27 months

Part of doing a shakedown ride on a project bike is to find out what can go wrong. Find it I did, indeed. Thankfully, it didn’t happen in so much of a spectacular fashion as it could have. Bike and rider emerged intact, for the most part, save for my ego. After a few spins around the quarter I decided to try climbing the series of long, undulating hills that lead from my house up to the Teachers’ Resource Centre where I work. I spent most of the time out of the saddle, but the bike felt stiff and climbed well. Even so, coming back from a six month stint on the couch I was feeling it. It didn’t help that February is one of the hottest months in Cameroon and I was riding during the peak of the mid-afternoon heat. Buea, which is mercifully spared the truly brutal heat of the lowlands, was getting warm enough for the locals to complain about it. When an African complains about the heat, you can bet it’s hot.

I made the TRC on the bike for all but for the final stretch of steep, deeply rutted road. There I found that my choice of 42×16 gearing left me with more chain inches than I could handle. Going downhill was a different matter. The 170mm cranks spun just fine as I negotiated the “death strip”—the narrow margin between speeding downhill traffic and the sheer drop into the straight-sided, half-meter deep open gutters that border virtually all the tarred roads in Buea. I was more concerned about the latter and felt fine with letting the taxis know it.

Everything was going okay until I hit the Great Soppo Market. It was Tuesday, market day, and half of Buea it seemed had gathered for the bi-weekly event. The four lane road choked down to two with streams of people, carts, hawkers, live animals and more overflowing into the street. Trying not to rely on the brake (and maybe to show off for the crowd just a little) I tossed in a series of short skips to check my speed. As any fixie rider will attest, skipping and skidding are two of the most fun things you can do with this breed of bike. At some point I felt the resistance give in the rear wheel and my cranks stopped spinning—a bad sign. As I suspected, the lock ring and cog had spun off the hub. Worse, the threads on the end of the alloy hub had been crudely machined flat against the stationary steel cog. There weren’t enough threads remaining for the lock ring to find purchase. End result: no fixed cog = no fixie.

Or was it that simple? After a solid day of no riding I hatched a plan. With a borrowed power drill and help from my local welder, I improvised a solution that, in theory, would permanently fix the cog while giving me a shot at removing it later. Given the unfeasibility of joining unlike metals with a welder, I sculpted a notch out of the outer surface of the exposed end of the hub and brought it to the metalworker. With a mix of Pidgin and pantomiming, I got the idea across. In no time he’d welded a bead onto the steel cog and filled the gap into the hub. The net effect was something like a key often used in machine work to fix two rotating parts. If need be, I surmised, it might be possible to drill it out and remove the cog—maybe. For now, I was happy. Pretty? No, but after some filing it didn’t look half bad. More importantly, it works! I put it to the test with a good skid and a series of punishing skips with nary a budge. Another small victory.