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| before |
I had fallen in love with my Electric Bike (http://www.solarbike.com/) for the commute to work. It had cut my ride home from a 45-50 minutes ride to a 26-27 minute ride, which is about the same as the bus, plus I still got a good work out, but it wasn’t a battle.
Then Thursday came.
I was heading down the Southern Outlet at about 30kms an hour and a roadie went past. Curious to see how much faster he could go, I let the brakes off ,and off I went, happily matching his pace at about 40-50km an hour. From there, it all went wrong very quickly.
The bike suddenly felt like the front anchors had gone on, and a horrible grating noise sounded from the front wheel. I pulled the bike to a stop as quickly as I could with the back brakes, and took a deep breath when a quick inspection didn’t seem to show anything wrong.
I set off again, noticing the electrics were dead and thinking maybe the wheel had seized, I tried to cycle on to work, but 20 metres further along it was quite clear the bike wasn’t going anywhere fast. It was like trying to cycle up Proctors road in top gear.
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| and after |
It was at this pont I realised just how lucky I’d been … you can see what had happened in the photo to the right, the front of the drop outs on both sides had just snapped off. The wheel was being held in place only by good luck.