Of bicycle chains and other things...

I love riding my bike. I am not particularly fond of maintaining (i.e., working on) it. That's a bad combination. I bought my bike about a year and a half ago and have already replaced both wheels. That's "wear and tear"!
My daughter and son-in-law gave me a subscription to "Bicycling" Magazine for my birthday. A nice gift. The first two issues came in the mail recently. One of the issues had an article entitled "Easier than it looks". "Easier", I'm for that! It explained that there are three types of bicycle maintenance that are easy to do. One of these is replacing the chain. Well, I am still using the original chain so I figure it can't hurt to try replacing it. Maybe I'll start my real bicycle maintenance with that.
So, I removed the old chain and laid it out on the ground. I laid the new chain next to it to decide how long it should be. The first thing I noticed was that the links of the new chain were shorter than the links of the old chain. Now, links are a standard size, so the old chain had stretched in my year and a half of riding. In fact the old chain was a full link longer when I counted out the same number of links. This fact prompted a quick call to my brother's house. He was playing tennis at the time, so I had to wait an hour to discuss this disturbing development with him.
An hour later when I spoke to him he suggested that I make the new chain the same number of links as the old chain. So, that's what I did. But, he cautioned, if there is too much wear on the sprockets the chain may "skip" when I try to ride hard. "In that case you may have to replace the crankset and/or the freewheel cassette." Now, I don't know a crankset from a hole in the wall but I do know if the chain skips or slips, and it did! Darn!
Back on the phone with my brother. "What now?" I ask. "Like I said, you will have to replace the crankset or the cassette." Came his reply. He must have forseen this whole episode because last Christmas he had given me a box of strange looking tools. I broke open the box and, after removing the rear wheel, I found the tools I would need to remove the rear cassette. With the phone on "speaker" my brother was able to talk me through the process of removing the rear cassette which I immediately put into a ziplock back for save keeping.
I will be in Florida all this week, so there is no time to finish this before next weekend. Next saturday, I will go to the bike shop near my house to get a new cassette and try to finish this repair. All I have to say about the article which prompted this little misadventure is: "Easier than it looks" my A$$. Still smiling though :-)
To be continued...