in a rare spell of preventative bike maintenance, this morning I removed my bottom bracket and cleaned it up and put it back in, rotated my chainring 72 degrees to even its wear, lubed my brake cables and cleaned three months worth of road grime off my frame. When I loosened the axle nuts on the rear wheel and pulled it out of the dropouts, both lock nuts fell off and hit the ground in four pieces, broken clean through. One of them was obviously broken for a while because there was plenty of rust on the exposed metal of the crack. I think the trauma to the nuts occurred one day a few weeks ago when my rear wheel slipped in the dropouts, pulled way off center on my way to King County at 4:22pm. The wheel was slammed against the non-drive side brake pad and it was like riding up a steep hill with the brakes on but I didn't have time to fix anything so I hammered through it all the way from 701 Pike to the courthouse. I'm guessing that's when I broke one of the lock nuts...
I am very lucky. Three weeks worth of Luck. Lucky I wasn't fixing a flat yesterday in the rain, dropping both broken lock nuts in the gutter outside 216 1st South when I pulled the wheel out, calling my dispatcher and walking up 1st Avenue to Mobius or Elliot Bay looking for some new nuts. Lucky.
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