Imagine for a minute that you are driving your eighteen wheeler to work,
I need a vehicle that has the equivalent number of gears, and your
primary transmission locks up, leaving you with two gears.  What in the
world would you do?  Crank down the road in first and tenth gears?

Well, that's effectively what happened to me on the way to work.  My
rear shifter seized in such a way that I could no longer shift into
harder gears.  Before I knew what was happening and as I was trying to
free things up, I shifted it all the way to the lowest gear.  Woops.  It
no longer wants to play and my bike is stuck in the lowest cog.  I just
ride it to work and figure I'll take a look over lunch.  Take a look
over lunch, no dice, the mechanism is completely frozen and I haven't a
clue which of the 3000 parts in the shifter I would even look at.

Here's where it gets cool.  I just release the tension on the shift
cable, manually place the dérailleur where I want it, tighten the shift
cable again and presto, I now have a two, perhaps three speed bike.
It's certainly good enough to get me home and to the bike shop without
spinning like crazy.  I'm seriously thinking about starting to track
component age, it seems like everything on this bike has been failing in
the last year.  Oh well, still cheaper than replacing car parts.

As an aside, I was standing there at one point, trying to figure out how
I could manually hold the dérailleur in place and pedal to get the chain
where I wanted it.  I'm wishing for a third hand or work stand.  Not
having either, I'm racking my brain when it hits me... my neck.  Place
your neck under the saddle, lift up and it works quite nicely to get the
rear wheel off the ground.  Darn glad there weren't any cameras around
though ;)

Mark

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