Day 468 | Mt Isa for a while: where would you rather be?
rest day
24,000 residents and no dedicated bike shop.
Alice, with 27,000 had two.
The nearest one is in Townsville, 904 km away. But at least at the only sport’s shop in town they have a fair corner with 50 bikes of various species, 10 choices of spare tyre, none much good, and, best of all, about 5 choices of new saddle, rails intact, all from Giant.
Sorting the seat post is the first issue and it runs into an initial problem, my existing post in the chrome moly frame hasn’t been moved in years and I can’t make it budge. I’ve found some respite from life totally set in the Exterior, and the potential to sit on a chair with a back rest, by booking into a backpackers for a few days and I accost a roommate of the burly body shape to assist with the extraction, Matt’s a plumber and must have an affinity with sorting pipes.
His combination of big Crescent and chunky biceps is unsuccessful, then seeing the fun, a troup of young tradies, extinguish cigarettes and hustle over to have a go, but in the arm wrestle my faithful companion, ie, the bike, emerges the winner, a true champion. That seat post will never emerge from its hole without destruction of the frame, I step in before the pipe wrench with a temporary galvanised pipe extension is brought to bear, I’m aware that this town is unlikely to have an exact replacement, there’s just excessive separate diameters of seat post around and the steel frame is now no longer too common.
But thinking laterally the seat post itself is not the issue, it’s the saddle rail clamp attachment at the top which while having done the job, after a fashion, since the original bolt snapped back before Chillagoe, had already had a crack in the cast aluminium alloy back then.
One of the blokes hovering around, temporarily separated from after work drinks says he’s a welder and has the time and opportunity to TIG, or was it MIG, weld it up at work, the boss won’t mind, it’d only take 15 minutes, then half an hour to work out the bill.
In the end it proved unnecessary, the guy in the bike department did a rummage through the spare used bits bin, you need to keep anything of value out here for this type of incident and he presents me with a fantastic, slightly used, seat clamp, better than my original, it’s a pristine piece of jewellery.
I go to the local bolt shop, obviously superbly stocked in this entirely mining town and find out about the discrepancy of the thread on the original saddle clamp bolt, British Standard, (Fine), and the Chillagoe high tensile replacement, Metric. No BS of that type in town but I find the new saddle clamp bolt has a metric thread, so no problema, señor. I get two stainless bolts, just in case, and a couple of nyloc nuts, in zinc so they don’t weld together like those pipes, but it seems the paperwork is much too fiddly, I didn’t get the right bolt, there’s a queue in the shop now so I’m told it’s a gift.
Total cost of seat post sorting: $0.
Now that’s my kind of money, I think I can afford that.
I picked out a saddle from the choice of 5, not the most obvious but when I take the bike for a test ride it’s clearly not going to work, oh, how I’m going to miss that Flyer. Fortunately I can swap it for one with more rump padding and that’s as good as it’s going to get until Adelaide, or maybe that great bikeshop in Melrose.
One other mishap in this string, I’m lying on my bed, enjoying some afternoon horizontality, 38ºC outside, when I hear a BOOM, the manager comes in to ask if it’s my bike, the rear tyre has just exploded in the heat, and a number of heart attacks have been just narrowly avoided.
I just think it’s lucky that it’s happened now rather than with me aboard 100 km down the road but that old, actually near life’s end, replacement CrossMark tyre I bunged on out in the sticks a few days ago is now history, 150 mm of Kevlar bead having unravelled, and I also need a new tube.
Maybe, hopefully, this will be the last disaster in the current series, I really need a break from catastrophe for a while.