Bike Chain Repair the Dummy Way (Bike Week)

Bicycle derailleur and jockey wheel (orange arrow)

May is Bicycle Month, and the Antisocial Network is all in favorite of bikes. You should realize, however, that two-wheelers are no different from any other topic when it comes to the stupidification of the internet. Today, some bad bicycle advice comes to us courtesy of the mother of all dumbassery, eHow, in the person of Kaye Lynne Booth. Kaye Lynne's topic? "How to Put a Chain Back on a Huffy 10 Speed Bicycle" which, for unknown reasons, Leaf Group niched in HomeSteady.com

Never mind that no manufacturer has sold a "10 speed" in years (Huffy apparently uses only six-gear cogsets, so theirs are 6-, 12- and 18-speed models). The point for today is how Kaye Lynne provides eHow's readers a set of useless instructions that are also nearly impossible to complete, a sure sign that she's never actually performed the task she got paid to write about. But here, read Kaye Lynn's instructions for yourself:

Put the bike on the kick stand. Push the rear, S-shaped derailleur up, to put slack in the chain. Slide the chain back onto the rear cassette on the sprocket that corresponds to the gear that you were in when it came off. We here at the Antisocial network put more than 6,000 miles on a couple of bicycles last year, and we dropped a chain a few times. It never slipped off the cogset, and we're pretty sure our chain has never slipped off the cogset in something like forty years of riding. You know why? Because it can't!

Kaye Lynne's instructions are impossible to follow, because the chain is trapped inside the derailleur cage on a multispeed bicycle (see image of upside-down derailleur above), and the only way for it to "slip off" those little gear-y things is for the whole damned wheel to fall off. No, if your chain "slips off," all you have to do to put it back on is grab it, loop it over the top of the chainring (the "front gear") and turn the pedals once. Our chief cyclist can do that without even getting off the bike, Kaye Lynn!

From the more bad advice department, Kaye Lynne instructs readers to lube their chains with WD-40® to keep them from falling off again. That's bad advice in two ways: first, WD-40 is a wet lubricant, which will hold grit in the moving parts of the chain and wear out a drivetrain faster. Second, and more important, the most common reason for dropping a chain is that the front derailleur is out of adjustment. Lubing the chain won't fix that, dumbass! Many thanks to our Dumbass of the Day for these bad instructions based on faked experience!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5804429_put-huffy-10-speed-bicycle.html

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