Tuesday April 29th - Trotternish

In France it was easy to fall asleep and wake up with the sun. It was just the right time of year that the night hours made for convenient sleeping hours, and I rather liked it that way. It was a bit harder to do that in Scotland - the nights were already on the short side, about five or six hours, so I'd often fall asleep in light and the sun got up well before I did.

The night was quite chilly at Portree. I'd brought my light sleeping bag, which was fine but I had to wear warm stuff inside it too and make the most of the hood and drawstrings.

I woke at 7:30 and left at 9, pleased to find that at I hadn't got any slower at getting away in the morning. I was pleased to find that the BBC's "two raindrops" forecast for Tuesday was a pack of lies, and the day was pleasantly sunny, a blue sky with only a few puffy white clouds.

I carried on up the road and onto the Trotternish Peninsula, which is characterized by a huge ancient landslip running most of its length. The traffic and I parted ways at this point, and the road turned single track. Sheep wandered everywhere. As animals go, sheep are quite cyclist-friendly, despite being a bit annoying if you get stuck behind one. Unlike dogs, horses and cattle I've never had a sheep try to "take me on" by rearing up, chasing or charging. They seem to be universally terrified of the bicycle in a non-aggressive way, even if they will jog half a mile while frantically dashing themselves against the nearest fence in order to prove it.

I passed the Old Man of Storr, a tall needle-like rock on the landslip, and Kilt Rock, a cliff with a tartan-like pattern marked out by rock strata, with its nearby waterfall. I don't think I'd ever seen a "proper" waterfall before.

The terrain was quite tough, a lot of ups and downs, and my legs were still getting used to carrying a full load again, but there were plenty of interesting, rocky and beautiful landscapes and things were made easier by the lovely weather.

I dropped down a series of sharp hairpin bends into Uig, having revised my original route quite considerably and planning on getting the ferry to Tarbert the next day. I spent the night on a mostly empty campsite with lovely views across the water, the rocky outline of the Outer Hebrides visible on the horizon.

Monday April 28th - Skye

I started out on the A87 from Kyle of Lochalsh, over the bridge to Skye and then along the eastern coast towards Portree, the island's capital. Huge logging trucks thundered past on the single carriageway and I managed to scare the occasional sheep into running away from me - unfortunately when sheep run away, they often do so quite slowly in a straight line directly ahead of you, and are happy to do so for a considerable distance.

After a couple of hours of weak sunshine, the weather took a turn for the greyer again. Curtains of white mist descended over the Cuillin hills, obscuring what would otherwise have been a wonderful view.



As first days go, it could have been better. There's often a morale drop near the beginning of a tour, you wonder why you're doing what you're doing, you miss the comforts of home, and the distance yet to be covered is vast and intimidating, but it doesn't normally kick in on the first day.

I reached Sligachan after 25 miles, damp and downhearted. There was a campsite by the loch, it was closed but there were four or five tents parked there anyway. I suppose with land access right being what they are in Scotland, a closed campsite just means closed facilities. I sat down in the doorway of the toilet block to shelter from the drizzle that had just started. The weather, the traffic and my own lack of fitness had been getting to me.

After about 15 minutes I decided I'd had enough for the day so started testing various areas of campground for squishiness (result: mostly quite squishy). I'd just picked a slightly less squishy spot when I glanced up at the horizon and noticed a promising white light and hint of blue in the general direction of Portree. Hooray! Exactly the morale boost I needed. I abandoned my camp plans and set off again. My legs were hurting but after a couple of miles it was downhill all the way to Portree, where I camped just beyond the town.

Dinner was buttered macaroni and local smoked mackerel fried with onions, which was surprisingly tasty.

Sunday April 27th - Getting there

The journey started at Horsley station, with me plus half my body weight in bike and luggage on one side of the tracks, four minutes until my train was due, and my passage rudely interrupted by one of those pesky iron footbridges that is the scourge of train-travelling cyclists UK-wide. Had this been the end rather than the beginning of a tour and I was feeling a little fitter, I might just have been able to heave everything up one side and restrain it from crashing down the other, but I decided not to risk breaking my back.

