Sam and Dave’s blog

Well, as Sam said, it wasn’t only our legs complaining yesterday. Halfway up the 2.5km climb out of arbois, the rear free-wheel started sticking. When I stopped pedalling the freewheel and chain continued turning fowards, eventually jumping free. VERY BAD sign considering we had another 55km to go. Somehow we eventually made it to Nozeroy, with the freewheel skipping occasionally and sticking.

This morning we went to “Ets Bourgeois Claude, Cycles - Motoculture”, where a the shop owner was able to disassemble and repair the freewheel. I didn’t see fully what he did or what was wrong, but I think he replaced the retaining clip of the pins, maybe the clip was broken. There was also damage to the metalwork of the freewheel cassette. He was very disparaging about the quality of the freewheel he said looked like it was a cheap part made in Taiwan.

I have to say this reflects very poorly on the build quality of the Pino, and I hope that Hase take note. I’ll certainly write to them to report my concerns. We have spent enough money on this bike not to end up with a broken free wheel after a few days of usage.

Tomorrow we plan to head via Champagnole to a bigger bike shop and see if we can get a replacement freewheel of better quality. Then we’ll either rejoin the original route (as given in the lonely planet cycling france book) or perhaps take a slightly easier route maybe following the River Ain towards Lyon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Posts in English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.