Trike Refurbishment
Running 2,000 miles under heavy load up and down mountains does tend to contribute to mechanical entropy. But the list of items on the Greenspeed GTO that needed repair or replacement during or after the journey is pleasantly short: one SRAM DualDrive hub, one idler wheel, one cable housing, one shifter, one chain, three tires, one set of decals.
The hub was felled by a quality control gremlin, the idler wheel a casualty of a random road pebble and, to be fair, probably could have lasted the rest of the trip sans one geartooth. The cable housing was my own fault, eaten by the idler wheel because I routed it where it didn't belong after replacing a shifter cable. The Shimano bar-end shifter for the rear derailleur got all gunked up with seaside moisture, but after I disassembled it in the lobby of the Hotel de Shining in San Francisco, I decided that it would probably survive another 300 miles or so, and it did, barely. It's pretty crunchy in there right now, but its new-in-box replacement arrived today, courtesy of eBay. The chain had become an eight-foot wickedly gunked-up linky snake of griminess, so stretched out from hard pulls up steep grades that every time I stopped, I could feel it lengthen with the first pedal stroke. Velo Pro Cyclery in town had the three standard SRAM 9-speed chains I needed to make one trike-length chain, so now I've got a shiny silver powerline wrapped around my cogs and rings.
I've ordered a new set of tires from Hostel Shoppe Recumbents, and they'll be arriving this week. I ordered the same tires I toured on: Primo Comet kevlar-belted 20x1.5 herringbone slicks. I got nearly 2,000 miles out the front two, and the only reason I swapped out the rear tire with my spare in Eureka was because I couldn't be bothered to track down the rough bit on the inside of the old tire that kept putting holes in the tubes. The tires are now flattened in profile, with slashes, gouges, and missing chunks where the roads of four states have all taken bites from them.
I'd be able to show you said bites, but my trusty HP Photosmart M425, after surviving four months on the road, was done in by a roller coaster at Great Adventure on Friday. I usually wore my backpack on my chest on the rides, trying to arrange things so that nothing was crushing anything else, but at some point while I was being flung through space at ludicrous angles, something in the pack broke the camera's LCD display. As it doesn't have a regular viewfinder, that effectively ended the camera's usefulness. I'm trying to score a replacement display, or at least a cheap used M425 on eBay, but until I do the site will be a bit less photographic.
Repairing and cleaning up the trike has made me realize how much affection I actually have for it. It's been a dependable steed, backed up by an excellent company. That's why I ordered a fresh set of decals for it, to replace the ones that got scraped and mangled on the road: it deserves them. This evening, I spot-cleaned the Windwrap fairing with a paper towel soaked with a bit of gasoline, to remove the paint that had scraped onto it when I squeezed the trike through narrow motel room doorways. The manufacturer recommended using lemon Pledge to restore some of the polycarbonate's shine, and damned if it didn't do just that: there are scratches and some dull spots, but it's got most of its luster back. I've been riding the trike through town without the fairing for the past several days, but it'll be going back on tomorrow. I've missed it...the fairing gives a sense of enclosure to the trike, making it feel more like a vehicle, and it really does make a difference in terms of wind resistance and, I believe, visibility.
Finally, I've ordered a pair of new safety flags from Terra Trike. The six-foot rainbow banner, faded, torn, and road-grimed, has done its duty, and will now become an artifact. These new flags are for what I've decided will be my pedaled conveyance of choice, both here and in San Francisco.
The GTO's done right by me, and it should be ridden, not disassembled and kept in an apartment closet.