I left the bike and handlebar bag on one side and raced (well, it felt like racing but probably looked more like waddling) over the bridge with all four panniers, then returned for the rest while several bystanders gazed on with amusement. It's not easy even getting an unladen bike over those things, and I only just made the train.

I was headed for the western islands of Scotland, a journey I'd had in mind ever since I'd got back from France, seen the vast empty mountainous landscapes of the Highlands on the telly a few times and imagined rolling up and down those long lonely roads on my bike.

I reached London and crossed from Waterloo to Euston without incident, apart from nearly wrenching my left hip out of its socket while stopped at traffic lights when my body forgot that a fully loaded touring bike is quite hard to hold upright.

The lights were off in the bike compartment and I spent several minutes struggling with a torch between my teeth while trying hang the bike up on the accursed hooks that train companies seem so keen on (those who care about their wheels slightly less so). Fortunately there was another cyclist to help, Harold, who was heading up the western and northern coasts over 5 days, riding 70 miles a day and staying in pre-booked B&Bs. We sat down in the lounge car later on, compared routes and chatted about cycling with a lady whose name I never found out, not a cyclist but a keen hill-walker. She worked in Scotland for the John Muir Trust, a charity which is not very well known but owns and protects various wild land in Scotland, including the peak of Ben Nevis which apparently cost about £400K a few years ago. She reassured me that, despite the miserable weather forecast over the next few days, I was bound to end up with at least some good weather over the next three weeks.

Being short on funds, I had booked a reclining seat on the sleeper but there was no power in the carriage I was supposed to be in so it was replaced with a berth carriage and I was fortunate enough to get a free bed for the night. Best of all, this included a toiletry kit with an awesome little collapsible toothbrush. I didn't sleep particularly well, mainly through excitement (about Scotland, not the toothbrush). Scotland isn't technically a different country but it has its own identity and is quite distinct in a lot of ways and I was really excited about seeing it for the first time. Every couple of hours, or every time the train stopped, I'd get up and peek through the window to see what station we'd stopped at, are we in Scotland yet, is it light yet...


It was light, and turning out to be a grey and drizzly day, by the time we reached Inverness. Thankfully, Inverness station is easy to get around with a bike and has no nasty footbridges. I stopped off at the cash machine to get some funny money and then boarded the train to Kyle of Lochalsh. A little old man seated by the bike compartment, started talking to me in a strong regional accent, and I had very little idea of what he was actually saying. I had joked before I left, that I'd probably have a harder time understanding the locals in Scotland than I did in France, but this did make me a bit worried that it might actually be true.

Harold and I chatted some more on the train, then he got out at some intermediate station whose name I forget, to begin his journey north. I hope he enjoyed it...

The train passed green-brown mountains, lochs, pine trees and sheep-covered grasslands. Newborn lambs frolicked and played together, big hairy cows grazed.

The sun came out as we arrived in Kyle of Lochalsh, and the cycling began.

Inbetween

As the bloke in the bike shop keeps telling me, touring really takes its toll on a bike, and this winter has been full of lessons in maintenance.

The dynohub needed sending off for repair.

I decided to swap out my chainrings, snapping both the chain and rear derailleur cable in the process.

Then there was the small matter of the front rack bolt being firmly stuck in the braze-on half way up the front fork, its head sheared off by my over-enthusiastic spanner work. Pliers wouldn't budge it. Dgym tried sawing a slot in the end and having a go with a flathead screwdriver. I finally took it into the bikeshop and got it drilled out, only breaking one drill bit in the process. Apparently it's a good idea to remove and re-attach these fixtures and fittings every year or so, just so the metals don't get too cosy with one another. My front racks are now re-attached and ready to go.

The combination of new chain and old cassette caused a lot of chain slippage, a classic sign of it being time for a shiny new cassette.

I also have been riding on a Brooks B17 saddle since Christmas, and am pretty happy with how that's working out.

I'm still happy with the chainrings, now that I've taken on a couple of the bigger hills around here I am feeling more and more confident that it was the right choice.

It's not perfect, I could do with overhauling the rear hub and rewrapping the bar tape, but it's good enough for the next trip.

