Wet commute
It rained overnight, and although it had stopped by the time I had to leave for work, it was still wet. It was a good time to test my plan to attach the fenders to my bike only when needed. I thought about it for a few minutes—whether to bother at all, and if so, how to go about it.
The bike stands up by itself just fine on the fire escape, but inside, I have to lean it against something. It’s usually parked against the stereo cabinet, and other times when working on it there, the front wheel swings out, then the whole bike careens off into an end table.
Instead, I cleared the books and magazines off the coffee table and flipped the bike over on top of it. This worked perfectly. It stayed put and I could get to both sides.
Each fender mounts with one screw in the front, then elastic straps hold the fender stays to the frame. I had the fenders attached in about ten minutes after dithering over whether to use screws or bread wrapper twist ties. I elected to go with the bread wrapper ties. I can easily get this down to five minutes with only a little more practice.
I bashed the rear fender into the living room wall and again into the kitchen door, but they’re flexible and there was no damage to either the fender or the apartment. (I’m forever cleaning tire rub marks off the walls, so I was concerned about damaging the fenders or gouging the walls.)
Everything worked just fine and I wasn’t even aware of the fenders being on the bike until I looked down and saw water shooting out off the front of the front tire and realized they were doing a damned fine job of keeping me dry.
BTW, everyone warns about the muddy stripe up the backside when riding fenderless in the wet. Ask a cyclist, however, and we’ll tell you it’s the muddy face that’s the problem.
While I had the bike on my improvised work stand, I messed with the sensors and sending unit of the wireless cadence and speed computer. Riding to work on Friday nothing worked. Every display on the head unit read zero. Except the stupid clock. And the unit kept going to sleep.
This morning I moved the sensor arms closer to the magnets and suddenly, everything worked. Why, upside down on my coffee table it was going 7 mph!
The way it works, BTW, is that there’s a sensing/sending unit that attaches to the frame (on the left chainstay) between the left pedal crank and the rear wheel. There’s one magnet that screws to a spoke and another that attaches to the crank arm with a tie-wrap. (The crank arm is aluminum, so you can’t just stick the magnet to it.)
The sensor arms pivot so you can swing them closer to the magnets. Turns out, you have to get them pretty damned close, and that was the problem on Friday.
I can report that, within the accuracy of the unit, my round trip from home, to the grocery store to use the ATM, a quick stop at Jim’s Restaurant for breakfast, then to work, and finally straight home is a whopping 5.85 miles.
Even subtracting out 5–7 minutes waiting time at the stop, door-to-door one-way is about a half-hour on the bus. That includes walking to the stop from here, and about a half-mile of walking from the stop to work. While that’s not “bus” time, it is part of the total commute time, and it’s total commute time I wanted to cut in half.
The wind was still on the way to work and I spun along on University Ave in 48-14 at 65–70 rpm cadence at 17–18 mph. Just for grins, going down through the railroad underpass, in the highest gear (48-11) I got up to about 85 rpm and 35 mph.
For reference, roadies like to run around 85 rpm cadence and Lance Armstrong trains for 110. Yikes!
Coming home into a 25 mph headwind (I checked on The Weather Channel site when I got home) I had a hard time keeping 50 rpms at about 9 mph.
I’ve already learned that this is not a precision instrument. Just pulling out of the apartment parking lot, the speed indicator rapidly jumped about from 8 to 27 to 15 to 42 before settling in at something that seemed right. The same thing happened a couple of times on the way home. Looking at the overall stats, it says my top speed today was an asounding 56.6 mph. That’s just not right.
