So within the first month or so of being a happy Volpe owner I headed down the road on my favorite 12 mile loop ride. I made it up the first hill and then was heading up the second hill. At that time climbing a hill was a pretty big deal for me. I was just learning how to shift properly and needless to say I didn’t understand that you really need to shift prior to needing to shift. You see a derailleur works best when the chain is passing through it quickly when moving slowly the rear derailleur struggles to move the chain to a different cog. Don’t even think about shifting the front derailleur with low revs on the crank, it may happen but your poor front derailleur won’t like it one bit!
So on that fateful day up the horse farm hill I went, nearing the top it gets really steep and I found that I needed to down shift in order to keep moving, think turtle speed and you’ll have an idea how fast I was going. So I clicked away on my front derailleur and with a gnashing of teeth and chain things began to happen very slowly. Note it is really a bad idea to change gears when hardly moving and applying max torque to your crank arms which for me is about 144 ft lbs of torque, which is really good! Lots of cars barely make that much torque though I only produce about .5hp but that is a whole different story. Anyway at 144 ft lbs of torque and fighting gravity components start to fail…. And thus I found out what it is like to break a chain. Just as that happened the local home owner Jeff took notice of me and came over to see what was going on. He was nice enough to offer me a ride home in his ’76 ford pickup which I graciously accepted.
Of course the next day I went up to the Neighborhood LBS, located just a few minutes from my house and got 2 SRAM replacement links which are great! I installed a new link in just a minute or two and had my chain back together and was ready to roll again. Or so I thought. Turns out my front derailleur was a bit out of whack as well. After a few minutes of tinkering with it I decided the complex two screw adjustment system might as well have been a Swiss watch and gave up. So I loaded the bike up and took it down to the store I bought the bike from for them to fix it. After all they did do lifetime derailleur and brake adjustment free of charge! I’m really glad I brought it to them instead of my N-LBS as it turned out there was much more wrong then I knew. First of the front derailleur wasn’t out of adjustment it had actually pivoted on its mounting ring and was completely out of place. Once the mechanic corrected that issue he spun the crank a bit and informed me that my crank was also bent and I would need a new one of those as well.. He promptly informed me that Bianchi’s warranty was completely junk and they would say that I’m a big guy and that was the reason the crank bent. But he said they sold a lot of Bianchi’s and thus he would just put it through on warranty and get me a new crank seeing as it was only a month old. After a few days they called and it was ready so I went down and picked it up. They got me an upgraded crank to a Tiagra triple which was pretty sweet as it was now a 52-42-30 instead to the Sugino XD500T which was a 48-38-28 and made of recycled beer cans. So I got a better crank and can now go a lot faster owing to the larger chain rings. He also told me that additionally I had bent the rear derailleur hanger but thankfully it was a steal frame so they were able to just bend it back. All of that and no charge! I should have just left the chain broke as well!
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