A Bicycle Troubleshooting Process Example

Slightly bent tooth on my Pivot Trail 429. I like troubleshooting things. It’s basically what I do at my day job, and I’m kinda good at it. Sometimes I’m asked for illustrations of how I troubleshoot stuff, so I’m sharing this example of figuring out a noise on my Pivot Trail 429‘s cassette that cropped up yesterday when riding at Poto with some friends. I visualize this sort of troubleshooting as being shaped like a funnel. At first everything’s really broad and big and open, but with each step I (hope to) narrow things further and further until the potential is super narrow and pointing at the actual problem. When riding last night the noise started out sounding like a shifting problem. I didn’t feel it in the pedals (so it wasn’t ghost shifting), but it was an irritating click noise that seemed to only happen in my most frequently used gear. So, I kept riding, gathering a bit of data, so I could solve it later. Here’s the whole process broken down by question and finding. Q: What…