Yesterday was rough. I’ve been working on emotional stuff for the last two months and I’m starting to get into the difficult items that I like to keep swept under the rug… which, ironically, leads me to sweeping ALL of my emotions under the rug and makes me a difficult husband and dad. The good thing this time around is that I have a vast array of tools at my disposal I didn’t have before. We had a funeral to go to, for my wife’s aunt and that was hard on my heart seeing all of that grief. My wife’s uncle is devastated. They were inseparable and together for something like 61 years. There was a lot of love in that room, though. The service and lunch after finished around 3 yesterday afternoon so we headed home for a 20-minute nap. I readied my Venge for Lennon and my wife decided to check out a gravel group nearby.

I arrived at the church parking lot a little bit late, but got ready and Chuck and I headed out for a quick seven mile warm-up loop. We had just enough time and with a southerly wind, we were making fast work of it. Until we got about a mile from the parking lot and I realized I’d developed something of a “click” every time the pedals went ’round. In the parking lot, when I went to unclip from my pedal, the left crank arm felt odd… and it only took a shake of that crank arm to know I had a major problem – and one that requires a long Torx 45 key to fix.

I took the dust cap off with Chucker’s multi-tool 6-mm Allen key but I didn’t know what I could do about the Torx-45… I pulled out my 5-mm Allen key from my pouch, lined it up in the bolt hole and turned it, cockeyed, and shored up the bolt. It wasn’t perfect, but it was tight and the slop was taken out of the crankset. I crossed my fingers as the group rolled out for the main event.

Four miles later I knew I wasn’t going to be finishing with the group. I probably could have toughed it out but I didn’t want to do permanent damage to my $600 S-Works crank. I turned around and hobbled my Venge back to the parking lot.

I got to work on it as soon as I got home. I knew I was going to test-ride it, so I didn’t even bother changing out of my kit. Now, there’s a trick to the S-Works crank. There’s an adjustable washer that sets the crank arm width inside the bottom bracket shell so that everything is tight, but without binding. When the bike came back from surgery on the crank, in hindsight it’s likely I didn’t set the washer correctly which caused the crankset to pinch on the bottom bracket bearings, which required I not tighten the bolt all the way to keep everything from binding… we’re talking fractions of a millimeter here.

Rather than mess around, I took everything apart yesterday, including the lock washer – I stripped the whole damn system down, cleaned everything, and put it all back together with some Loctite Blue on the threads… and sure enough, it went back together perfectly. Including the lock washer that I’d absolutely installed wrong the first time. This time I was able to tighten down the bolt as should be done.

I took the bike out for a test six miles and it was spectacular. Perfect.

It was a bummer of a lesson to learn on a Tuesday night, but I’ll stick with being glad I learned it.