Bicycle Touring 101: The War between seasons and the joys of equipment failure

It really is spring despite this early April snowfall! You can actually see snowflakes in the picture if you look closely!
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This last month has seen a battle rage between winter and spring with spring appearing to finally have the upper hand during the last week until this morning when I woke up to once again discover a covering of snow everywhere showing once again that although winter is beginning to beat a retreat for now the battle between the seasons is truly not finished.

Equipment failures have also plagued my friend Jakub during this last month of Icebiking and I have also not been immune. Jakub experienced the opportunity to fix two flat tires, fix a broken chain twice and recently he has been given the challenge of fixing a broken spoke.

In my case I had to repair my first flat tire in over two years recently when I lowered the air pressure on my tires for better traction in snow and went just a touch too low causing the tube to slide in the tire and rip the valve right out in the process. While pumping up a new tube the brand new tire pump broke leaving me to the tender mercies of a nearby friend to provide air so my tire could get rolling again.

The much more serious issue is that with the apparent arrival of the long awaited spring I brought my touring bike down in preparation for giving it a good ride in the coming months. As part of this preparation I cleaned and oiled the chain, greased the pedals and wiped off the excess grease from the top of the rear rim. When wiping the rim I discovered tiny cracks running near four of the rear spokes. They are very tiny and you almost have to squint to see them but unfortunately they are not figments of my imagination. As a result I have ordered a replacement rim as well as spokes giving me the adventure of restringing the wheel to look forward to prior to my next long tour.

All of this set the background for the latest poll on Bicycle Touring 101. "Broken gear during a bicycle touring adventure " is a poll focused on trying to find out what are the most problematic areas of a touring bicycle based on many people's experiences during their tours. It's not a perfect poll and several questions could be worded more effectively but it does do the job of highlighting the problems including a lack of gear to handle them while touring.

Today is April 3, 2005 and the poll is not over but with 106 responses so far there seems to be enough data to report some preliminary results.

Dave McLeod fixing a flat on an obscure road some kilometres off the Biggenden Gayndah Rd in the Wide Bay of Qld, Australia
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Prior to reviewing the survey I would have guessed that the top three problems that cyclists experience during a tour are flat tires, blown tires and broken spokes in that order. As you can see in the results that follow I was close for two of the three but many other problems seem to occur before a blown tire.

Here are the current results with 106 responses. The numbers in brackets represent the percentage of respondents who reported having that particular kind of problem. I have removed any "Not Applicable" answers from the results shown here.

It becomes even more interesting when you start to look at the actual repair gear that people take on tour.

Even though 90.6% percent of respondents have experienced a flat tire 99.1 percent carry a spare tube, and 97.2% also carry patch kits and tire levers.

Spare spokes are only carried by 51.9% and Fiberspokes are carried by 26.4%. This is one case where I wish I had worded the questions differently to make determing this next bit less time intensive. By reviewing the individual replies I was able to determine that 86% of those carrying spare spokes also carried Fiberspokes with them. 38.6% of respondents carry the tools needed to remove a rear cassette or freewheel with them as well.

Broken spokes are the second most common problem that occurs during a bicycle tour and yet based on the results in the last paragraph you could almost say that the people carrying repair gear for spoke problems are generally also those who have experienced first hand the problem!

I will be posting the first partial results page for this poll in the next few days. If you haven't answered the new poll yet please consider doing so.

Fixing another flat tire!
Mary Shaw ( copyright (c) Mary Shaw 2003).
Click to enlarge.

The web site is also coming along nicely. This last month has seen a 43% increase in the number of unique visitors to Bicycle Touring 101. A lot of the credit for this goes to the Contributors who have once again continued to submit very useful articles about bicycle touring to the web site. People enjoy reading their efforts and as a consequence return to the site an average of 1.91 times last month.

A smaller part of this has been driven by the search engines where BT101 is now listed as number six out of 2.4 million sites using the "bicycle touring" keywords by MSN Search. Yahoo ranks the site eleventh using the same keywords. Google has a sandbox rule which prevents them from ranking the site for your main keywords until six months have passed since they first crawled the site. Another month or two should finish that off.

The search engine ranking is important in the sense that with all the work that's been put into making the site useful it's nice to know that someone new to bicycle touring is likely to find it when doing a web search about the topic.

This month also saw the addition of a RSS newsfeed to the site meaning that you can now use a RSS reader and easily receive notification whenever new content has been added.

After reviewing some reader feedback about the site I continue to make efforts to improve its usability. My unfinished and still under development attempt at a new homepage can be found here. As you can see it's still very much a work in development but hopefully you can let me know if you think it's a step in the right direction by dropping me a note.

This month I hope to go on my first bicycle tour of the year. Working on the site on a regular basis has given me a heaping spoonful of bicycle touring everyday this winter so I am champing at the bit to get out there and experience another one. The first one is likely to be no more then a simple two day tour to visit a friend in a neighbouring city and return home. This will involve two 120 km riding days but since I will be staying overnight in his home I am unlikely to need to carry a full touring load on this tour. This will make for an interesting contrast with previous tours where I've always been carrying the gear needed for self-contained touring.

Even without the full load and despite the relatively short time line of the tour I am looking forward to experiencing once again the thrill of leaving the city behind me and enjoying the farm fields, quiet roads, woodlots and scenic river views as I head out on my next adventure!

It's my hope that in preparing for your next adventure you find useful information on this site to help you get underway. Please remember that this site is here to help you and I'm more then happy to accept suggestions for future topics that would be of help to you!