Ooops almost

I did ride yesterday but it was a bit late and a lot overcast and I just didn't get any what I thought were good photo opportunities.

I am on the new bicycle and one thing I did not mention in the shake down summary is that I was slightly concerned by the state of the tires.  The bike had been in a stand on the concrete floor of the basement and the rubber of the tires didn't seem quite right, it felt vaguely dry.

But I pumped them up, they held air, everything seemed fine, I rode them a couple of times.

One thing about riding a bicycle is that it is inevitable that you become quite familiar with your front tire.  There it is going round and round right in front of your face.  Towards the end of yesterday's ride I started to notice that the tire didn't seem right, it just wasn't round enough.  It seemed slightly out of focus.

I decided that maybe six years unused was too long.  I had a set of new tires still in their packaging.  I have a new tire tool that I had never used, I decided to take the safe route and install the new tires.  Here's what I found.

There is another one nearly as bad down by the red spoke.

So the new tire tool was OK without being anything like a major improvement.  I got the tires off and discarded them.  I examined and briefly considered retaining the tubes.  The rear tube was pretty good, a tube that had never been patched.  The front had three patches.  I almost always have at least a couple of tubes around still in their original package and I just decided that in for a penny in for a pound (British content) and went with all new.

While I was at it I did some clean up on the drive train, removing an alarming amount of caked on crud from the rear derailer pulley wheels.

Bicycle content.