That is unless that Fred Chariot is creaking like a haunted pirate ship on the high seas, which is what the Renovo has been doing lately. I'd already snugged up the seat mast to no avail (It had been the source of some creaking in the past), so this morning I moved onto the bottom bracket, hoping maybe it was a simple matter of snugging up the cups. First I removed the cranks and made sure they were tight (they were), then I gave the whole bike a quasi-thorough going-over, even going so far as to adjust the bearing preload on the rear hub. (They're crabon and they're like two grand, but they don't seem to hold an adjustment.) Finally I buttoned everything back up and went for a ride, and I was hopeful until I hit the first hill and...
It's a lot easier to inspect a bike under the brilliant rays of the autumn sun than it is under the energy-saving lighting fixtures in my basement, so that's what I did. And here's what I fixated on:
See?
Yes, I realize it's in shadow, but what you're looking at is a split in the wood where the left chainstay is bolted and bonded to the rear dropout. Remember how I said early on I found some cosmetic cracks in the bike? Well that's one of them, and here's what it looked like back in November 2017 when I first discovered it:
The short version is Renovo were going to build me a whole new frame and send it to me, but I declined as it hardly seemed worth the effort. Here's what Ken from Renovo had to say at the time:
The chain stay is both bonded and bolted to the dropout, shouldn't be a problem. If the gap changes in width or you see other changes we'll get you a replacement immediately. If that happened on a customer's bike we would replace it immediately, as we were prepared to do for you. In any event it won't catastrophically fail.
Anyway, now Renovo is Re-no more, so I'm not going to follow up with them, and while I can't tell from the photos if it's in fact gotten worse it is a bit more vexing in light of this new creaking I can't seem to track down. I suppose I'll go through the usual steps of swapping wheels and pedals and so forth, but even if this crack isn't the culprit I can't help wondering what else might be going on deep in the bowels of this ship. Or, for all I know it's temperature-related--maybe the bike swells up in the summer when it's hot, but then it contracts when it's cold and the fittings start wriggling around a little bit, hence the creak suddenly manifesting itself in autumn. Or maybe it's unreasonable to expect a quiet wooden bike, just in the same way it's unreasonable to expect a quiet wooden staircase. Or maybe it's just termites.
Clearly I need to consult with an arborist.
Or, you know, ride a bike made out of metal.
from Bike Snob NYC https://ift.tt/2Ogolyy
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