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Rant: my $14 chain checker was lying to me and it cost a customer a whole drivetrain
Last Thursday a regular drops off his gravel bike, says the chain skips under load on the 3 tallest cogs. I check it with my trusty chain checker, tool says 0.5 percent wear, so I tell him the chain is fine and it's probably a bent hanger. I straighten the hanger, charge him $25, he rides off happy. He's back Saturday, skipping worse, and now the cassette looks chewed up. I pull out the Park CC-4 I never use since it lives in the bottom drawer, and guess what, the chain measures way past 1 percent. My cheap checker had been reading low for months, probably got banged up in the tool bag and the pin geometry went out of spec. End result, he needed a new chain, cassette, and chainring, and I ate the labor to keep him from bad mouthing the shop. Now I've got a $200 paperweight of a chain checker in the trash and a rule that any skipping complaint gets measured with a ruler whether I like it or not. Anyone got a go-to chain wear tool that's survived real shop abuse, or do you all just use a 12 inch ruler and math like the old guys?
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grace_wright1mo ago
Wait, you charged him 25 bucks for a bad diagnosis?
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