April and Ella know when it is time for a walk and in no small part due to putting on shoes. And that was me yesterday getting the new eBike, a RadRover5, ready for its one week celebration. I was in the garage and getting ready to put the bike on the car and test the Kuat Phat Bike Kit I had purchased a couple of years earlier when I purchased my Kuat NV 2.0 rack. I wanted to make sure that the rack worked and as I have only had the RadRover5 for a week, I wasn’t sure of the battery life as it actually related to a real ride. I enjoyed the manual which gave various levels of intensity and power settings and explained the hours difference. But nothing said “Hey, you might be on and off grass, cutting through trees, and riding up hills and buzzing back and forth on sidewalks. Clearly the manual on this eBike was written by someone who never really loved the bike…if they had, or had actually ridden the bike, they would have had a column on the battery life chart for “Willing to crank it to 5 to pass other cyclists in town”, “chasing someone else on a RadPower Bike who weighs less and is burning juice going up a hill in front of you”. The critical power losses come on this manner of segments, not simply the idea that you bought this bike and are going to maintain ECO mode for a long time.
So I am pumped. Ready to roll the bike out of the garage and onto the car and then I remember I was going to take my QuadLock Out Front Mount off my Zwift Bike and move it onto the eBike. I spent time pawing through the boxes of bike parts, supplies, tools, and errata to find the Quadlock boxes which housed the various size rubber rings so the mounts would work on various bar thicknesses. Locating the one I wanted to use I spun the screw and released the mount and turned to the Rad and put on the mount and the correct ring and realized I had dropped the screw.
Now, dropping a screw, and sometimes kicking it, sometimes having it bounce off a bike, or something on the garage floor and end up in any manner of locations from under something to hidden in plain site, is something that happens to all of us. I am proud to say that it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure at all anymore, it is just another thing to deal with and I rather enjoy getting down and looking at the floor sideways and wondering where the screw ended up. I was busy getting my super powerful magnet after looking “everywhere” and when I had the magnet in my hand I looked down and there was the screw all ready to be picked up and put in the mount. The mount secured the phone and I was set to roll.
I will admit, I am not sure why the phone goes dark at all the parts where one turns, and that still needs attention. But it worked great. And it is summer and I can switch the mount to the Zwift bike to run it when I need it again.
Oh, how did the ride go? Look for yourself