Whoops
I was planning on replacing this chain soon, and I may have unconsciously routed myself close to REI in the first place, but when I was returning home (from stopping by Kobos to pick up some tea) I was two blocks away from REI when I accelerated away from a stop and had the chain disintegrate out from under me. I thought that it had simply derailed itself off the front chainrings, but when I pulled over to the side of the road I saw the tail of the chain dragging along in the dirt and grime in the gutter.
I didn’t even try to stick the chain back together; I just pulled it off the bicycle, tossed it into a pannier, and coasted down to 14th & Johnson to buy more chain (3x SRAM PG 850 == 2 xtracycle-length chains, and it costs about as much as a tank of gas) and put it onto the bicycle.
All in all, it was a pretty cheap lesson in “deferred maintenance is not a good plan”, and it’s a reminder that I should replace the OTHER parts of the bicycle that are wearing down (the front tire, which has just today worn through to the puncture-resistance layer, and the bottom bracket, which hasn’t been looked at for at least 10,000 km, and which probably needs to have the bearings looked at and probably repacked) before they go *sproing* in a less-convenient location.
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They do make chain wear gauges; they’re pretty cheap and certainly preferable to less good location chain disintegration.
The front tire would terrify me; front wheel lockup = broken bones in my experience. (As in, both times that’s happened to me, I needed a break set.)
I don’t think the chain ate the cassette before it died. When I measured it last (on the 17th, after ~1900km, it was stretched just shy of a 16th of an inch.) I then went out and rode another 600km, which most likely finished wearing the links to their expiration date, but I’ve not actually checked that for obvious reasons.
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Hopefully you won’t have the situation I had, where after I replaced my chain, I discovered that the old chain had, as it aged and stretched, worn all my gear cogs. With the new chain, it was actually slipping off the gear and “skipping” when pushing hard uphill. I ended up having to replace the rear hub and all three chain rings up front. Very annoying, very expensive.