Derailed Dérailleur

Shimano Alivio Rear Dérailleur

As if the trouble of setting up front-dérailleur (Shimano M191) on my cycle (Schwinn Sporterra Sport) was not enough, during last few rides, I had been experiencing severe problems with my rear dérailleur (Shimano Alivio). Now Alivio is not supposed to let you down within merely 1000kms. It's supposed to be quite sturdy and reliable for long time. But here I was clinching my teeth, Clint Eastwood style, every time the chain slipped or didn't get to the right cog. The dérailleur was acting up.

It was as if it had developed a mind of it's own. Now I am not the sort of person who has problem with things developing a mind their own. After coming across so many people who have lost theirs (thanks to my corporate experience) and having been living in a country where even the prime minister doesn't have his own, things having minds of their own usually comes across as a breath of fresh air. As long as the mind is confident of what it's doing, that is. The mind of this dérailleur was a different story.

Whenever I tried to shift the chain from a smaller cog to a bigger one, it hesitated. And not only that, it kept on hesitating for quite some time. On one trigger from me, first the chain would move to a larger cog, then the dérailleur, low on confidence as it was, would move chain 2 cogs down. Again, out of sheer benevolence, it would move the chain 1 cog higher. Then back to where it came from. And this would go on. As a result the chain kept moving from one cog to the other until I had to up-shift/down-shift drastically, and I kept fretting a lot due to the slipping chain.

When it came to shifting the chain to the right desired cog, the dérailleur was as confused and clueless as Venkatesh Prasad batting against a spin attack. Here comes the ball ... should I go on front foot ... ummm no, I think I should stay put on back-foot ... my team is in trouble and i am the lone warrior standing ... so defend is all I want to do, but it has to be the right defense ... so back-foot it is ... but hey, why are they chuckling? ... oh, the bells are on the ground, it must be a dead-ball ... the bells are on the ground because I am castled? ... what? how? when? ... but how come the ball pass by me without me knowing? ... it went from under my bat you say? ... oopsie-daisy ... today is probably not my day ... but you know, what hurts me more is that that little bugger didn't even say Hi! while passing by ... moron.

When I would climb an incline, the dérailleur stayed busy with its jugglery and as a result the pressure on peddle pulled the in-transition chain off the cogs. The chain would slip and that put me in a grave danger of losing balance and taking a good gracious fall. I would keep thinking about what could have been the reason behind this Alivio going kaput on me. It might be the chain - has it elongated?. It might be that I tightened the quick release lever a bit too much on the rear wheel, which might have caused the cogs on the wheel to go out of alignment. I might have washed out the grease inside dérailleur during last wash and that might be causing it. I kept guessing.

Finally today morning, a situation came when I started giving a serious thought to kicking and ripping the dérailleur open for once and all. But good sense prevailed. I broke my ride, got down and gave it a kind attention with a little bit more patience. But even after moving the dérailleur around and taking a look at it from every possible direction, I understood zilch. And then suddenly, like a stroke of lightening, I noticed an adjustment knob where the shifter cable connects to the dérailleur. There were also the HIGH and LOW screws there. But adjusting those HIGH and LOW screws was out of question because I had learnt my lesson while adjusting the front dérailleur. You don't touch them unless you are committed to the adjustment and you have plenty of time at hand. I had none of it. So I decided to give that adjustment-knob a try. The knob would turn either ways, so I turned it in such a way that it came out, increasing the tension on the cable. And viola! Suddenly the dérailleur started behaving like it was put on a leash. The problem was gone for good. In the next 15-20km ride the chain slip problem caused by hesitant dérailleur never appeared again.

Hmm ... So the frustrating trouble for last 2-3 rides was gone with mere couple turns on the adjustment knob. Phew! Turns out, actually doing stuff and troubleshooting problems on your own (your skill level notwithstanding), is the best way of taming a cycle, irrespective of how many maintenance manuals or DIY posts/videos you read/watch.

Gives me confidence that I will be able to manage that 'holy-grail' ride of future, without a backup. Not to mention, this is the only vehicle that gives me this confidence.

Cycling: Sinhagad Ride - All Torture No Gain

The uphill and dowhill sections of the Sinhagad ride

Why did I go there!? I have ridden almost 800kms now, and never ever till date have I shuddered at the thought of, and during, a downhill. Today I did. And my fears were right, the downhill almost broke open my wrists, jammed my back, busted my hips, cracked my neck and screwed (no pun) my shoulders ... there can't be anything worse. Up Sinhagad, it's a not a road, it's merely a bunch of stones (of all forms and sizes) scattered around as per whim (the stone's) and glued together with - sometimes tar, sometimes, loose dirt! Did I not know that the road was bad? Oh yeah, I did. But last time, when I had been there on my Apache, the bike suspension had kept these intricate road stats at bay, and even though I had cursed the bad road that time as well, actual details of 'just-how-bad-is-bad' I experienced today on a suspension-less near-road-bike - my Sporterra Sport - with it's tiny 700x38c tires filled to the brim with fresh morning air.

Sinhagad ride was on the back of the mind for sometime due to the way it's placed alongside Lavasa (ha!). I wanted to check just how tough it was going to be on a cycle. So in the morning I left, just about time when the skies were lightening up. Thought the Warje road would be better than the always-under-construction-and-dug-up Sinhagad road. But boy, was I wrong! The Warje road is at least as bad, if not worse, as the Sinhagad road; and what with the tiny suffocating gullies stinking of rotten meat everywhere. Uptill Donaje, the road is pathetic to put it very mildly. And from Donaje till Sinhagad, the road is beyond my stock of a gentleman's vocabulary.

