August 28, 2017
Occam's Razor: Day 21 - Freiburg to Baumlach With a Visit to Toute Terrain
If you’re any sort of a bike nerd you know who (the late, great) Sheldon Brown is. Next, if you have any sort of bike problem you consult his web pages. He has a nice section that’s basically called “things that go clunk” and that seemed to fit what was happening to my bike.
When I read his clunk stuff regarding pedaling noises, he very systematically walks you through what to do. First, and always, start with making sure your cranks are tight, then you go from there, ending, many steps later at your bottom bracket.
I had tried this but was confounded at step one. Our bikes (very nice, very durable, but quite specialized) have Middleburn cranks. They are small specialist company in England and are highly regarded in the European mtb community . Their cranks are British, they are different. Much different than any other square taper or external BB type of crank I’ve ever encountered (and I HAVE installed, replaced, maintained all sorts of cranks and BB’s over the years). I really didn’t have a clue how to check these cranks, so I moved on past this step.
Over several days I had convinced myself that I needed new pedals (there is a small amount of play in them) and that the bottom bracket (a Phil Wood that should be good for about four times the mileage (or more) than we’ve put on them) was pooched.
Good thing that we were going to the Toute Terrain shop this morning.
We thought it would be cool to see where our bikes were made and that’s why we were in Freiburg (after being here there are many more reasons to come!). So first thing this morning we were waiting on the doorstep of their shop on the outskirts of town when they opened up.
We were met by Dominic, who we’d spoken with last Thursday. At that point, I had mentioned that I had a pedaling clunk and in addition to a visit to their shop, it would be great if they could have a look at my bike. By this morning I had myself worked into a ‘complete rebuild’ lather.
Dominic calmly showed us around their (spotless) shop, and then had a look at both our bikes.
I had a loose crank. Score one for Sheldon.
Everything else was fine. However, I did learn how to install and check a Middleburn crank. Simple, once you know, but by no means intuitive, in fact almost ass-backwards to every other crank system on the market (I will add that I previously did try to find a installation/instruction manual on the net to no avail).
Interestingly though, when Dominic was checking out Kirsten’s bike, he found that her drive train was not properly aligned. This, combined with the higher belt tension she had probably contributed to the cog wear, and ultimate belt failure she had right at the start of our trip. Domonic (and the Gates folks) were very surprised to hear that she had broken a belt. In TT’s experience, the only belt failures they’ve seen are when they put them on machines and put them under extreme stress to test for failure.
I know I’m bashing on about a bunch of bike stuff that only I care about (but guess what, I get to write what I want) but it was a really great experience to be able to go to the TT shop.
All the folks there were incredibly friendly and helpful. We saw the process for creating a finely crafted bike, and our bikes received a ‘spa treatment’, at no cost!. They were very happy just to see us pedal away very satisfied. And we did. As we left the shop, both our bikes felt like we were pedaling on soft clouds of whipped cream (I’m not joking!).
We made it back into central Freiburg where we busied ourselves with getting German mobile phone cards and had lunch before setting off south towards Basel to get back on the EV 6 program.
The rest of the day was just pure enjoyment biking (silently) along perfect bikes paths through the hills south of Freiburg.
We had picked out a few campsites as targets for the day, the first being about 50 km away with a couple of others a little futher, as we didn’t know how long we’d be at TT and getting German phones sorted out.
Turns out that the bike and phone stuff was pretty efficient, so we reached the first target camp site at about 2:30. It looked really nice and even had a ‘mini-putt’ , one of K’s fav’s, but it was only 3 pm so we pushed on to the next one.
It looked really good on the map, a large wooded area with small lakes and other amenities, and was listed as a ‘Naturist’ camp. Great, maybe we could go for a nice walk in the woods after setting up camp.
When we got there, it dawned on us what a German Naturist camp was. Google it (and be prepared for the interesting ad feed you get for the next week!).
K wasn’t quite prepared to show off her new tan lines so we pushed on (I tried a small protest, the facilities looked really nice!) and found another good campsite a few km’s further along in Baumlach .
We ended up having a simple, but good dinner at the bistro at the campsite, met a few other couples there and it proved to be a good finish to a very satisfying day.
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Song of the Day:
Reboot the Mission by the Wall Flowers
I used this on our cross Canada trip, but it’s a great song snd really fits the day. Our bikes are now back to the ‘don’t worry about it’ stage they were for our entire 2015 trip. TT was our help desk … ‘just reboot the system and see if that fixes it’ … it did.
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Today's ride: 67 km (42 miles)
Total: 1,500 km (932 miles)
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