Bikes

Bike gears are a pain in the arse. You'd hope with all the technological advances in life that adjusting gears would be at best unnecessary and at worst involve moving a lever or two. But no. For the non-bike-riders among you, it's a pain in the arse. Front and back gears each involve two small screws, a quarter turn of which can have a surprisingly large effect. But wait, there's more. On the back there's an extra screw which adjusts the tension of the spring mechanism, and on the front shifter there's a manually adjustable...thing, which also changes the setup.

As such, the whole thing becomes a balancing act, and thinking about it I can't recall ever having a completely perfect setup. Either the back gears don't shift quite right, or something rattles, or there's chain noise, or....aaargh. Recently I've had an irritating chain noise in the position I use most often, and finally got around to fixing it. I say "fixing it" - fiddled with every possible screw and dial (by "fiddled", I mean "adjusted properly" - I've learned from bitter experience that if you try fiddling, turning a screw here or there, everything gest worse and there's no way to put it back to how it was).

And after about an hour, no more noise - but...I now can't shift from the smallest chainring to the middle one, at least without pushing the lever partway towards the next step up. But frankly that's a less irritating problem. Oh, and there's now a bit of chain noise in a different position too, but balls to it.