Listen, my children, and you shall hear a cautionary tale of a faithful bike whose persistent noise saved his owner fifty or more dollars. It all started on a cool Sunday morn in April . . .
I first noticed an odd sound during the Vancouver Discovery Walk ride (yes, the walk that’s also a ride). My bike started making an odd clicking noise. I thought I broke a dérailleur by doing bunny hops during the first half of the ride (by the way, bunny hops are so much more fun with clipless pedals). Fortunately, the bunny hopping had nothing to do with the clicking noise—it did, however, lead to a snapped spoke, but that’s another story.

I had not heard this exact noise before, and the last time I heard an odd noise, I discovered that I had the wrong pannier rack. This time, I knew that Little Joe (my bike) was telling me something. I don’t speak mountain bike, so I tried getting everyone within range of my bike to listen and look for odd sounds and movements, but no one could spot anything. By the end of the ride, I decided I better keep and eye (and ear) open to figure out what was wrong.

Fast forward to two weeks later: two nights before Reach the Beach. As I inspected my bike, I heard a clank: the sound of some kind of metal dropping to the garage floor. I looked around, but I could see nothing, so I chalked it up to one of many possible screws, nuts, or bolts that sat precariously on a shelf edge (yes, I need to clean up the garage). Then, upon further inspection, I noticed that my spoke was broken. I was about to feel shamed about all the bunny hopping I had been doing, but then I thought about the fact that this was a mountain bike, and if you can’t bunny hop with a mountain bike, you have no business with a mountain bike, so I chalked that one up to wear and tear.

I took the bike down off of the hanging hook, and it was then that I noticed the disc brake was not working correctly. Something was wrong; the break wouldn’t work at all. Great, I thought [notice the italics], it’s only two nights before Reach the Beach, and I have to get my spoke and disc brake fixed. I did a little internet search and discovered that it could be a disc break drum that fell out. It was then that I figured out the clanking sound; it was my disc brake drum pad landing on the garage floor. I explored the garage floor, and low and behold, there was a flat, little metal roundish looking thing, so I picked it up and wondered how much a replacement would cost.

The next day (the day before Reach the Beach), I dropped off the bike with the drum pad at Performance, and the guy fixed the spoke, and let me know that the drum pad was fine (it turns out that the drum pads are metalic, and there’s a magnet in the disc brakes; it just must have had too much dirt in between the housing and the pad), so he just stuck it back in. So after all the little mechanical mishaps, I figured that the clicking sound riddle was solved—end of story.

But it was not the end of the story. Not more than 2 miles into the Reach the Beach ride, the sound came back. Fortunately, unlike the Discovery Walk, this was a heavily supported ride with bike techs at every stop, so I had an REI tech check the funny noise. Just my luck, as he popped my bike up on the bike stand and explored all gears, Little Joe went mute—no sound at all. He looked it all over, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so he did one last check: he measured the chain. Low and behold, the sound was simply a loose chain. He warned that loose chains must be replaced as soon as possible. He offered to replace the chain for free, but I still would have to pay for the chain, but alas, I had no loose change on me for the ride, so I had to wait.

It took me two weeks before I finally got around to getting a chain, but it only took me about 20 minutes to swap out chains. It’s a good thing our friendly neighborhood REI tech guy caught the problem. Had I not swapped chains in time, I would have to replace not only my chain but my freewheel and one or more chainrings. Of course, the real hero of the story was Little Joe’s persistent noise; had Little Joe said nothing, I would have probably waited another year, and then it would have probably cost me $100 dollars, instead of the $22 dollars for the chain.

And the moral of the story is: listen to your bike.