Bike Repair

After my bike woes on Sunday, David had his on Tuesday. We both rode down to the airport to pick up the car with the plan of putting one bike in the trunk and the other riding their bike back to the marina.  I was the driver and left a few minutes after he did.  I was keeping an eye out for him and good thing as he was walking!  The man is made to ride bikes and walks only as a last option so something was clearly wrong.  Turns out, his seat post, a custom job he did about 6 years ago, broke off at the place the post goes into the bike frame.  He is lucky that he didn't fall over and lose some skin.  We loaded the poor, wounded steed into the back seat and went on our way.  We took the seat and post with us in hopes of having it fixed at a bike shop we had visited on Big Pine key.  Really nice guys and they thought they could help us out,  At the end of the day, however, they had been unable to get the old piece out in order to put in a new piece.  Today was major surgery day since we really didn't want to not have both bikes for the rest of our trip.  It turned out that some of the tools that he had added last minute to our inventory were essential to the repair.  After all is said and done, his wounded beast is all better ready for many more miles of adventuring.

Oops, this should all be one piece!

All we have to do is get that shiny piece our.

That saws-all was great.  He had to cut slowly and check constantly so he
didn't cut through the seat post.  My job was holding the vise still since it was
mounted to the workbench with only one bolt.

The work room is really a nice feature for boaters at Boot Key, especially the live aboard crowd.
They can even rent a locker (you can see some off on the far right).  We saw one guy who basically
used the locker as his wardrobe and pantry.  Some of the boats are really tiny so these lockers are
essential.  There are even sections where you can pull major parts off you boat to work on.  We saw an engine
being rebuilt one day when we passed by.

Once he cut enough grooves in the  old piece, he was able to pound it up into the stem.  He still had to
shape the new post with sandpaper to make it fit, then drill new holes and put  it all together.
Nice to have a handy genius on board.