I despise the need to go to Ikea.
I had a friend who would phone me up offering me dinner. It was bring car and roof rack, head off to Ikea, shop for a load of stuff and then I got treated to meatballs on a BOGOF offer. All that favour and dinner wasn't even cooked or paid for.
I then had to furnish a show house, for a job I was in, and did so from Ikea. Three trolleys and £8000 of goods and furnishings and the checkout wouldn't accept the company credit card unless the CE was there to sign for it! So it all went on mine and then on an expenses claim.
I had a migraine part way round, a lot of the large items were from the bargain basement and the staff were obnoxious in their outright refusal to assist in anyway. They wouldn't even mind the trolleys while I loaded it to stop other shoppers pilfering stuff from them.
Anyway, enough of Ikea PLEASE.
Tiddles' new tyres arrived today and I went off to get a new inner tube.
LBS was closed, market stall didn't have anything smaller then 16x2.5, ditto
Halfords.
In the end I went to Harry Hall's in Manchester and managed to park outside and get served on the door step watching out for traffic wardens.
£4.99 and I had a tube.
The tube is a physically different size to the front one.
The front one is only 30mm wide where as the original rear one and the replacement is 40mm wide.
Does it matter? Is one of them wrong?
The front also has a fully threaded metal valve stem.
The front tyre went on fine by hand and didn't pose any difficulty at all. The rear one was a bit more stubbon and the larger tube didn't help. It seemed not to want to fit in the tyre and was pinching all over the place. With a bit of inflation, deflation, inflation, deflation, wiggle it about and repeat I eventually got it on by hand.
I had to make up a new bit of rim tape. The old one in the rear wheel was hard and crispy and was up on the bead seat instead of the well. I used the one from Granville's new rim, that was broken at the valve hole, and cut and glued it shorter. I cut a new hole in it and it was fine.
I have just done a 2 mile shake down ride before it got dark and, aside form a little squeek from somewhere and twitchier handling, it seems ok.
The gears are a little slow to change but that may be down to using general purpose grease inside and it being a bit more sticky then the proper stuff.
Not found what the squeek is though but there is a stiff link in the new chain that maks the tensioner bob about a bit. I will need to find it as it wasn't there when I checked it when it was first fitted.
The squeek sounds like brake block rub but doesn't seem to occur in time to the wheel revolution, more one squeek every three or four rotations of the crank. Could be the stiff link squeeking the tensioner.
I think the cheap Schwalber Marathons might be seconds. The printing on one is nicely placed with the size and pressure marks between the brand and model printing. The other has the model printing overlapping the size and pressure marks.
Time will tell if they were worth the cost saving. I will email the seller to ask if they are seconds.
Mine was bought from there.