"It's been a cheap year for biking so far". Oh dear.

And with those foolish foolish words still hanging in the air as we climbed through the woods on the new Roaches ride, I was soon to discover the cause of the phantom rattling sound from the back end of my bike.

Before the ride was over I had discovered, with the Baron's help, that the cassette was incredibly loose on the freehub body and was the cause of the rattle - but it was only doing it when the chain was on the top three gears as it was the bottom end of the cassette that was loose. On top of this, the Chris Bling hub was starting to be a bit lazy on take up.

You can imagine the trepidation with which I removed the cassette (no damage to the freehub splines thank god) and then took the rest to our local friendly porsche owning bike shop for a diagnosis.

Anticipating a bill of epic proportions for a chris bling hub replacement, I sensibly waited till Fiona was away before approaching the shop. This had the benefit that the kids were running wild in the shop trashing everything so the staff were not exactly on the ball when it came to working out the cost. Somehow I managed to leave without paying a penny and was told that CK's warranty would cover it. Yippeee! The wobbly cassette was cured with the addition of the spacer ring I'd somehow managed to leave out. Oops.

Not so lucky at the counter was the grumpy roady whose titanium lightspeed road bike (apparently about £4k's worth and one of 3 he owns, all sorced from the US direct) had been brought in for some routine service work only for the nice mechanics to spot a truly horrendous crack all the way round the head tube/down tube area, so bad, even I could spot it. Apparently he'd been doing over 40mph on it the day before...

The friendly chaps at the counter pointed out that as the bike was purchased in the US it wasn't covered by a UK warranty. I'm not sure if "glee", "shardenfreude" or just general smug gittery is the right thing to describe what was going on, but you get the drift. Ouch.

As I left, the grumpy roady was on his mobile to the US whilst the helpful counter staff pointed out that it wasn't quite such a cheap bike now...