Bike sorted

The previous weekend I had put some effort into my beautiful new bike. And I hoped I would be able to finish it the next weekend. It's no good if it just stands in my house somewhere! It needs to be on the road. And I mentioned something along these lines during the concert to Martin, and he is an old hand at bike maintenance. I am quite good at improvising nonmatching bicycle parts together, and keeping things just about working. Mart is more the kind who keeps his bikes in the sort of state where they look like they were taken out of the showroom about 10 seconds ago. He immediately started to talk about how to end up with perfect disc brakes, and that he had everything needed for that. Enough for my bike too! So on Friday I enquired if that offer still stood, and it did, so on Saturday I biked back up the hill.

I had spent the rest of the morning on the mudguards. I had been wondering how to sort these out. The arms were not long enough to get around the disc brakes of the front wheel. How to lengthen them? But then I thought that just one arm was probably enough. If I would just straighten the V-shape out, and then re-bend it with uneven arms, then the long arm could keep the mudguard in position. The short arm I could just manoeuvre out of the way. So I set to work! With the help of my gas torch a new bend was easily accomplished. And it worked! And because I was curious I weighed it: 13.5 kg. Almost twice the weight of the road bike, but this was including the lock! Still a lot lighter than the black bike!

Manipulating the brackets of the mudguard

That meant that everything was finished except for the brakes. I was totally sure that Martin would have all the tools needed. I wouldn't have been so sure about tools for improvisations as I had done with the mudguards! But this meant that the only thing I felt I needed to bring were the actual brake pads. And the entire bike, of course.

When I got to the top of the hill I saw Mart had already brought out a bike stand. While he made coffee I put my bike in it. And after the coffee we set to work! And that basically boiled down to me replacing the brake pads, and Martin doing everything else with me making sure I saw what he was doing so next time I could do it myself. I hadn't really thought of the finer details of tuning your brakes after you have replaced the brake pads. It makes sense that you have to; you have to do that with cantilever brakes too! I'm sure I now have the best-tuned brakes in Wales.

work in progress

When the bike was back together we got the gunk off our hands. In the meantime, it had started bucketing down like the clappers. I knew that was going to happen! And I was resigned. Martin looked out of the window and asked if perhaps I wanted another drink. And after one more coffee and some general gossiping about the surroundings, the rain had abated a bit and I went home. He had warned me that I would need to wear in the brakes. But I figured I might do that the day after. Right now I was working on getting home quite efficiently! I knew the Sunday would be dry. And they were not at all slippery as I had anticipated.

I was glad that the bike was now ready for commuter duties! I had a lecture on Monday; that would be the reason for its debut. I was looking forward to it!