As for the ride, during uphill you dont mind bad roads because you are anyway at a snail's pace. So uphill: good road is good to have, not a necessity. Going by the elevation plot, it looks like a mighty inclined one, but the gradient at 4.8%, is less than the 6% gradient of Lavasa climb. All along the ride, I never felt like losing it at any point in time. On Lavasa, it does feel like that during the Lavasa-4 to Lavasa-3 stretch. Here, I was quite at ease during the first part of the climb and carried on feeling quite fresh, no huffing or puffing. To give it to the Sinhagad climb, the last 2.5kms stretch indeed sports a respectable 8% gradient. But all along, it never looked like I wouldnt make it without a stop; except for the last stretch where, after passing on an opportunity to sip some water on a platued road, and then never getting any chance later on due to continuous climb, I was on the edge of getting dehydrated. The wheels were slipping due to loads of gravel on the road, and to make the matter worse, the chain was slipping and the rear derailleur (it's Alivio for crying out loud!) had developed a mind of it's own, changing gears when it deemed fit. I, for once, thought that I would have to take a stop and attend to the issues. But carry on I did, summoning all my endurance. And good enough, reached the top of Sinhagad without a single stop after leaving home.

When I check the stats and look back on the ride, I feel Lavasa gets exhausting in the final climb probably because you need to first ride ~40kms to reach the base of the climb - 2 ghats along the route; while here for Sinhagad the distance is exactly half of that without any ghats enroute. So comparatively you are mighty fresh when you arrive at the base, and then it's not that big a deal to reach the top.

After reaching the top, by the time I noticed a non-piercing boulder to sit and settled on it, I found out the phone battery was dying. So I immediately saved the uphill ride and replaced the battery with a spare one that I had carried. The prudence of spending a thousand bucks on a spare battery finally paid off. More importantly, not forgetting to carry it and then actually having it around when needed, was even more satisfying. So even though the ride is split into two halves - uphill and downhill -, and however much I would have liked to have recorded in a single GPX, I at least could have it recorded.

The downhill from Sinhagad top, has already been given a grand treatment, so no more on that again. But I was desperately looking forward to get onto even a semi-decent road where all my bones wouldn't have to rattle like they were stuffed in a leather bag and swayed end to end; where a vibration started at a knuckle of my toe will not have to end up at the tip of the highest standing hair on my head. But the misery continued till I got on the bypass.

The moment I hit bypass, that smooth surface of tar was such a relief and so inviting, that I threw caution to winds and raced like a man with a mission, outpacing a Maruti Omni enroute. There. Even my cycle has outpaced a Maruti now. You better be not around until I will have to out-run you, you Maruti people ;) The joy of seeing utter disbelief in that Omni driver's eyes, for a moment, made me forget the dusty, trafficy, unsettled, tormenting ride on the Sinhagad road till then.

The nearly same timings for uphill and downhill are an indication of how much I would have cursed everyone and everything that came in a kilometer's distance of being even remotely responsible for the road condition.

Here is a short comparison of a Lavasa and Sinhagad cycling ride (in my eyes) --

Destination:	Lavasa (aah!)	Sinhagad
Distance till Base:	~36kms	~18kms
Climb from Base:	8kms	12kms
Overall Gradient:	6%	4.8%
Top Gradient:	8.1% for 4.6kms (mid climb - around Lavasa-4 milestone)	8% for 2.5kms (final climb till the top)
Road Condition:	Goooooooooooood!!	Horror of horrors!
Will I go Back:	Hell Yeah!	Well, not until I lose my mind ... again.

And here are uphill and downhill tracks recorded and maintained on Sports-Tracker -
Home to Sinhagad (uphill): http://www.sports-tracker.com/#/workout/shreyas/cjb0cf3e6mo4pvem
Sinhagad To back Home (downhill): http://www.sports-tracker.com/#/workout/shreyas/cjb0cf3e6mo4pvem

वासुदेव

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खणखणीत आवाज.पण तितकाच सुरेल. लहानपणा पासून कित्येत वासुदेब बघितले, ऐकले; पण असा सुरांची जाण असलेला पाहिल्यांदाच. सकाळी ६-६:१५च्या दरम्यान गाढ झोपेत असलेला मी खाडकन जागा झालो. त्यानं उठा पांडुरंगा म्हणेपर्यंत झोप डोळ्यावरुन पूर्ण उतरली होती. एकदा वाटलं पटकन ध्वनीमुद्रित करावं आणि youtube वर टाकावं पण आळस आडवा आला आणि मी गादीवर लोळत त्याचं गाणं ऐकत तसाच पडून राहिलो.

आवाज इतका खणखणीत की त्याला माईकची गरज नाही. गाणं म्हणत म्हणत तो दूरवर गेला तरीही त्याचा आवाज येतच होता. जून्याकाळी, राजा-रजवाड्यांच्या काळात, ज्यावेळी माईक किंवा amplifiers नव्हते, त्या काळात असता तर ह्याच्यावर वासुदेब व्हायची पाळी आली नसती कदाचित इतका सुंदर आणि standout आवाज.

(वासु)देव करो आणि हा वासुदेव कुणा जाणकार (आणि 'पोहोच' असलेल्या) माणसाच्या कानावर पडो.