How to check for chain wear: The easy way, the best way, and why
By: Dave RomeYour bicycle’s chain is put through hell every time you ride. For every minute of pedaling, approximately 44,000 chain pieces are in motion, creating 320,000 separate instances of sliding surface friction. And all of this is on a component that sits near to the ground and is exposed to the elements.
Just like your tyres and brake pads, chains wear with use. And as a chain wears, friction in the drivetrain increases, your shifting gets sloppier, and worst of all, you’ll quickly start wearing out other drivetrain components. Changing your chain at the right time can save you money and make your riding more enjoyable.
If you’re seeking a quick answer for the easy way to check for chain wear, you should only need to read the first few sections of this article. If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole, well, we can help you with that too.
(
Read more.)
55 Comments
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797615620784
Helmets are great at helping prevent some injury, but 30 years of constant helmet safety propaganda rammed down throats have greatly overemphasized their reduction to injury, and obviously had some psychological effect in way people approach situations. How many commuters would have been safer by not running that redlight? How many mountain bikers would have been safer if the stuck to trails in their known limits?
I will never ride without a helmet, but there is certainly something there to examine further.
Speaking of the neurological side, recent science seems to show that the way pickle juice helps with muscle cramping is mostly due to the taste! The body's reaction to the strong taste also triggers a neurological reflex that causes the muscles to calm down
It's like when I ride without armor, does it hold me back, am I more conservative, or do I just say F' it!
So yeah, wearing safety gear helps if you crash, and that's really all there is to that.
Laboratory testing for risk taking is like playing poker with fake money, it's not representative of real behavior.
Also it's funny that they seem to consider that the activity you do while wearing a helmet is the same as when you don't.
I could do the same and say that driving with the seatbelt is more dangerous than driving without it. "Let's compare a guy driving a go kart and a F1...".
Another one
"Skydivers take more risks with a parachute than without" yeah because they won't jump without one
50.92593 riders riding next to each other to come up with 44,000
It's called math...Look it up. LOL
There are two points on each sprocket were pins articulate (one where the chain joins the sprocket and one where it leaves it) and there are four sprockets (chainring, cassette and two jockey wheels). So there are eight articulation points in the drivetrain, each with 4940 pins passing them per minute.
So I make the total number of articulations per minute to be 95x52x2x4=4940x8=39, 500 . I don't see how you can get a higher number than that.
It doesn't depend on the number of links in the chain by the way.
"For every minute of pedaling, approximately 44,000 chain pieces are in motion, creating 320,000 separate instances of sliding surface friction"
The number of pieces in motion is surely not something which can be described as "per minute" - they're either in motion or not.
The 320000 instances of friction (per minute) is the number i was trying to recreate.
As someone who has smashed and been saved by a number of Giro and Bells finest, I can attest to that.
I once saw a bloke come off a road bike with no lid on. He caught the edge of a curb and it scalped him. Like literally. Whole top of his head including skin and hair just cut off and hanging down his back. He just sat there with his skull on show looking like a right tool.
I read something somewhere that the army used to have so many fatalities in the old days with dispatch riders on motorcycles. When they introduced helmets as primative as they were, fatalities went down by 46%! ....... and yet decades and generations later, people still seek to prove the obvious.
Oh shit, big brain time
Show me the same premise on a bike from the 90's or early 2000's, and if you dare off-road.
The change in both basically distills down to: make room for fatter tires, use wider rims to support those tires, tubeless (less of an advantage than it was for MTB), discs (same as tubeless). One by is a thing for cross too, but a lot of people still prefer the double.
FWIW I have a cross bike I purposefully got in on the last batch of rim brakes. Avid Juicy Ultimate Canti's work about as well as any road rim caliper. They are hella expensive for what they are though.
If you damage your helmet, you are going to do some damage to your brain so think about it while you still can?
unfortunately road isn't one of those filters
Post a Comment