Saturday, September 15, 2012

Death of a Friend (not a person, so don't panic)

I was cleaning the garage today and, as part of the process, decided to pop the connector off for the tagalong that's supposed to go to Erik.  I started to pull the seat off and, well....you can see the results below.  I've had my mountain bike longer than I've had my daughter.  I put thousands of miles on it each year (bit of hyperbole because it conjures up an image of 3000+ miles, but I suspect I put a good 1200+ on it each year and I know I had a year where I put well over 2000 on it), and used it for a whole season back when I was at my most active with TCBC, so it's had a good life.  I could weld it, Bicycling magazine recommends finding a professional framebuilder, but that will probably cost me more than the bike cost in the first place.  I could just swap out the frame and keep all the bits and pieces, but then I'm constrained to fiinding something that fits what I already have, which might be difficult given it's a decade-plus old.

So it's time to go bike shopping.  Maybe it's a good thing, fall sales being here and all.  And perhaps, if I indulge in a bit of magical thinking, my car accident prevented me from putting four additional months on my mountain bike, which means I wasn't riding it full tilt during a seat snap, potentially breaking my skull and putting a seat post into my posterior.



Here's the view of the frame where it snapped.  I could probably go all DIY and figure out how to mount the seat right into that hole without so much as a weld, but once again, that seems like more effort than it's worth.  Not to mention, probably dangerous.

2 comments:

Kyle said...

Any plans for the broken bike? You could always strip the parts for spares. Or donate it to Cycles for Change. I'm sure they would like the parts.

http://www.cyclesforchange.org/support/donate-bike

Kyle said...

Was your seat post up that high when you were riding the bike? That might have a lot to do with the break, since any weight/force transferred to the seat post would be transferred to a much smaller area of the seat tube. There's no doubt you got your money's worth out of the bike, but I'm just glad it didn't break while you were riding it.