Monday Blues: Twist and Shout

 I had been wondering, for quite a few weeks, what exactly had been causing the chain on my mountain bike to skip every so often as I pedaled along. Usually it was an annoyance, but a few times it skipped as I started off while in the big ring causing me to pitch forward, my clipped in left foot to suddenly unclip, and a heck of a sort of chain-breaking sound to bounce off whatever happened to be nearby. Needless to say all that noise drew unwanted attention so I had to shout at the darned thing and give the bottom part of my bike a dirty look, just so that all those lookeeloo's would think the problem was sudden and unexpected. Which, of course, it wasn't since it had been happening for months. Usually I could avoid the problem by making sure to start off in the small ring, and quite frankly, the one day a week I have been able to ride that particular bike lately, means there just hasn't been much urgency to make a close examination of the problem. Until Sunday, when I finally decided enough was enough, and up on the work stand it went. 

My initial thought that it must surely be a derailleur problem requiring a simple turn of a screw to fix the alignment was cast aside - the chain was running through the rear derailleur just fine. True the arm looked a little bent, but I decided that was a sneaky trick of the eye and not a problem at all. So what the heck is it, I thought, and slowly spun the chain backward. Ah-ha! The chain kept coming off the chain ring at the same place. I bent down close, narrowed my eyes, sort of Clint Eastwood-like and then noticed it, a clear twist in the links (you can spot it for yourself in the photo above) and gave another shout, this time of satisfaction - Ah-ha, there you are!

Who knows what caused the link to turn astray, a branch, a rock, an overly enthusiastic chain-breaking tool, I didn't know, but I did know how to fix it. Unfortunately, the LBS closes early on Monday, so my hopes to make Monday evening the first ride of the time change will have to wait until the approaching storm passes through later in the week.

Lesson: Sometimes it really is the simplest of things - always check the chain.