MossCommuter
Guru
- Location
- Salford
A colleague that I sometimes ride home with made a comment that resonated; he said "a bicycle should be silent".
Mine never has been, I have never really thought about it much, but the other day a mudguard bolt failed and everything became very rattly. As I made the repair my mate's words were running through my mind so I went about eliminating all the rattles I could by tightening stuff and being more thorough than usual with the lubrication routine.
It didn't work... Riding to work the next morning I became aware that the main rattle was the constant high-pitched one from the frame mounted D-lock; it's a noise that's always there and had become background so going home I put the D-lock in a pannier.
The new total silence has had an interesting side effect: without the haptic-feedback of constant rattle the bicycle somehow feels more comfortable and the tyres feel more forgiving even with the same pressure. It's as if the rattling of the D-lock was fooling my brain into believing the surface to be harsher than it was. I sense the tyres moulding to and gripping the road instead of bouncing across the top. I am also a bit quicker; I do less coasting on the rough bits and do more constant pedalling. Maybe fewer rattles make my subconscious more confident of the surface - "the bicycle is not rattling to bits, it's OK to give it some beans".
Weird.
Mine never has been, I have never really thought about it much, but the other day a mudguard bolt failed and everything became very rattly. As I made the repair my mate's words were running through my mind so I went about eliminating all the rattles I could by tightening stuff and being more thorough than usual with the lubrication routine.
It didn't work... Riding to work the next morning I became aware that the main rattle was the constant high-pitched one from the frame mounted D-lock; it's a noise that's always there and had become background so going home I put the D-lock in a pannier.
The new total silence has had an interesting side effect: without the haptic-feedback of constant rattle the bicycle somehow feels more comfortable and the tyres feel more forgiving even with the same pressure. It's as if the rattling of the D-lock was fooling my brain into believing the surface to be harsher than it was. I sense the tyres moulding to and gripping the road instead of bouncing across the top. I am also a bit quicker; I do less coasting on the rough bits and do more constant pedalling. Maybe fewer rattles make my subconscious more confident of the surface - "the bicycle is not rattling to bits, it's OK to give it some beans".
Weird.
