Car bad, bike good and all that but bicycle maintenance is absolute bullshit. This is what I've been through just this year:

  • First the chain and sprocket needs to be replaced. Also the front tire is flat.
  • I try to replace the chain myself. It's too loose and worse than before.
  • I try to put a new hose in the tire. The bike pumping station malfunctions and explodes the hose.
  • I buy a new one and put it on.
  • The next morning it's flat again.
  • I give up and go to the bicycle repair guy
  • The day after it comes home from the repair guy some spokes break and one of the tires on the bike trailer is flat.
  • Bike lights? The little fuckers just vanish in thin air all the time.
  • Front wheel? Flat again!
  • I manage to patch it and put it back on. I inflate it.
  • A few hours later it has pushed the tire off because of some dumbass fold
  • This goes on for days. I inflate the tire, thinking this is the time that satanic monstrosity has straightened itself out, only to discover I was wrong. This goes on for days.
  • Guess what? Another broken spoke!
  • Bonus: The gear cable is almost breaking in half.
  • The plastic wheelguard? It breaks in half. Because it can.
  • Then I run over a branch of some tree that best can be described as nature's own version of barbed wire and one of the tires on the bike trailer is impaled on a big ass thorn.
  • I manage to patch the tire. As I put it on the tool slips and pokes two new holes in the tire.
  • I patch the tire again and gets everything together.
  • The next morning it's flat again. The second patch didn't adhere properly for some reason.
  • I patch it up for the third time. This time our seems to hold.
  • The next morning the other tire is flat.

What the absolute fuck? This is ridiculous. I didn't remember having so much stupid pointless trouble back when we had a car. Why are bicycles such absolute shit?

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Some of this sounds like you had a faulty wheel (or something between the wheel and the inner tube), some of this is a matter of how patching is a skill that not everybody is good at and some tires just don't patch well, some of this is just plain old bad luck. In any given year of heavy cycling I've never experienced more than a fifth of your list (unless you factor in a bike getting stolen).

    However, did you get a new kameloso?