have to replace the rear cassette. They would have worn together. The hope is that the chain rings on the crank assembly would not have to be replaced. But who knows? The only way to know for sure would be to replace the chain and see what happens. That is what Bob did in Sarnia. He replaced the chain because it was rusted solid. But then the chain would just skip and we had to replace the cassette and the entire crank assembly and the rear derailleur. The whole drivetrain came as a set and it had to be replaced as a unit. I might be facing that same situation.

I don’t know what to conclude about this. I know that I carry a heavy load on the bike and that I have ridden on extremely steep and rough roads. However, is the load I carry so heavy that it can tear apart the bike’s drive train so easily? Is my touring load that unreasonable? I look at the load other people carry on their bikes and it looks just as heavy if not heavier than mine. But I don’t read on their blogs that they have replace their entire drive train constantly.

Anyway, I have to say that I’m getting a little bit annoyed at this whole bike touring thing. It’s getting to the point that the bike and gear is so expensive that it makes no sense. For all the money I’m spending on the bike and gear, I could stay in really nice hotels everywhere and go do all kinds of interesting things. The bike is supposed to make travel more interesting and cheaper, not less interesting and more expensive. What’s the point of that?

Looking on the bright side, I did find an extremely skilled, nice, and helpful bike mechanic in Kuala Lumpur. The bike is slowly getting back in shape. I wasn’t sure what to do about the chain. Jason’s English isn’t the best, and we have the occasional problem communicating. If we were talking about just the chain, I’d have had him replace it yesterday. But since it was the cassette AND the chain, I hesitated. I wanted to ride the bike a bit longer on this chain and get my money’s worth out of it. However, last night while lying in bed, I remembered what happened to my chain rings last time. When the chain got loose, it started grinding down the teeth of the chain rings until they became as sharp as needles. And that wear meant I had to replace the entire drive train. I might be able to continue riding on this chain, but I realize that since it is stretched so badly, it will wear down the teeth of the chain ring again, and then I will definitely have to replace the entire drive train all over again.

In the end, I left my bike at the shop and returned to the guest house by subway. I did that not because I was thinking about further repairs but because after the trip out there on the highways, I couldn’t face the thought of doing it again on the same day. It would be easier to just take the subway home and then return the next day to pick up the bike and ride it back. I guess that is my plan today, and I think I’m going to ask Jason to replace the chain. I’ll try it to see how it works with the old cassette. Then I’ll decide if I want to replace both. Such a pain in my wallet.

Now I can’t stop thinking about making the load on my bike lighter. The weird thing is that lighter gear is much more expensive, and there is no guarantee that shaving off ten or fifteen pounds of weight will make any difference to chain wear. I think it is going up steep mountain roads that causes all the stretching. Whether I have seventy pounds on the bike or fifty pounds or forty pounds probably wouldn’t make any difference to the chain stretching. Perhaps I’m just being unrealistic about what a touring bike is capable of doing. My legs can power the bike up those hills using the lowest gear, but the stress on the chain is extremely high. Maybe I’m just not supposed to take such steep roads.

And even if a lighter load would make a difference, it might be a dumb way to do it. For example, I want to buy a Clikstand for my Trangia stove. It is much lighter than the usual Trangia base and windscreen. But for the price of a Clikstand system, I could buy two bike chains. And I could buy a new tent that weighs two or three pounds less. And I could buy a silk sleeping sheet to replace my cotton one. And I could buy a smaller and lighter mosquito net. All that could come to several hundred dollars – the price of a couple dozen bike chains. So it might be more economical to just monitor the chain wear and just keep replacing the chain at $40 a pop. The funny thing is that I was hyper aware of this problem at the beginning. I had even purchased my own chain measuring tool. It was part of my tool kit when I landed in the Philippines. But my load was so heavy when I landed that I put that chain tool in the box I sent back to Canada. It was a relatively heavy piece of steel, and I didn’t want to carry it around. Now it looks like it was the one thing in that box that I should have kept with me.

Tags: Bike Pro, bike touring, Kuala Lumpur, load, Malaysia, train