Early this year, I got the cheapest bike I've owned since I was a kid, and it’s been a blast. It is a Mongoose fat-tire bike, single-speed, with a coaster brake. This means there aren't any cables coming off the bars, and you need to pedal backward to engage the brake. Every time I ride this bike, somehow, I’m left with a grin from ear to ear. Something about the simplicity of the bike, combined with the low expectations about performance, makes it a freeing experience to ride. However, I haven’t ridden it in months because, despite the simplicity, it needed some serious time in the shop, or so I thought.
A few fat-bike rides ago, I ended up needing to walk the bike out of the trails and back to the car because the rear hub came loose, and the braking that happens inside of the hub basically stopped working. The next day, I brought the bike into the shop to tighten the rear hub back up. I was debating whether or not I should do the much more time-consuming and thorough task of taking the hub apart to clean and re-grease everything before putting it back together, or do the five-minute fix of just tightening the hub back up. I obviously chose the latter.
As a result of my less thorough fix of the bike, I was hesitant to take it straight back onto the trails in fear that it would leave me stranded again, so my first ride back on it was just a 10-minute cruise down the sidewalk to a trailhead where I like to go for a run. On my cool-down ride back home from the trailhead, my fears of a recurring problem that would take more in-depth repairs seemed to be confirmed. As the bike was rolling, at about 10 mph or faster, when coasting there was a loud rattling sound coming from the rear wheel. My best guess was that this sound was coming from the braking mechanism inside of the rear hub, and to fix it, it would require taking the hub all the way apart, which is probably not a five minute fix.
Despite how much fun I have on this bike, there is something about a $200 bike that moves the required repair way down on my to-do list. It feels less important to keep this bike ridable because I have so little invested in it. In other words, there is little to lose if I don't ride this bike for many more weeks, and that is exactly what happened. I was intimidated by how long the repair would take, so I just let the bike sit there in its "un-rideable" state.
Yesterday, I finally found the motivation to tackle this project. I brought the bike with me into the shop. Then, after we closed for the day, I went out to grab the bike from my car, but before taking it directly into the store, I decided to take it for a lap in the parking lot to remind myself of the problem. On this lap, I hear the noise almost immediately, but this time I thought that it was still probably the hub, but the noise did sound kind of plasticky. I stopped by the door and I looked down at the bike, and there it was, the spoke reflector on the rear wheel. Could this sound be coming from the reflector all this time? I went into the shop to grab a screwdriver to remove the reflector. After three seconds, the reflector was off. I hopped on the bike again, but this time the bike was silent; it was the stupid reflector this whole time.
I thought to myself that I can’t believe I didn’t ride this bike for so long because the reflector was loose, and it took a few seconds to fix. Of course, because of the timing of when the noise started, I just assumed that it was related to the hub issue from the ride before. This goes to show how dangerous it is to make worst case scenario assumptions, and that things, lots of times, are a non-issue or easy fixes in life. In all areas of my life, I’ve been trying to stress less about assumptions of things and situations that are out of my control, and most of the time things aren't as bad as they seem.