It didn’t snow much but it was very cold and icy during my daily commute. I bought thicker gloves but maybe not thick enough as my fingers would always be numb with cold by the time I got to work, or got back home. I was glad when the thaw came the week after, although now it was raining and so I would end up wet instead. The water on the road was not only dirty, but it was now fall of salt too.
I didn’t think much of it until after the weekend when it came to Monday morning and my chain was a ‘nice’ bright orange colour. Too late to do anything about it until the next weekend when it would be daylight once again at home, so the whole week I ventured out with different shades of orange. Midweek, the gears stopped working, I couldn’t go up or down – I supposed everything was starting to seize up. Not an immediate problem with it now being an ebike, although with the PAS no longer working (sensor got too wet?) it was feeling like things were starting to fall apart. I have the throttle set to “cruise control” mode, not strictly legal I would expect, but it is good what you can do with a small bit of blutak. I expect it has put extra strain on the motor as normally I would be changing up and down gear as you normally would on a bike, meaning the motor is always just “topping things up”. For this week the motor was taking most of the stress until I got to normal speed at which point the high gearing I was stuck in would match.
The job for the weekend was to get the chain back to normal use and to sort out the gears. I thought that after some oil both would be ok. The chain quickly came back to normal colour and flexibility, although a quick check showed it had gone past the “stretch of no return” which as it was nearly there before Christmas was not a surprise. A quick visit to Decathlon during my lunch hour in the week for a new chain would sort that out and I would fit next weekend.
A closer look at the gears showed the gear cable casing had split resulting in not much happening when you pulled on it. A bit of a surprise, never had this happen on a bike before. I had a spare casing and a new gear cable to fit, which I thought would be quick and is never a bad thing to change. A problem, out of the two small screws holding the casing of the gear mechanism, only one would undo. Seeing that this bike is kept undercover all the time, and during the day it is not only undercover but out of the damp too (and so dries out if it has been wet), to have this seized was not fun. It finished up with me drilling it out!
Everything after this was straight forward, I got the gears indexed and I got the remainder of the drilled screw out and replaced. I decided the bike really does need a good clean, but not today. I also found a broken spoke on the (heavy) rear wheel, which explains why it is buckled. I have planned to take the wheel to the local bike shop at some time, maybe now a bit sooner than I wanted.
I tested the PAS sensor with a meter to see if I was getting any reading out of it. I didn’t think I would as the lack of the LED lighting up shows me something is not right with it. A common problem I found out on the forums, the water trickles down the cable and into the sensor over time. It is best to fit in a horizontal position, but my bike frame does not allow that, so vertical it is along with this problem. A bit of extra sealant I am told is a good idea. I had emailed the place I got the kit from in the first place and he was helpful, right up until me asking for a price and to send the new sensor at which point I haven’t heard anything for a week. I found EggBikes instead, they seem to have a sensor that looks the same, they answered my email within minutes with a sensible response – and so I’ll put an order in with the hope that it is indeed the sensor and not the control block that has failed. In the meantime, I still have the sticky hand throttle ‘cruise control’ to keep things going.
