When A Chain Breaks

You ever have a chain break?
Remember the sinking feeling when your feet went around the pedals and seemed to pushing against air?
They were pushing against air.
Okay, so it was no big deal.
You took your chain tool, broke 2 links out and re-attached it, right?
But what if you didn’t have a derailleur bike?
What if your bike had a 7-speed internal hub with a single cog that allowed for no chain wrap?

Edie and I were going uphill out of Chagrin Falls when this happened to my trusty (and rusty) winter commuter. Fortunately there are 2 bike shops in Chagrin Falls, so we just turned around and Edie pedaled, while I coasted, back down the hill.

At the first shop I was ushered into the bike section in the basement. It’s a pretty shop and my bike was an oily, greasy mess, so I was cringing when the young mechanic undid the lug nuts holding the rear wheel and tugged on the chain. All he got was grease. The 7-speed internal hub has a special hub brake on one side and a shifting mechanism on the other. And both seemed to be stuck. The mechanic pried and poked, yanked and pulled, but the brake and the shifter seemed to move together rather than independently, and neither would come loose. He called his partner over. They tried to logic it out. With the same result. Something was stuck. Something was wrong. The brake and shifter were not coming loose.

A moment’s inspiration got him on the phone with a second bike shop a mile away. In his truck went the bike and off they sped to the other bike shop, with me, on Edie’s bike not far behind. But at the second bike shop, the same conclusion was reached. Something’s stuck. Something’s jammed. This is not coming loose. Back in the pickup and back to the first shop. Apologies, embarrassment. They couldn’t figure it out, but they were very kind. They charged me only for the new chain and not for the hour they’d spent monkeying with the bike. And let me keep my panniers there while we plotted our next move.

At this point the rear wheel was partly disconnected from the frame and not going back in its dropouts. I had to hold the rear end up as I walked the bike out of the shop. As Edie rode off home to get the truck, the young mechanic poked his head outside to ask how I’d get home.

‘I’ll just walk’, I said.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oh, in Cleveland Heights’, I replied.
‘Cleveland Heights?!’,
' how far is that?’
‘Oh, about 14 miles away’, I said, ‘not a bad walk except for having to walk the bike back too’.

At this the young mechanic grinned, knowing he’d been had. I locked the bike out by the ice cream place on Main Street and headed down to the river for a snooze. It would be a while until Edie returned. As I lay on the banks of the river it dawned on me I had no need to lock up the bike. In its condition, no one was going to take it anywhere.

A week later I picked the bike up from Ken Schneider’s Bike Shop at Lorain and Denison.

‘Good as new’ was Ken’s greeting.
‘How’dya fix it?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t it jammed?’
‘Well, actually there’s this little lock ring that was partly broken and it was keeping everything
from moving. Hardly took any work at all to get it free’.

Next time I break a chain, I want to do it on the West Side, somewhere, just uphill from Ken’s shop.

Marty