Today we rode into Puerto Vallarta proper to see if we could get a bolt or two from the "Casa de Tornillos" (the "House of Bolts").
If you remember from our previous blog, Christian had a problem with one of his panniers and the breaking of a bolt...something like that...haha. Okay, seriously, look at the following pictures and see if you can decipher them.
But basically the day went like this: We woke up, took showers, jumped on my bike and rode into PV. The ride was great. The highway was smooth and the traffic wasn't bad compared to a few places we've been. The directions we got were really good and when we got lost...haha...everyone was very helpful in getting us to where we needed to go.
After wandering around for a few minutes trying to find the bolt store, we stumbled upon a great bakery and bought some yummy pastries. Then we found the bolt store and when we showed the woman the bolt we needed, she reached down under the counter and said, "How about this?" and it was the right bolt with the right threads, just a little short. This is worth mentioning because we'd been to a few places we thought would have the bolt and they didn't. I'm wondering if they even knew anything about bolts, but this woman, she knew her stuff. So we got the bolts!
Everything was working out and we came back to the house and took a much needed nap.
Then, the trouble began.
We decided that the pannier frame needed a little more support so our Couch Surfing host took us over to a welder she knew and he welded a little support bracket. We started to reassemble the panniers and realized that the bolts weren't going in very easily and we had to take everything off to see the problem. Christian was annoyed and I said, "At least it's not welded." Famous last words. The bolt wasn't the problem after all.
We realized that we had put a spacer on the wrong side and that the bracket that Juan had just welded on, was just that, welded on. So we had to take everything apart and he had to cut the bracket and fix it and then we had to put everything back together again.
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| Old Bolt - New Bolt |
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| Juan the welder. |
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| No gate...and he makes gates! |
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| Christian wants this tool. |
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| Welding...you just can't see it without your shield. |
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| Hooray! Or Hooray?? |
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| Looking good. |
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| Oops! Too short. Gotta cut it. Dang. |
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| Hooray! It's fixed. Again. |
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| The other side was done right. |
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| Panniers secured and ready for take off. |
The moral of the story is: Always check your bolts and have spares!!
P.S. ~ It wasn't Juan's fault that the bracket was too short the first time. It was ours. Sorry Juan.
P.P.S.~ We paid Juan a whopping 10 dollars for his trouble. 100 pesos. Go figure.
1 comment:
Good the hear that the bike is fixed now :)
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