Unchained

Further to yesterday’s post, having transformed the Faggin into road mode I was eager to take it for a proper ride:

I first obtained this frame like seventeen years ago and built it into a singlespeed for my wife; then we moved to the hill country, she got a WorkCycles followed by a Clem Smith, Jr., and the frame lay fallow until I recently resurrected it as an urban runabout. As such, until now, this poor Faggin never had a chance to live openly as its true self–that is to say a proper road bike with drop bars and gears.

It so happened I had an appointment in Manhattan yesterday morning, and so I figured for its maiden voyage I’d ride the Faggin to said appointment and maybe throw in a lap of Central Park on the way home. Setting off, I marveled at how well the bike fit me and how speedy and comfortable it felt. ”How did I wait so long to do this?!?,” I marveled to myself. Then I heard a loud *snap* and there was suddenly no resistance in the cranks:

I’d broken the chain:

I admit I have become quite cavalier about reusing old chains, and reusing quick links, and mixing different-speed quick links with different-speed chains, and generally disregarding best practices when it comes to careful drivetrain curation. However, in this case it didn’t appear that any of my eight zillion quick links had failed:

Instead, as far as I could tell, it came apart at a normal link:

Despite my aforementioned heedlessness I’m not one to reconnect narrow modern chains using the same link or anything like that, so I’m not sure how this happened:

Sometimes chains just break, especially when they’re on bikes ridden by lazy slobs.

Fortunately I wasn’t far from home, and I was also right next to a subway station, so I had a decision to make: do I walk back home, get another bike, and start all over? Or do I lock the bike up and hop on a train? Since I didn’t have much extra time to play with, I opted for the latter. This gave me an opportunity to check out the new subway map:

I also witnessed a fistfight break out on the platform at Times Square. It broke out explosively and without warning, and so close to me I was lucky not to catch an errant punch. Once I was clear of the melee I alerted a pair of transit workers, and then a pair of the police officers the urbanists don’t believe should be in the train stations.

I made it to my appointment right on time, then afterwards I picked up a chain at the nearest bike shop and took the train back to the bike, which fortunately was right were I’d left it:

I have a theory that bike thieves in New York City are now mostly just interested in e-bikes and sundries, and that generally speaking you’re much safer when it comes to locking up a primitive human-powered bicycle. This isn’t to say you should be complacent, but I do think the average bike thief in 2024 couldn’t distinguish an old Italian road bike like this from the trash by which it’s surrounded.

From there it was a short walk home, during which I admired my pretty decent bar-taping job:

Paul sent me that tape awhile back; he meant it for the RockCombo but I think the blue looks pretty good with the Faggin’s Pepto Bismol pink.

By this point I’d lost much of the morning, but I was determined to see how the Faggin felt out on the road, and with some time left before the school bus arrived I installed the new chain, put the old one in my chain drawer where it’ll eventually get re-reused and fail yet again, and headed north. While there’s barely a trace of the snow we had this past weekend where I live, it turns out there’s actually plenty of it just a few miles from here, and I rode right into it:

While not nearly as troublesome as a broken chain, the snow on the bike path did derail the ride somewhat, and as I was running out of time by this point I was eventually forced to detour into industrial Yonkers for the return trip, which kinda sucked: