We've been having the annual "Golden Week" holidays (just a set of public holidays that all occur sequentially) here in Japan, so on Monday we went on our traditional hilltop walk on the Ten'en Hiking Course around the north end of Kamakura to the famous Zen temple of Kenchoji.
Actually, this pic is an old one - on Monday it was crowded and we walked though fairly briskly. Outside of main holidays and fairly early in the morning it's usually more like this though.
Chojuji was open, unusually, so we went in there too.
The centre of town was absolutely heaving so we quickly retired to our peaceful neighbourhood, and the bicycle maintenance job that has been hanging over me for a couple of months...replacing the rear bottom bracket on our tandem, which had developed an alarming degree of wobble.
Regular cyclists will probably know that the bottom bracket tends to be a particularly recalcitrant opponent and is prone to seizing in place. Sitting there at the low point of the frame where all the water and muck collects, it also has a large diameter thread and thus requires a high torque at the best of times. The rear of a tandem in particular has a large load applied with both riders' forces passing through it. With our tandem being aluminium, the threads in the shell are rather weak and prone to damage - plus effectively irrepairable, making it a potentially expensive job to attempt.
I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fairly recently. Although nominally about motorcycles, it is also a pretty good bike maintenance manual (helped by the authors' habit of using the term "cycle"). The book's term "
gumption trap" applies very well to the problem of a knackered bottom bracket - at least in my case. The cod philosophy is a bit annoying, though.
A few hefty blows with my trusty mallet had got one of the cups loose the day before, but didn't make much of an impression on the other side. I was left scratching my head - and thinking up strategies for finding and importing a new frame - when in a moment of inspiration I remembered the 6ft roof bar we had for mounting the tandem on a car roof (brought with us to Japan, but never used here).
Rather to my surprise, it worked, the threads on the shell are still at least somewhat intact (though a fair amount of powdered metal came out) and the new component is now installed. As the old saying almost says - if at first you don't succeed - get a bigger spanner!
