Matthew's Journal

I got on my bike to cycle home from the pub after choir this evening, and the front light started doing the flickering thing which I "fondly" remember from the failure the other week. So I pulled over near a street-light and had a look. It became clear that the wire had been pulled hard from my rear light - both out of the light itself (which has a clip to hold the wire in place) and through the cable tie I fitted.

Thankfully, it was straightforward to re-insert the wire into the rear light, but it left me baffled as to why someone would choose to vandalise a bicycle thus - I can't see you could have applied that much force to the wire accidentally.

I had to replace the light bracket on my bike. Again. That one replaced one that I bought in March 2014; this one has lasted less long, but it also hasn't quite failed - I noticed that the lamp was shining too low, and then saw a crack in the stand. The new one is a different design (tubular rather than pressed metal) so will hopefully last rather longer, but has the downside of pressing on the front mudguard; you can sort of see that in the picture below. While this isn't causing any problems now, I suspect it means I won't have enough clearance for the winter tyres any more :-/

A bit late for 2nd November, but there we are.

This morning, I noticed that my front light was a bit wobbly. Looking more closely, I see that this is because the bracket has started to fail (look at the corner between the horizontal bit and the long upright which the light is attached to). More annoyingly, this is the second bracket I've had fail in a similar way - I only bought this one back in late March 2014 :-(

A friend helpfully offered me their spare made of more solid material, but that doesn't have enough of a down-curve to fit under the brake saddle, so it won't help :-(

There are a lot of brackets available (e.g. here), but it's really hard to tell which of them will work with my (presumably slightly odd) brake geometry.

This post was going to begin something like "Have you ever had one of those days when lots of little things go wrong, and you keep making stupid mistakes, or forgetting things? Where nothing is the end of the world, but the sum of all the little things is a pretty bad day? I've had one of those".

Then, just as I was getting home (to pick up the bike light I'd forgotten this morning), my bike broke. As in, the frame sheared through. Picture here. So now I'm faced with a fairly pricey frame repair and repaint (it's a good enough frame that that's worth doing), and need to find a spare bike in a hurry, since our "spare" isn't really up to being used for several weeks. So, that made things all rather worse :(