Busted!
Immediately after I wrote about my "dependable steed", the second DualDrive hub crapped out. Yesterday, I was seven or eight miles into a planned 20-mile ride out towards Montecito, when the hub began to behave in the peculiar way that means Something Is Terribly Wrong: not shifting properly, making strange grinding noises, bursting into flames, that sort of thing.
So, rather than head up 800 feet to the top of the ridge, I headed back to home base, where I removed the rear wheel and opened up the hub shell to have a look inside. The hub's innards are intricate and interesting-looking, full of precision-cut metal and little spring-loaded fiddly bits that flick in and out to move gears into different relationships with each other. The metal collar that secured three of those gears had, at some point, cracked into four pieces. Hence: grinding noises, explosions, etc.
Back in Kentucky, when the first hub failed, SRAM told the wrench at the Lexington bike shop that the DualDrive is "not spec'd for touring." I'm beginning to think they might be right. Paul Sims, the tech guy at Greenspeed, remains puzzled that I keep breaking the things, and Jerome, Greenspeed's US rep, is sending me a new hub, so I'm satisfied from a customer service standpoint.
Although the first hub lasted a mere 800 miles through the Appalachians, and the second hub 1,100 miles through some not-as-serious climbs along the West Coast, it's supposed to have a lifespan of many, many thousands of miles. My guess is that pulling a heavily-loaded trailer, hitched to one side of the trike's rear frame at the intersection of the chainstays and the seatstays, is just beyond the capabilities of the SRAM DualDrive. Either that or, as Paul suggested, I just "got two duds." We'll see.
In any case: the new tires are here, the new flags will arrive tomorrow, the new hub may or may not be here by Friday, so hopefully I'll be riding again by the weekend.
It's likely that the cracks in the collar began to develop while I was still heading down the coast. So I was within a week or two of having another hub failure while still on tour. I'm certainly glad that it deigned to hold together until I reached Santa Barbara, but think about what might have been: if I had pressed on across the country, I might've had a hub failure every thousand miles or so. That's five hubs.
