The other boys don't do crack. Why do you do crack? That's not RIGHT!

If you remember my N+1 post from some time back, you know that I have a mountain bike. It was cheap -- an no-badge eBay frame find that I nabbed for $2.35 plus $30 shipping. Oversized aluminum tubes, tig'd and painted, ready to rock, elevated chainstays... Reminiscent of the Nishiki Alien from the early '90s, minus the square down tube. The only new parts I had to hang on it were the stem and headset. Everything else I had as remnants from other bikes.

I keep this one at work most of the time so I don't have to transport it back and forth, and I ride it during my lunchbreaks on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I've made some comfort revisions to the handlebars, varied between being a single speed and a 1x7...

I've also had a lot of issues with the rear wheel, specifically flats. Lots of flats. I changed the tube, the rim strip, the tire, filed and Dremel'd the valve hole. No dice, still flat. The next step was a new rim.

Eric, my training partner, volunteered to let me use another rear wheel. So I brought it home along with the bike today to be sure the wheel would work -- solid nutted axle, wide range gear cluster. I have an old road rear derailluer on the bike, so it can't handle a normal wide range of gearing.

So as I was taking it out of the car at home, I noticed a dark jagged line on the down tube coming from the mid-tube weld. And another one on the seat tube at its mid-tube weld. I did the fingernail check, and sure enough, they're cracks. Big ones.

All this time that I was hearing creaking and thinking it was the bottom bracket, or the crankarms, it was probably these cracks growing. They're almost half-way around the tubes.

Steel or titanium, it would be likely repairable. Aluminum? No go. This frame is now dumpster fodder, a gigantic paperweight.

I've had 6 mountain bikes in my life. This is the third one that's cracked, the second aluminum one that's cracked. Of the others: One I gave away, one got left with an ex, the last was sold to a friend.

Lesson? Well, I could say that I've learned to not buy aluminum MTB's, but the first one I had that cracked was steel. Or maybe it's that I need to not buy no-name MTB's off eBay. But it's given me well past my money's worth, and no other bike has cost me so little.

I know one lesson is to inspect the frames more often, so I'm not alarmed to find a crack in my frame that's almost half way through a tube. That would be smart.

Or maybe the lesson is that I need to have more than one MTB... Yeah, that's it. Always have a back-up.

Happy Halloween!