Emergency Bike Chain Reparation, on the Road and at Home

Why bike chains break

Bike chains incidents are not very frequent, but not really rare. Bike chains can break because the links became loose without us noticing. Maybe because we didn’t execute a sufficient chain lubrication and maintenance. Last but not least, because we shifted gear quite abruptly, too fast: in this case the chain undergoes a torsion that can easily break it.

The causes of chain fragility

The more gears in the cassette, the narrower the space between rings: consequently, chains have become thinner and thinner as gears became more and more numerous. Just take a look at the chain of an old five gear bike, you’ll notice quite a difference, which makes the old one a lot thicker and therefore sturdier. Older chains were so robust that you could have used them as a lock. That’s why, if you have many speeds, you should better bring with you a spare chain on your tours, especially if you venture riding in countries where is almost impossible to find chains for cassettes with many speeds. In case of the ebikes, especially with the mid-drive motors, the possibility of breaking the chain is even greater, since the motor considerably increases the pression on the chain.

Chain reparations, even during a bike tour

Master link

The quickest and easiest way to repair a broken chain is the quick link. We can take away the two or three links that are broken or damaged and mount the quick release link, or master link.

What if we forgot to the quick release link? In this case, we can use a chain snatcher. With this tool, we can snatch the pivots of the damaged links to take them off, and remove the pivots on the next intact links to connect them. In case our chain became shorter following these interventions, we would have difficulties using the lower speeds, especially with the biggest chain ring.

Having broken our chain during a tour, we could even be compelled to use our bike as a single speed bike, using the smallest rings both upfront with the chain ring and on the cassette. Of course we would find a better solution once we are back at home. A remedy for this eventuality is bringing with us a short piece of chain, in order to install it on our chain, taking out some links if necessary to reach the correct length. In this case, quick release links, called also master links, can be practical, otherwise we can use the snatcher.

Chain snatcher

Chain repairing operations

Once we have inserted the chain into the snatcher, we position correctly the pivot that we want to unlock and we screw with the handle, until the pin of the snatcher touches the pivot of the link. We then screw quite hard, since these chain pivots are not so easy to remove. We should better avoid to completely take off the pivot, because it would not be easy to insert it back. A good solution is to take with us some spare pins, they are easy to insert and, once there clipped in, we can just cut off the exceeding length. To snatch the pins back in, we use the snatcher in the opposite way. If our shifting has more than nine speeds, this operation entails that there will always be some links that are more fragile. See images below.

With a quick link, repairing the chain is even easier. We should just insert one part of the quick link on one extremity of the broken chain, inserting the other part on the other extremity, but on the opposite side. Once the two parts are joined, if we have difficulties tightening them manually, a strong pedal strike will do it.

How to eliminate rust from the chain, during a bike tour

Let’s imagine that it rained quite a bit and our chain is a bit rusted. Two solutions are possible. We can just dip our chain into a bowl of Coca-Cola. It contains orthophosphoric acid, that can effectively eliminate all the rust during a night sleep. Another possibility is letting it soak for some hours in a bowl of gasoil or white petrol. In both cases, we should clean it up afterwards.

Find more ebike tips here.

You may want to read: turning our bike into a single speed – tutorial.