The title of this post may sound reminiscent of Robert M. Pirsig’s excellent book, but philosophy was not exactly on my mind when I tried to fix a busted spoke on the rear wheel of the Enfield today. Having suffered similarly last time a spoke went, I couldn’t help but noticing a couple of regularities:
Rule 5
I’m starting at five as I will probably need room for obvious rules like “Enfield Maintenance requires a hammer. Always.” and “If you leave the house without tools, the kickstarter will fall off”.
Erm. Anyway. Rule 5:
The likelihood of a spoke snapping increases with the effort required to replace it.
This means that all the spokes I’ve had to replace so far were back wheel, left side ones. These require removing the back wheel from the drive train, which of course means losing the axle alignment, and of course the resulting reassembly of is the only two person job in Enfield maintenance I’ve come across so far.
Rule 6
There are two varieties of back wheel, left side spoke. None of them are available at your local Enfield dealer unless you want to order spokes for a full wheel.
Rule 7
There are two varieties of back wheel, left side spoke. If you order two each from a not so local Enfield dealer (just to be sure), the one that’s broken is of the third variety.
At least I now have a specimen of a spoke with the right bend, but slightly too short, which I can show my local dealer – he has a large box of spares, one of which is sure to fit. And my older son now knows a bit more about how to help fix Daddy’s bike.
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