Bicycle Mechanic I am not

Last week Pat, a friend and co-worker, had a massive front der/chainring failure. We're still not sure how it happened but his bike was stored inside and when he went to ride home and started to pedal, he quickly realized there was a problem. He called me, as I had just left work with my truck, to ask for assistance, and I ended up transporting him and his bike home via my truck.

His front der had somehow slammed 90 degrees forward into the water bottle cage and bending it. I also noticed his large chainring was severely bent out of true. My hypothesis involves the front der getting loose and slipping down, Pat 'free wheeling it' to get his pedals into position before taking off which grabbed the front der and spun it, and then the damage to the chainring was done when he attempted to pedal home with the drive train in a bad state.

I told Pat if he wanted assistance getting his bike back into running order, I'd be happy to let him borrow my workshop and my limited knowledge. We decided Sunday would be a good day and so I told him I'd pick him and his bike up after going to the hardware store to buy a ball peen hammer for use with the Park Tool Crown Race installation tool.

We arrive at my house shortly after 1 and start to take apart his drive train. We quickly decided that we needed to replace at least the large chainring and maybe the middle one. We also are unsure of his front der and if it sustained any damage. After Ben D. showed up to provide moral support, we went to CW and spoke with Tony about getting replacement chainrings. He led us to where they were and Pat purchased Shimano LX chainrings for his Truvativ FireX crankset. We made sure the bolt pattern was correct, but the Shimano middle chainring had more 'meat' below the bolt hole, so as a result it didn't fit properly. The large chainring, fortunately, did fit. So we replaced the large chainring and Pat did his best to straighten the middle one. Pat and I were putting the last bolt on when I used my wrench to tighten it that last bit and sheered the receiving end in two! $2.13 later after a quick detour to Bike Rack, we're back in the garage putting everything together.

There were a collection of problems, including greats such as the chain link where I opened the chain being too tight so it wasn't freely moving, the front der rubbing the large chainring in various places at various times, and not properly having the barrel connector in the slack state when initially setting up the front der cable. After all these were corrected we still were not able to get the bike to run as smoothly as it should. I suggested we involve someone more skilled as we're not sure if the front der was damaged in the initial incident and as a result is the culprit, or if the middle chainring being mostly straight is causing the issues.

Pat was at least able to ride the bike home at 5PM (that's right, 4 hours later) and made it there alive. He reported there was an incident where he almost bit it due to the chain sticking on the way home. He thought the middle chainring may have caused the problem.

Overall I enjoyed the experience as I obviously need a lot more of it, but it was frustrating when you can't get the bike to shift nicely. Maybe single speed/fixed gear riders are on to something...