On Broken WIngs

I like the song, and it sets up my bicycling involvement as of late. For those not familiar with the song, it's by Europe. Yes, the hair band from the '80s who brought you "Final Countdown".
Anyway, Sunday morning I learned about an LDS missionary whose bike wasn't working well. (Yes, these are the guys who ride bikes in white shirts and ties and knock on your door; no, they aren't the Jehovah's Witnesses. DIfferent sect.) Being the helpful guy that I am, and always looking for a way to increase my knowledge of bike mechanics, I offered to look at his bike and try to get it running better for him.
Monday afternoon the missionaries rode to my house in the falling snow, bringing over the offending steed: a Novarra Aspen, circa 1990, steel frame, with almost generic, but identifiably Shimano components. I think it weighed about 20 kilos. A steed that possibly should have been shot, with bearings that had seen better days. In fact I think that the poor bike was stored in a lake or swimming pool for at least one Winter at some point in its life. At best what I offered was palliative care for it while it waited to die. I guess I'm kind of a hospice for bikes.
I performed a quick and dirty true on the front wheel, pulling out a huge wobble. During that I noticed that the wheel really didn't roll all that easily, but I had limited time, so I didn't crawl into the front hub. In fact, I had to keep pushing the wheel to get a single rotation on the truing stand. Ouch. That poor missionary is really getting a workout when he rides. Once that was completed, I moved onto the real work.
The main problem reported on this bike was that it had become an involuntary single speed. The rusted -- but not stretched -- chain was sitting on a single cog of the rusty cassette. The front derailleur had been locked into the middle chainring. (In case you aren't keeping up on your low end bikes, the Aspen is technically in the all terrain bike family.) After releasing the high and low limit screws on both front and back derailleurs, I found that the shifters were the problem. The derailleurs moved freely, and the cables were not seized inside the housings. I had seen something similar on my wife's Schwinn High Plains of similar vintage. The ratchet system in the shifters gets cold, dirty grease stuck in it and the mechanism just slides rather than engaging to cause a shift.
My solution, and those who know bike mechanics can certainly tell me where I went wrong, was to crack open the shifters as far as they would budge, and spray a liberal amount of WD-40 into the mechanism to cut through the frozen grease and crud. While this worked on my wife's bike last year, I didn't see any real improvement on the missionary's bike. So, I figured that with time it may loosen up some more. In the meantime, I adjusted the limited screw on the front derailleur to rest in the middle chainring, so he could push and hold the shifter to get access to the large chianring. I then left the rear derailleur in its normal-high position. My thought was that if the de-crudding of the shifters started to work, he would have access to most of the gears he would need to ride on the relatively flat roads of West Jordan.
So, getting back to the title, "On broken wings; I guess that's how you'll have to fly…" He's glad for two gears, and I'm hoping to hear of more becoming available over time.
For those hoping for a riding story, sorry. But I think that being able to maintain what you ride is critical to continued enjoyment of riding. I also find it satisfying to help others who have more bike troubles than spare cash, or my friends who are willing to put up with my learning curve as I solve more bike problems than they currently know how to work on.