Dropping gears

*** This little tale of bicycle butchery is dedicated to Sheldon Brown, who died earlier this month, and without whose articles I would be even more clueless about bike mechanics ***


Devon gave me new ideas about gearing. I had always been happy with the gear range on my Galaxy, throughout its life as a commuter, shopper and general workhorse, and for some time after I swapped commuting for touring. Like most other aspects of my bike, I didn't know too much about the gears and felt Dawes had made a reasonable choice on my behalf.

The 20% and above hills in the deepest depths of the South West caused me to think again. Chugging up 1:5 gradients with a full touring load, I was frequently running out of low gears and having to get off and push.

The Dawes Galaxy comes with a front chainset of 48/36/26 and 11-32 at the back, giving me a low gear of 21.9in. I noticed a few other touring cyclists mentioning lower gears, and wondered whether my setup was unusually high. A surprisingly controversial discussion on the CTC touring forum only concluded that everybody was different and, while some people had benefited hugely from lower gears, others were fine with much higher ranges. It just had to be tried really.


Chainrings

I learned a lot about cranks and chainrings through this process. When buying new chainrings for existing cranks, there are two things to consider:

1. the number of bolts around the crank spider
2. the bolt circle diameter (BCD).

These dictate which chainrings will fit the cranks, and therefore what choices you have in terms of numbers of teeth. With a triple chainset there are two sets of bolts, one for the inner chainring and one for the middle and outer, and thus two different BCDs. My inner BCD is 64mm, and the minimum number of teeth available is 22, which would reduce my lowest gear by 3 inches. However, this would be a huge drop down from the middle ring's 36t so I decided to order a 32t middle ring to even out the spacing a little. It was still possible that 32 to 48 would be too big a gap and I might want to change the outer for a 44, but since bigger chainrings cost more I decided to wait and see about that.

My chainrings arrived and, utterly clueless as to how these things are done, I dived blindly out to the back yard, armed with various Allen keys and spanners.

You can just push the chain aside (some consider it a good idea to put it on the outer ring to protect your hands from the teeth) but I decided to remove it to get it right out of the way, and to give it a clean. Technically you are supposed to install a new chain when you replace chainrings, to minimize wear on everything, but for the same reasons you are also supposed to replace the cassette when you get a new chain... I'm not keen on the whole idea of discarding perfectly good stuff just because it's a little worn, so decided to leave that one alone for the moment.

I removed the outer chainring bolts with a 5mm allen key. They were quite stiff, having been undisturbed for about five years, but gave eventually and the outer chainring slid off over the crank. Only the outer ring can be removed in this manner, and the inner two cannot be taken off without removing the right crank.

Removing the crank

I removed the dust cap, underneath which was a 14mm bolt requiring a socket wrench. This was even harder to remove than the chainring bolts, and it didn't help that I could only find a socket wrench with a couple of inches leverage. I've had this bike for five years, ridden it thousands of miles and this was the first time I've worked on this part of it. No wonder things were a bit stiff.

I was naively hoping everything would come apart once the bolt was out, but after that I faced with a square hole embedded deep within the crank, and no amount of pulling would get the crank off. At this point, the sun was on its way out for the evening, my fingers were freezing cold and I got distracted for a while trying to photograph the fat robin that had taken a shy interest in the complete cock-up I was making of my bike mechanics, well it was either that or the robin-muesli I had scattered for him.

I retired to the warmth of the house to research the matter further, upon which I learned I would need a crank puller in order to remove the crank.


Crank puller

My crank puller showed up a couple of days later. It was a very cold day so I kicked dgym's trike out of the shed to make some work space.

I wasn't sure at first that I'd got the right tool, the thin round bit didn't look as if it would fit into the even thinner square hole in the crank. A little online research reassured me that it wasn't supposed to, rather it pushes against that bit while the wider bolt pulls the crank away.

I removed the tool's outer bolt from inner, and screwed it as far as I could into crank, into the threads the dust cap had been covering. I then inserted inner bolt and screwed it in as far as I could. This evidently wasn't far enough as the crank didn't come off. I pushed and pushed, but nothing was happening. At this point, the bike had to come down off the workstand, as it couldn't stand up under this kind of force. I put my whole bodyweight onto it, leaning the bike against the workbench, one foot on the pedal, the other on the crank puller handle, keeping stability by leaning into the bench, and it finally gave way.

