No Thru Traffic

My new chain!

Maybe 10 people will be interested in this…

So as you may have gathered, I had a real shitty time dealing with my chain all the time. After the first long ride it had turned red, was bone dry, and needed a ton of tightening. After repeating this cycle and discovering new terribly tight and terribly loose sections everytime, it finally got to the point where it was either going to catastrophically fail, or it needed to be replaced.

I even had a shop in northern Utah claim that they had a chain for me, only to get all the way there and find out that they had a chain a few links too short. Instead of taking their advice of just adding a couple links of my old chain to the new one, which would have been terrible, I just had them take a few links out to give me some more adjustment. It was stretched, but still had some life left in it.

It always seemed like a smaller chain than it should have been, but I attributed it to my lack of knowledge on the subject. However when I finally found myself in Moab, UT with a chain that was skipping teeth and bright red I decided my life and motorcycle was worth getting a new one. Somehow a tiny and awesome shop in Moab had my chain – a rare find considering no one within 100 miles of northern Utah had one.

And when I had him put the new chain on for me, we all discovered why this one had been such a pain in the ass. It turns out that it wasn’t an O-ring chain – meaning that it would need constant lubrication in order to work properly. It’s so senseless to have my chain that I didn’t even consider it wasn’t a normal O-ring chain. No wonder it was so small. No wonder it needed constant lubrication. No wonder it was red hot. And no wonder it failed so quickly with so many constant miles.

Good thing the first shop didn’t add a couple of my old links to a new chain. Not even they noticed that it wasn’t an O-ring chain.

Anyway, now I should be all set. My sprockets seem to have at least 5,000 more miles on them so I should be able to get home.

I need a shaft-driven bike.