Her bike isn't that heavy, so I picked it up and moved it out of the road. Then my son and I worked at it with the tools we had in the tool bags until we managed to free the brake and axle so it could roll again. As befits the brotherhood of bikers, we had several people stop and offer additional tools.
In addition, a guy driving a Budget rental truck asked if he couldn't just fit the thing into the back of his truck and take it to the nearest shop. Well, of course we would be very happy if you would do that! So we wheeled it up the ramp and tied it down, and he transported it to the cycle shop maybe twelve miles off where we left it.
Possibly it'll get stolen before they open on Tuesday, but if so it's insured. I locked the forks and hid the key where nobody is likely to look, and left a message on the shop's answering machine so they'll know what's going on when they open Tuesday morning. Then we rode home with my wife in the passenger saddle, the way we used to before she decided she preferred to ride her own machine.
7 comments:
I'm doubly pleased, that no one was hurt, and that people stepped up to help.
His name was Chuck. I sent my wife with him in the truck — she could have taken him if he’d tried anything — to direct him to the shop. I had to run them down on the expressway and turn the truck around because they were so busy talking about chickens and horses that they totally missed the turn and kept right on trucking.
Curious failure- glad no one got hurt, that can be a disastrous event, having a rear wheel lock up. Disc or drum brake?
Drum! The pads are in fine shape. The spring didn’t break. The aluminum lever didn’t break or shear. The screw joint was still set. A very strange failure indeed.
I think the steel control rod must have fatigued a little bit at a time over the nearly 20 years she's had that motorcycle, and finally gave out. It didn't show any sign of it, but I do remember that she had me tighten the rear brakes recently as she felt they were too soft. Maybe it had been failing, causing the softness in the brake, and the tightening put additional strain on it?
Sounds possible- metal fatigue failures tend to be exponential.
By the time any symptom is seen, it is well on the way to failure.
I tried to explain why a "small crack" on a fitting was worrisome, and got dismissed by the skipper, only to lose the spar in a storm in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska. It was a good lesson on damage control, and risk assessment.
It's always gratifying when people step up to help strangers like this, and I'm also glad no one was injured.
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