Today, I was intending to cycle from Edinburgh to Berwick-upon-Tweed and back. Unfortunately on leaving the lights a Regent Road to head down on to London road, my gears started making a grinding noise.
Gears 5-8 all made a horrible noise. Luckily I still had gears 1-4, though unfortunately I had a top speed of only about 15 miles per hour, which is way too slow when on the road. I cycled down to Halfords at Seafield to see if they could see what the problem was. One of the guys at the BikeHut took a look and said that I could either wait about 10 days for a gear service (£14.99), or replace the gear cable myself, which probably would be the problem (£1.99).
The old gear cable has had one of the strands lose in parts of the cable. However the change of the cable hasn’t made the noise go away. So it seems that the gear unit will need to be opened for an half yearly service. I also need to get a new chain and front cogs for it too some time soon. 🙁
At least I did manage to do some more mapping for OpenStreetMap.org, so it wasn’t a completely wasted journey.