A simple enough job, cleaning the chain on my 2 month old Merida eOne-Sixty. But I thought I'd be a bit more thorough than usual, so I popped it up on my Park Tools bike stand as a recently mangled knee is stopping me bending down for a while. There's only one horizontal piece of top tube that will go into the jaws of the stand, right above the shock, so up she goes and I tighten the clamp, nothing unusual there. I set about removing and cleaning the chain, giving it some TLC and then sticking it back on again. So far so...
I start loosening the whirly clamp thingy on top of the stand but it feels a bit stiff for some reason. I hadn't noticed anything unusual while tightening it but may have been pre-occupied supporting the immense and unbalanced weight of the back end with my weaker hand. Anyway this little issue then hit me square in the eye (see pic). The bottom of the jaw bolt had chewed through the top of the rocker link making a nice little gouge in it. You can just see a trace of the lovely Teal paint on the bottom thread.
I think I uttered something blasphemous at this point. Park Tools, this is terrible, and I sure hope no-one else suffers the same damage through your weak engineering design. The bolt is simply too close to where bits of bike could be lying while clamped. An easy manufacturing fix but too late for me. Annoyed.
I start loosening the whirly clamp thingy on top of the stand but it feels a bit stiff for some reason. I hadn't noticed anything unusual while tightening it but may have been pre-occupied supporting the immense and unbalanced weight of the back end with my weaker hand. Anyway this little issue then hit me square in the eye (see pic). The bottom of the jaw bolt had chewed through the top of the rocker link making a nice little gouge in it. You can just see a trace of the lovely Teal paint on the bottom thread.
