Fat Fucking Fail

This last weekend I assembled the exercise bike and actually started to use it and record data on fatfuckingbastard.com. After settling in to using it every day, today - the fifth day of using it - the thing went 'clunk' and stopped feeding data to the 'trip computer'. Annoyingly it did this at four minutes and 25 seconds, and since today's minimum time was five minutes I got a zero score.

While the bike itself still appears to work as a bike, without being able to record distanced travelled my plan for encouraging myself to keep going is pretty much fucked. I'm pretty scunnered about this, and my options aren't great either. I doubt I could take it back to Argos, given that I'm substantially heavier than the bike is rated for and that could be the direct cause of it breaking. I don't fancy my chances of keeping it up every day without some scoring/tracking mechanism, and with the heart rate monitor I bought being hilariously unreliable (to the point of claiming that my heart rate was zero) - and heart rate numbers not being great for calculating a score from anyway - the only metric I can really measure is time spent, and that's not really enough.

I don't really want to buy another bike. Yeah, I got 1/3 off this one, so it only cost £33, but if I replace it at normal price I can expect to pay £10 a day if it lasts as long as this one did. That's just stupid. I could get a bike that's actually designed for my weight. John Lewis will sell me one that's rated for near enough for around £300, which seems like a lot of money to spend on a bike that doesn't go anywhere. (They have one that's actually rated for above my weight. It's described as a 'basic' model and costs £900 - or more than the fee for my wife's citizenship application. Madness.)

I could try taking the thing apart and see if I can fix it myself. As a child I always loved taking things apart, and that still lingers on as an adult - but I can't imagine that I'd have much luck getting it working and there's a fair chance of destroying the basic cycling functionality which does still actually work.

What to do? Suggestions from the audience are welcome.