A little detective work

Remarkably, no bike store that I could find in Ulm had a road bike derailleur.  And, the Shimano SLX that was the only 10 speed I could find has a different cable pull.  So, it takes 2 clicks of the shifter to move one gear - so, I have effectively 6 gears in the back (I can get all 10 gears if I pull the cable by hand, but that seems pretty impractical going up a big hill).  I'll try again for  a road derailleur in Regensberg, and again in Vienna - if I still can't find one, when we get back into the mountains in Romania, I'll just take up some extra slack in the cable and move my 6 available gears to the inside of the cogset.  

I still had the mental challenge of figuring out what happened.  The available data:

I had just come down a hill in the big chainring, shifted onto the small ring but instead the chain dropped inside the small ring onto the bottom bracket (not that uncommon an occurrence - just ask Andy Schleck).  I was able to just flick the lever back to the outside, and the chain went back up onto the big ring.  No problems.

As soon as I started to put pressure on the pedal again, I pedaled less than one full turn and there was an awful grating noise from the rear derailleur and the hanger and derailleur was toast.

After I converted the whole mess to a single speed and rode the rest of the way home, my power meter no longer gave any output readings of cadence or power output, although the Garmin still told me a power meter was connected and I could do a manual calibration.

That suggested to me that the power meter itself was still good, but that the magnet was missing so that the cadence reading was always zero - thus the power (force times cadence) was always zero even though the calibration was good.  Today, I looked, and indeed the magnet was missing, though the mount was still there.

So, here's what I think happened:  when I dropped the chain, it knocked the magnet loose.  The magnet then attached itself to the chain (I've done this before - these rare earth magnets can jump a couple inches and attache to the chain so that they are hard to get off).  When I pedaled, the magnet got sucked into the derailleur, jammed the derailleur, pulled the whole thing into the spokes, and turned the whole thing to toast.

Elementary,  my Dear Watson.

Today's ride was flat, not much of great interest (the usual pretty rural towns with pretty churches with interesting steeples) - which gave me plenty of time to work out the derailleur problem in my head.  Went out after the ride and did some intervals - but no power data.  Best I can tell is that I didn't quite vomit, so not quite as hard as they should be.

The Danube has now become quite a large river - more like what a major river should be - though not yet anything like Missouri/Mississippi size - but much bigger than something like the North Platte.  No shipping on it yet - that starts at Regensberg - 3 days from now.

Time for a nap.  No pictures today.

Later, folks.