can i ask a really stupid question about chain wear tools?
the chain has been on my bike for fucking months, about 8000km of use. i have a lifeline essential chain wear tool. the .75% wear indicator doesn’t sit in the links at all (indicating it hasn’t worn .75%), but the 1.00% side does fit in. has it worn that much? (i was under the impression if it had worn by 1% the .75% side would fit in too)
conicidentally i snapped a chain for the first time yesterday
I’ve never managed this scenario before. Is the tool marked up wrong maybe?
that’s what i thought. can’t really remember. does the 1% fit in really easily? might be so worn that 0.75 no longer fits.
at that point i’m not sure if it’s worth replacing just the chain. iirc once it gets to that point it means your cassette is already worn out and if you put a brand new chain on, it won’t mesh with the worn out cassette and will jump around and wear out really quick. not sure though.
yeah, though I will double check again tomorrow. tbh I’ve just seen if i can lift the chain off the big chainring and see daylight underneath and i very much can, so i think i’ve answered my own question 
i suppose i should buy that 34 tooth cassette now
My chain tool (Park) has 0.5% (think about changing) and 0.75% (very worn and probably need to change the cassette. I’ve not used a 1% but that’s well beyond the limit but can’t think why it won’t fit in the 0.75%.
I think I get somewhere between 2000-3000 km out of a chain on the geared bike depending on weather and type of riding, I reckon it’s safe to say that at 8000km it’s gone as is the cassette. There is an argument for carrying on and using them both as the cassette is already worn out, it could impact on the chainrings but these wear much more slowly.
yeah, don’t want this to happen as i have a silly fsa modular chainset and replacement rings are like £100 each 
(new cassette and chain should be arriving in the next couple of days)
So I packed in the fags three weeks ago, and I think I’m noticing a difference on hills? Not getting half as breathless…
Took ruthless advantage of tonight’s downtime at work, brought in my gravel bike’s wheels and repaired both punctures (I say repair, I just installed new inners 'cos I’m lazy). I hate hate hate taking off/putting on tires because I’m incompetent, but I think I might have done it successfully. Might try installing some new winter tires on the old road bike on Thursday night’s shift. Take that, the man!
What are you gonna go for?
My recommendations are Michelin Pro4 Endurance, or Jack Brown Mile Munchers.
Posted this on Twitter earlier and it’s possibly my most liked tweet ever. m+ are a bitch to fit unless you’ve generous rims 
My BiL had a spare set of fetching retro Raleigh tanwalls going, so I’m going to try those first. The old road bike had slicks, so the plan is to switch that over to bad weather tyres permanently.
???
all my road bike tyres are slick??? the tread on other tyres does nothing on a road.
I guess this is yet another example of my naivety and why I don’t deserve to be called a cyclist. Here was me assuming tread on a tyre helped with grip like it would on a car. That’s what I get for not reading up on things properly 
Elsewhere, one of the punctures I “repaired” is already deflating. Cycling is fun but it’s also great at making me feel utterly useless and about 6 inches tall.
bollocks to this. you’d outride us all in a race, plus you have the flashiest bike!
i think the whole tread thing is a very common misconception. only helps with softer / looser surfaces, not with grip on roads. for winter i’d pick something with a bit more puncture protection (because no one wants to be replacing tubes in the cold), but you still want something with decent amounts of grip (which comes from different compounds rather than the tread). i’m really happy with my tyre choices which i just use all year round, i don’t bother with summer / winter tyres. no problems in the wet / with mulchy leaves, and barely any visits from the puncture fairy.
did you pinch the new inner when putting it on?
Had a scary moment on a roundabout with gravel tyres on the other day. Wouldn’t have happened with slicks (or if I’d gone round at a more sensible speed)
Even in a car, for best grip on a dry road you’d want slicks.
The job of the grooved tread is to displace water.
Looks like I’m not using the right words or terminology again. In my head I say ‘winter tyre’ and I mean ‘something that’s more comfortable to ride in the wet’, which is not what winter tyres actually are. I assume a tread pattern helps with that because it displaces water, like on car tyres. That’s what I’m thinking about when I’m considering ‘grip’ here, not general contact with the road surface per se.
nope, tread doesn’t provide extra grip on roads unless you’re going well fast, so useless for bikes on roads
Thanks for the advice, I’ll have a think about alternatives.
TBH, that makes me feel even more of a pathetic noob right now - all style, no substance. All’s good when everything’s working well, but when something goes wrong on a bike it highlights just how little confidence I have regarding maintenance and how incompetent I am regarding fixing things. I can ride a bike reasonably fast, but that’s pretty meaningless and I don’t feel anything like what a ‘cyclist’ is in my head. Maybe that doesn’t matter, but beyond actually riding I feel more and more stupid and helpless with every passing month.
It’s possible, it was really difficult to get back on. There is also the possibility I didn’t fully check the tyre over after taking it off. I found a gigantic hawthorn that made me go “aha!” which I then removed. Did I check the rest of the tyre afterwards? I can’t remember. Possibly not.
Anyway, back to the drawing board. Cycling is supposed to be my stress relief valve for life, not another source of angst 
This is key. It does not matter if you can’t change a chain or a puncture, or if you’re unsure of what a winter tyre is. That’s what bike shops are for. I never once attempted to fix anything on my bike when I rode (partly laziness, mainly scared of fucking up Campag Chorus, plus campag uses weird tools which I wasn’t investing in). Ride your bike, that’s all a cyclist is. Don’t worry about lack of mechanical knowledge or whatever.
*Understand your geographical location is a factor here btw, but the point stands
