Quorn, 8 March 2010

Band-aid

On my way from Wilmington to Quorn, it gets hard to change gears.

It should not be hard.

My Rohloff gear box is run in well.

Are the cables perhaps full of dust?

A bit of oil into the cables does not help.

Changing gears gets harder and harder, becomes impossible.

The black box between cables and gear box seems to be the source of trouble.

Are the cables broken there?

I fail to open the black box.

Two star screws hold it tightly closed. Grr.

The Quorn caravan park comes to the rescue and lends me a star screw driver.

And yes, the cable is badly ragged inside the box.

The weight of my swag has stressed the cable too much.

Maia recumbent bicycles, who maintains my Flevobike GreenMachine is way back in Dordrecht, the Netherlands.

That is at the other side of the globe, an odd 20,000 kilometers from here.

Quorn does not have a bike shop.

The nearest one is in Port Augusta.

It might have the right cables.

Port Augusta is near, yet a day's walk from Quorn.

So, improvise!

A nail cutter and a borrowed pair of scissors remove the fringes off the cable.

What is left is a thin cable with some loose ends.

Now those loose ends should not go ragging again.

How to keep those loose ends confined?

If only I could put a sock on it.

A piece of rubber perhaps? No, that won't slide well.

A bit of leukoplast perhaps? No, the cable will be to thick.

I kind of like the idea of leukoplast.

But it should be a thin, metal version.

And it is not to hard to make a metal band-aid out of some tin foil and glue.

The tin foil folds tight around the cable. The glue seems to work well.
Too bad, the glue does not stick.

The band-aid is off already at installation.

So I will have to change gears using loose ends till Port Augusta.

Will Port Augusta have the right cables?

Or do I have to go back to Adelaide?

Or even back to the Netherlands?

Till next nut,
Nut