2023-07-21 07:03 | [practical-power-cycling]
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This is part of my bicycle generator project originally posted on hackaday.io
Where will you be when metal fatigue strikes? I knew something was wrong today when I started pedaling and the chain fell off. While trying to put it back on, I found the pedal bearing was extremely loose. Only a couple tugs with one hand and the entire bearing housing broke clean away.
Let's do a bit of estimation here. I had passed 15600 watt-hours when this happened, and I'm going to guess that my typical rate is about 50 watt-hours per hour. That's not a lot, but it sounds realistic. Some days are more, some are less. As such, that represents 312 hours of pedaling. If I say that a full cycle of the pedals is about once/second, that represents 312*3600=1123200 cycles, a bit over 1 million. This frame is pretty old, so it's possible in a past life it attained maybe another million or two.
The only question now is if it's worth repairing this old, cheap frame, which is actually too small for me, or, if I should find a better frame.
Ignoring the layer of greasy dust, we can see that it was the actual frame that failed, not the weld.
