recognised limits

There were no fortuitous discarded tyres hanging around this underpass this evening, not that the bike would have stayed upright for long propped up against it by the pedal with its imbalanced load of a single pannier full of fruit juice.

Now that I've discounted the end of the front dérailleur's shifter cable ticking against the crank as the reason for the pedal-clicking (clearly audible on the quiet way back) I suspect it's probably the crank/BB interface again, though it's still a long way from being the grinding squawk of a few years ago. The combination of that plus the middle chainring being almost dead, a cheap exact replacement not being available (resulting in three PayPal refunds in the past few days after people who pretended to have them turned out to not have them), a near-equivalent made out of cheese being quite pricey, the Bike Station never having anything suitable in, the left brake lever not being as effective as it once was, the general non-idealness of the position of the brake levers relative to the position of my hands and my ongoing failure to find a properly-comfortable handlebar position are making me wonder about switching to a compact chainring (not available at my current bottom-end crankset paradigm) which would hopefully mean spreading my time between two chainrings rather than hogging the middle oneand resulting in a reduced rate of tooth-wear but which would probably also involve a differently-axled BB and which would then require a different front shifter lever. The horrible cost of even the cheapest drop-bar STIs and the handlebar-comfort problems could possibly be resolved with bar-end shifters on bullhorns, though I have zero experience with them. The look like they could result in achieving a position in which my hands are roughly where they are now except there would be a greater contact area, especially when squeezing hard on the brakes. It's whether I would miss the easy thumb-flick shift-up I have now and which makes accelerating very easy...