D40: 安居 → 长岭

July 16, 2022

This picture only shows the broken in half gear wheels. There's no photographic way to show the wobble. (Rather than admit that obvious manufacturing errors are manufacturing errors, FSA would eventually offer me a whole 30% on the purchase of a new crank)

My crank has started to wobble again and this time it isn't the bottom bracket. I first noticed the issue, in the form of a strange sound, the first day in Hubei. The second day I passed through an actual city and stopped at a bike shop which tightened all my loose things and got rid of all the other whispering sounds and squeaks that had been subtly scraping at the back of my consciousness.

With just that one sound that shouldn't be left to me, it was very obvious that something wasn't quite right. It stayed about the same amount of not rightness whether I downshifted or upshifted but it felt more wrong in higher gear. A closer look determined that, just as the left pedal and crank had moved where and how they shouldn't when the bottom bracket was in need of replacing, now the right pedal and crank did.

Although it's been explained to me why people want cars with Beijing license plates, it still seems strange to me to be seeing such an advertisement this far south

Unusual for wall painting advertisements to be major companies (they tend to go for billboards) or to be feuding with each other on a given stretch of road

Speaking of wall decorations, this is my third copy (first outside Henan) of the cloisonne style Rural Safe Electricity Usage mosaic that I want so badly

On an ordinary crankset, this would be a single piece. However, I don't have an ordinary crank. I have a Patterson Metropolis crankset with some of the prettiest engineering you've ever seen shoving a two speed set of planetary gears into the platter portion of the crank.

After no answer to my initial email to the address I had for Sam Patterson after issues with the crank back in 2019, I tried sending an email to every address I could find off of their website. Given the severity of the obviously not wear and tear issue (whose level of severity would become even more obvious once I went to a bike shop), despite my crank being out of warranty and Patterson no longer cooperating with FSA, this got me pointed at FSA's warranty department.

Traditional characters to give a sense of refinement and class to the Coach Station Hotel where I spent last night

My photographer friend has challenged me with "hotel room slippers"

On account of her being on the wall outside (!) the bathrooms for the people whose rooms don't have private facilities, I'm not going to count this as the first Hotel Fap Tile¹ of the tour

I'm currently pretty pissed off at FSA over their response but as that won't happen for a few days yet and they still have a chance to actually be reasonable, I'll skip it and return to the chronological narrative.

Uneventful morning ride along the national road with so little in the way of interesting things to see that I didn't even bother pulling my phone out and taking pictures. Got to Suizhou City, found the Xidesheng I would have preferred to go to closed for a family emergency, and ended up at a small Merida where the wrench was very unhappy about being asked to do anything "unusual".

The installation and use of domestic circuit breakers is economical and simple and protects against disaster

Instead of a Panasonic 松下 (songxia) refrigerator, it's a 松沙 (songsha)

The protective fence around a transformer must not touch the transformer. Climbing or working on a transformer that hasn't had the power cut will kill or maim you.

This is a fairly standard "children don't climb on transformers image"²

Taking my crank off and then doing as much disassembly of assembled things as the parts would allow for, we found the source of the wobble. Being as it was inside one of the sealed parts, we couldn't confirm it to be a failed weld but "if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck", it's probably a duck.

Add in the "shouldn't have been able to break" broken pieces of metal from 2019 and a new piece broken in the same way and the diagnosis is less a single "failed weld" and more substantial "failed quality control procedures" on a never-popular never particularly advertised sideline product in ways that perhaps explains why Patterson isn't licensing this design to FSA anymore.

Last of last century's farmhouses to be replaced with modern buildings

A particularly colorful late 80s early 90s villa

End result, I've now got a Deore crank, and the Patterson is in a plastic bag in one of my rear panniers waiting for me to find out who I'm mailing it to. Also, because some truly awesome people in my WeChat group for discussing this Tour insisted on giving me money to pay for repairs, I've also gotten around to setting up a Patreon.

Pouring rain in the afternoon which I actually kind of enjoy as it gets almost all the traffic off the road and gives me something to focus on other than how dull this particular road is.

The restaurant where I have dinner is supposed to have some kind of local specialty but they've run out and tell me I can come back for it in the morning. I intend to but the over the top excitement over my existence, while nice in small doses, actually gets on my nerves by the end of the meal and I know I won't be.

¹ As the name suggests, a "Fap Tile" is a masturbatory aid masquerading as stylish wall decor. They are only found at the classiest of establishments.

In return for the dozen photos taken of me, I thought I deserved one of this rather awesome shirt

² A near identical image in different materials was shared in this Journal on 5/29

Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 2,378 km (1,477 miles)

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