Swoopy Is Dead. Long Live Swoopy.

I am sad to announce that Swoopy -- after just a week of life -- is no more.

Swoopy outside St Pancras station

Through a week of commuting, I struggled to figure out why and how Swoopy kept throwing her rear wheel askew, hard into the lefthand chainstay. Nothing we tried made the wheel axle stay in place in the drop out.

Swoopy's wheel strops were sudden and seemingly unprovoked. One minute, we were gliding along, the next we would come to an abrupt wheel-locked halt, with the rear wheel hard fast against the chainstay. Time after time, I loosened off the wheel nuts, re-centred the wheel and re-tightened -- only for it to happen again. Tantalizingly, not immediately -- usually the next day.

We experimented with the position of the axle in the drop-outs. We changed which cog in the cassette the chain ran on and slid the axle hard against the back of the dropouts. No difference... except to add fender rub to the equation.

Then Thursday morning, standing in the shadow of Birkbeck College on Malet Street -- in the rain -- I re-centered the rear wheel yet again and then noticed that the axle was positioned very slightly differently in each rear drop-out. Hmmmm. Had one rear triangle been bent? In other words, had Swoopy been in a crash somewhere in her dark mysterious past?

I got home that evening and told Adam what I'd spotted and my suppositions. He was doubtful -- there had to be another "more likely" i.e. "possible to fix" explanation.

However, Friday came and went with the same problems so I rode her to St Pancras and instead of locking her up for the weekend, rolled her onto the train to Luton, where I bundled her into a taxi and brought her home.

After a thorough investigation, Adam came into the house and announced "you're right; she's bent".

We tossed around a few ideas to change the build in ways that might compensate for the discrepancies in the two rear triangles, but the most obvious is the one that we won't have an opportunity to do in the foreseeable future: build her up a set of singlespeed wheels. And even then, there might still be problems.

So.......... that's the end of Swoopy's brief but glorious life as a London town bike. All a bit sad but at least I'm glad the problem has been diagnosed, as life was a bit bumpy and I just couldn't trust her and that made me sad too.

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Post-script added 10 May:

Adam just read this post and said (with some surprise and even indignation): "Swoopy's not DEAD! She's just gone back into hibernation after being woken briefly from a deep slumber."

A nice way to look at it. She'll wake again one day.