At Bike Pirates on Saturday afternoon there were plenty of stands free,
unlike in the summer when coming there at fifteen minutes after opening time
might mean a two-hour wait. The volunteer advised me that my wobble was
probably being caused by a loose axel, so he set me on doing that, but I had to
remove the axel first and clean it up. While yanking the rim counterclockwise
with the axel in the vice to get it off, my hand slipped and skinned my knuckle
twice in the same place on the spokes to the point were it was bleeding
slightly but the blood wasn’t flowing out. He noticed that one of the
dustcovers for a nut on my axel was warn and so he advised me to find a
replacement for it in a big bin. I dumped the bin out on a table, but couldn’t
find a match. Dennis came along and told me that I needed to separate the dust
cover from the nut so he took a mallet to it. I looked through the bin again
and ended up accidentally tossing my original nut into the pile. My volunteer
returned from going out for a while and said Dennis shouldn’t have separated
the two items. I was totally confused as to what I should do. I went to ask for
advice from my volunteer, who was helping out someone else near the vice where
my rim was standing. I looked at my rim and noticed that a couple of spokes
were loose and one was broken. I realized suddenly that was the reason my wheel
had been wobbling and that I had just wasted more than three hours fiddling
around with the axel when what I’d really needed in the first place was a new
rim. I told this to my volunteer but he wasn’t fazed at all that he’d made a
diagnostic error. He just immediately went downstairs to look for a rim for me.
The one he gave me had a quick release, which worried me a bit, since I didn’t
want to have it stolen, but he said I could just chain my wheel with the rest
of the bike when I lock it. I bought some new back brake pads because the old
ones were too worn and from this point on it didn’t take too long to get
everything fixed up.
I went to take a test drive in the back alley, but I saw that my back
tire was rubbing against the left side of the frame. I showed it to a volunteer
who’d just arrived and who has this manner about him that some bike experts
have that says, “If you don’t already know how to do the basics of bike repair
you are an idiot!” He just said, “You didn’t put the wheel on right.” So he
fixed it. I said, “So I should have …” He said, “You should have put the wheel
on right.”
The pads were five dollars and the rim, being second hand, was “pay what
you want”, so I gave the shop $20.00. It was kind of frustrating to waste three
hours trying to repair part of something the main part of which was
non-reparable based on a volunteer’s advice, but the heaven and hell of Bike
Pirates is that one gets help that eventually helps one get one’s bike fixed
despite frequently receiving wrong advice before it’s fixed.
When I got home I noticed an email from Nick Cushing Hamstone that had
been sent an hour before, telling me that he was leaving Hamrock right then for
Toronto along with his brother, Bruce March Hamstone. I had my phone on vibrate
and I’d expected to hear it when he called, but a few minutes later there was a
loud knock on my apartment door. It was Nick, who my next-door neighbour had let into
the building. Before Nick sat down he got a call from Bruce, who he’d dropped
off at Tim Hortons to get a tea and who was then downstairs, so I went down to
let him in (I’ve been wondering for years why Tim Hortons is not Tim Horton’s.
It turns out that it keeps them from having to change their signs in Quebec,
where the French language does not use a possessive apostrophe for names).
Before sitting down, Bruce offered to go out to buy Nick and I a couple of
Christmas beers, so he went out and came back with two cans each of Creemore
Lager for us.
We chatted for an hour or so and then Nick decided he needed to go out
to Fullworth’s to get curry sauce to take back to Hamilrock. Bruce and I talked
for the at least half an hour that Nick had gone one minute up the street. He
came back with a bag of spicy items for his Hamilrock kitchen, such as curry
sauce, masala, pickled chilies and a bag of salt and vinegar fries to share,
made of corn meal and potato granules, baked and shaped like French fries. We
chatted for at least another hour, and then Nick had to drive Bruce to the
Frequency Zed studio to pick up the band’s equipment for their gig that night
at Tiger Bar on College.
It’s always nice to have a visit from the Hamstone brothers from Hamilrock.
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