A bike with no free-wheel

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I left you last time with a problem … a bike with no free-wheel

So we get back to the room with our bikes and a few more days to enjoy on our biking holiday. I scour the little town looking for bike repair shops and guess what, there are none. Then I find a little store selling holiday makers stuff which is not doing so well, all the stuff in the window is faded by the sun and the shop owner is half asleep. I've spotted a couple of old bike pedals in the window for Euro 3.

Now I reckon they will have some ball bearings in them even if the wrong size. It's worth a Euro 3 bet. I take them back to our room and break them open. Now I have not got a micrometer with me but I set up my penknife so the blade with a ruler on it is stuck at a fixed steep angle and slide the balls into the V created. Yep the balls are the same size as the free-wheel's to a couple of microns ( I just knew an engineering degree would come in handy one day). I pop them out (keeping what little grease there was on them, wiped the free-wheel components clean of grit and assembled the whole package. “E voilà” one working free-wheel which needed an odd tighten up every 15 minutes or so. Now if only I had a free-wheel spanner.

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