wrenching at the tour de franklin

 The Franklin Township Food Bank Tour de Franklin is usually the first charity bike event of the season, and I've been wrench-for-the-day there for years (except for last year, when I was at school in Oregon). They have rides for the serious enthusiasts (including a metric century), but also rides down to 5 miles, for the local families who bring out their kids. I forgot my camera, and had to take what pictures I could on my phone (and I'm not as adept with my phone as I am with my single-purpose camera, but a few of 'em came out anyway).

My workstation:

 Some of the registrations:

 Early in the day:

 

The rides of the different routes start with a mass-start (they have a lot of fun with it, with a barker and a cheering squad):

 It was a very windy day, and cooler than expected, so there were fewer riders than there sometimes are. But (as is common for this ride, and other charity rides that cater to the riders with more hope and good wishes than experience) there were some unusual calls for service at the mechanic station. One rider broke off the top of his presta valve when he was loosening the schrader adapter he keeps on it; the tire continued to hold air, so he went off to do the ride. One woman took the opportunity to have her bars straightened; I expect she had been riding that way for years! We did a couple of chain lubes, and filled a LOT of tires.

The Food Bank provides me with a high-school assistant (she's a minor, so she doesn't get a picture). She was initially enthusiastic, then bored (which was appropriate; it was largely a slow day). But she was pleasant to speak to, and treated me is if I were not just some superannuated stranger.

I like being the event mechanic; they treat me with a deference I find pleasing, and I see people I don't often see otherwise. I'll plan to go back until they won't have me anymore.

more is coming; it will get better

 

A couple of years ago, I posted about a particularly bad time for my mental health (yeah, this is a link to the original post); I'd driven to scope out a location for suicide. I've posted about my fragile mental health here a couple of times since (like this post, and this one), and I refer to it in a few of my ride posts. For suicide prevention month or mental health month, I link to one of these from my Facebook page.

The tattoo above, on my left wrist, is a reminder. It was commonly, for a while, about suicide awareness and mental health generally. Amy Bleuel, who began Project Semicolon, later died of suicide.

This shit is no joke.

It also doesn't just go away. A few weeks ago, I could tell that the anxiety and depression was trying to come back, and, a week or two ago, it did. Attaching to some of the most minor of occurrences, it took over my life for a few days, and I was thinking of suicide again.

I got through it, but it was bad.

 So now there's the ampersand on my right wrist. I hope it will be a reminder that more is coming; that when things are bad, they won't always be, it will get better.

(The tattoo artist pointed out that it would be upside-down when my arms are hanging and others see it. That's OK; it's not for them.)

Thanks for listening.

abbreviated ride, and a shifting mystery

Laura OLPH listed a 50-mile ride on the club website for today, with 2500' of climb, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that... but then friend Tom H suggested a route that started with Laura's, but then took a shortcut, winding up with about 40 miles, and a smidge over 2000', and that sounded like a better idea. Tom and I signed up for Laura's ride, with the intention of turning off (which we did; no suspense there!).

 

Althea, above, new to the slugs, rides a stainless-steel Tomassini, and this bike is very nearly perfect.

Laura's "gimmick" for this ride is that she brings a bag of chocolate bunnies. Everybody who finishes get one, but they also go to the folks who make the worst jokes and puns along the way. In this crew, there's stiff competition.
 

I don't remember which road we were on when we found the closed lane... but of course, we did find the closed lane; after all, Tom H was on this ride.

 

 I did better today than I thought I would, and if I hadn't promised Tom I'd ride back with him, I might have gone on... (heavy foreshadowing here, and eerie organ music rises in the background). But Tom and I turned off shortly after this.

 

Tom's route included a stop at the Carousel in Ringoes, but when we got there...

 

 A couple of tables and some rusty chairs on the porch, and, although there was not a light on inside, one could peer in the window  and see that the shelves were almost bare (whatever was left on them must be virtually worthless). Perhaps another venture will open a deli there.

 

Perhaps it will be clean and inviting when they do.

 

Tom and I proceeded back to the start. About thirty miles in, I noticed that the rear derailleur was getting stuck on the easy gears.

 

Huh? If the cable breaks, the derailleur goes to the hard gear. I could tell right away that it wasn't the shifter, or anything having to do with the cable and housing up by the handlebar. I figured something might be stuck in the derailleur, so I pulled it out by hand. It came out to gear 5 (of my 10). I left it there and pedaled the rest of the way back, with only the two front gears for shifting.

 

That would have been tough if I'd continued with the 50-mile, 2500'-climb plan. As it was, it was a demanding last few miles.

 

When I got it home, I saw that the cable was fraying and getting stuck at the run of housing at the rear wheel dropout - fraying so much that I had to cut the cable in three pieces to remove it.

 

 You can click on the pic to see it bigger. If a cable looks like that, it's not gonna go gracefully through the housing. 

This derailleur is a recent Tiagra. Shimano has it cover ten gears over the amount of cable pull they usually assign for eleven gears. I think it's a bodge job by Shimano, or else an excuse so that you can't use this derailleur with any other indexed setup.

 

That's not generally an issue for me, as I still use bar-end friction shifters, so I don't worry about indexing. But the last bit of the cable leaves the housing at a sharp angle, and I'm sure that's what caused this on the ferrule:

 

 That's the ferrule from the end of the housing, just before the fixing bolt on the derailleur. The hole on the top is supposed to be circular, and it's anything but on this one; the hole is worn into an oblong. I expect the cable did that to the ferrule, and the sharpened edge of the ferrule then cut a few strands of the cable, leading to the fraying.

 

When I installed the new cable, I replaced the ferrules at the rear with plastic ones. It's been five years since I replaced the cables (when I installed the bar-end shifters... wait, has it really been that long?). I'll plan to keep an eye on the plastic ferrules to see how they do (I'll plan to, but I won't actually do it, until something untoward happens to the shifting... and then I'll look up this blog post to see what I did, and when I did it).

 

Maybe you want to think about changing your cables.