I fixed my bike!
Mar. 18th, 2014 12:36 pmI fixed my bike! It's great being able to travel freely again. It was never bad enough to *not* go somewhere, but it was a hassle being just that bit more inconvenient.
I'd mentally consigned it to "wait until I had time to fix it properly" which dragged on and on, and then realised that, maybe it actually wasn't that hard if I was methodical at looking at what was wrong, and it actually wasn't.
One problem was the front gears getting out of alignment, so I couldn't move them far enough to go into high gear. I wasn't sure if I could adjust them myself, but I thought that I couldn't make the alignment worse, and actually, when I turned the bike upside down in good light, with the right hex key, it was fairly easy.
The other was something sticking between the cassette and the wheel. I wasn't sure if it would need replacing, I didn't even know how the bits went together. But taking the wheel off and poking around for anything stuck fixed it, and at least I now know what may go wrong in future.
It reminded me a lot of: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/, where Anna Salamon said she got into the habit of assuming she couldn't fix ANY mechanical problem, when actually, thinking for 15 minutes to see if it was obvious was worth it, even if you usually ended up having to find someone who knew more. She said this was exactly like how she saw many children learning simple mathematical expressions -- they'd learned there was no point trying to understand it because it would just go wrong, so they clung to "demand a fixed recipe of instructions and then follow it to the letter" as the only possible way to approach the problem.
I'd mentally consigned it to "wait until I had time to fix it properly" which dragged on and on, and then realised that, maybe it actually wasn't that hard if I was methodical at looking at what was wrong, and it actually wasn't.
One problem was the front gears getting out of alignment, so I couldn't move them far enough to go into high gear. I wasn't sure if I could adjust them myself, but I thought that I couldn't make the alignment worse, and actually, when I turned the bike upside down in good light, with the right hex key, it was fairly easy.
The other was something sticking between the cassette and the wheel. I wasn't sure if it would need replacing, I didn't even know how the bits went together. But taking the wheel off and poking around for anything stuck fixed it, and at least I now know what may go wrong in future.
It reminded me a lot of: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/, where Anna Salamon said she got into the habit of assuming she couldn't fix ANY mechanical problem, when actually, thinking for 15 minutes to see if it was obvious was worth it, even if you usually ended up having to find someone who knew more. She said this was exactly like how she saw many children learning simple mathematical expressions -- they'd learned there was no point trying to understand it because it would just go wrong, so they clung to "demand a fixed recipe of instructions and then follow it to the letter" as the only possible way to approach the problem.