So macho!

Whilst I might not be quite the heaving mass of muscle the young gentleman, pictured to the left, is I'm feeling pretty damned manly.

My 'stand in while I've got a broken spoke in my main bike' trusty Peugeot had been giving me a bit of gyp. For starters it's not a great bike but, worse still, the top gear wasn't working and I couldn't understand why.

Yesterday, I tried putting it in the workstand (Already feeling pretty manly at this point purely for owning a workstand) and had a fiddle with the little limit bolts on the rear derailleur, which control how far the derailleur is allowed to move. It turned out that wasn't the problem but rather the chain just wouldn't sit in the top gear no matter what the derailleur's positioning was. I knew it wasn't the chain as it was fairly new and worked perfectly in the other gears. You can see I'm using my super-sleuthing skills here as the Sherlock Holmes of the cycling world.

Here's the bit which made me feel all manly and mechanical. I took the Shimano Tiagra rear derailleur off. No, don't faint with excitement now as there's more. I then put a Shimano Sora rear derailleur on and (This is the bit I've been leading up to) it didn't make things worse. Of course, the chain still wouldn't sit in the top gear but my being able to take a part off a bike, replace it and not have the bicycle any worse off as a result is quite a coup for me. By the way, bike nerds, the reason I replaced the Tiagra (Nine speed groupset) with a Sora (Eight speed groupset) derailleur is that it's only got RSX (Seven speed groupset) on it and it was easy enough to get the Sora derailleur working with it.

As I was already feeling pretty cocky and confident with my derailleur 'success' I took out the back wheel, removed the cassette, gave the smallest cog and freehub a wipe, stuck it all back together again and amazingly it worked fine. Funnily enough, that's not the bit which I'm all chuffed about. It's being able to take the derailleur off and replace it properly (The bike now changes gears more crisply than it possibly ever did for me) which I'm pleased with.

When I first got back on a bike (After many years of laziness from learning to drive and no longer using a bicycle for transport) it was as much as I could do to change an inner tube in the front tyre. Taking the back wheel off was a terrible problem for me (I didn't realise about that whole thing of putting the chain in the two littlest cogs and how that helps when putting it back on). You can see why it's been a reasonable improvement for me. Other than truing and building wheels, I'll give pretty much any fairly standard bike maintenance a go now. I'm not saying I'll be successful with it but I'll give it a go. Now I've got three dodgy bottom brackets to replace. Thank you for reading this borefest and please wish me luck...