Finally, my crank was free. I removed the inner and middle chainrings, the inner chainring bolts requiring more force than the outer ones had (perhaps I was not feeling so strong that day?) and gave everything a good wash.

I fitted the new rings, the notches facing the crank. It didn't matter this time due to the tiny diameter of the inner ring, but on some setups the outer chainring nuts need to go in before the inner chainring is screwed in place. I greased the chainring and crank bolts before putting them in, but did not grease the axle as this can result in the crank going on too far and damaging the axle.

While I was at it, I gave the chain and rear mechs a thorough clean too, and put the chain back in place.

It was only when it came to turning the pedals and testing out the whole system that I noticed the rotation was somewhat uneven - puzzled as to what I'd done wrong, I eventually noticed I'd reinstalled the right crank at 90 degrees to the left one. Doh! It was much easier to remove the crank the second time round, and I set the crank correctly.

After some testing and tweaking of the system, I became slightly concerned that I wasn't able to get a good derailleur setup - the shifting seemed slightly awkward, having to overshoot to shift up, and then move the derailleur back to avoid chain rub. More research told me that derailleurs have a capacity, the difference between inner and outer teeth, and mine was most likely 22t - with a range of 26t I was now exceeding my capacity. This is not necessarily a problem, the capacities are normally set fairly conservatively and if the gearing system is not abused, i.e. smallest with smallest, I should be able to get away with it.

However, I eventually decided that on a touring bike it is always better to have the most standard and common setup you can - so 44/32/22 would make sense. I wasn't desperate to hang onto the 48t. Realising that my almost unused mountainbike had an almost new 44t chainring, it was easy and free to give it a try.

After much faffing around with both front and rear derailleur adjustment (during which I managed to snap my rear gear cable) I finally got things shifting reasonably well.


Chain

On my first trip into town, the chain snapped dramatically outside the supermarket. The break occurred a couple of links away from the Powerlink, and I managed to find a small fragment with one half of the powerlink but couldn't find the other. I freewheeled / pushed down the road to the bikeshop, which unfortunately was closed due to Christmas holidays. I went back and had one final hunt for the other bit of the powerlink, but no such luck.

Fortunately I had a chain tool on me so propped the bike up against the wall and knelt down to rejoin my chain. It would be a few links short but with careful pedalling and shifting, should get me home, which was only a mile or two away. Joining a chain is quite a fiddly task, especially when you have less chain to work with than you should. Since I normally use Powerlinks I'm not that experienced with the chain tool so it took a while, especially the final join, trying to keep the chain correctly routed and push the jockey wheels in to give me as much slack as possible (I eventually tied them to a spoke with a spare leg band). A couple of folk approached me while I was kneeling in the street, agonizing, swearing and bleeding (I must have snagged a knuckle on on of the teeth). One chap just wanted to check that I was OK and had everything I needed to fix it. The other advised me that braided fuse wire was useful as an emergency chain fix. Sounds like a good candidate for the generic repair kit.

I eventually got the hang of it. When joining, rather than just slipping the inner plates between the outer plates and trying to hold it all together whilst pushing in the rivet, it is much easier to push the rivet in by about a millimetre, part the outer plates slightly so that the inner can be pushed in and latch onto that millimetre of rivet - then use the tool and it'll stay in place.

It got me home, but I needed a new chain now that the old one had lost links. I learned how to check for chain stretch, measured the old chain and found that it would have needed replacing anyway before it started to damage the cassette. On visual examination of the cassette, it doesn't seem worn enough to warrant a replacement. If the chain slips a lot, I will take that as advice that I am wrong.


Conclusion

With the new chain installed and adjusted, things started to get better. I think that the new gears are an improvement, and I seem to be making more even use of the outer and inner rings, although living in the gentle valleys of North Dorset, I have yet to try it out on any really steep hills. It feels like I have made the right choice in reducing my gears, but time and touring will tell.