After my recent experience with a bike shop I got to thinking. Never a great idea in my case, it still can bear fruit on occasion. As I’ve said, I’ll be riding my Bike Friday New World Tourist across Iowa. Now it’s been on trips before, several of them in fact.
Of course travel takes a toll on bikes, even folding bikes that fit in a suitcase. For the most part my BF has survived quite admirably. But things do wear out, especially cables. Especially cables that must do more than their share of folding. You can see my bike here on a trip to LA. Note just how much cabling there is hanging around. It needs to be extra long to allow the bike to fold up properly.
I’d been thinking of taking it in a couple of months before I left for RAGBRAI and have the cables changed and things serviced but then my bike fell over. I was at a vending machine getting a bottle of water (yes, I know bottled water is terrible for the environment but I’d forgotten my own Kleen Kanteen and sometimes…well I digress.
The point is I broke the right brake lever when my bike went down. It was an inexpensive Avid mountain lever but it moved things up a bit on my timetable. Rather than take the bike to the shop it occurred to me I could probably at least change the brake cables and levers. I’d changed the cabling on my Fujiyama and it hadn’t been a huge problem. I did buy a Park Cable and Housing Cutter back then so I pretty much had the tools so how much bigger a problem could swapping brake levers be?
As it turns out I decided I might as well go whole hog and change the brakes too. Some time ago I’d noticed the balance screws had broken on one of the brakes, probably from packing or repacking by TSA agents (to their credit though they check my bike pretty much every time I’ve not had much trouble).
Know I realize I can just bend the spring myself, and that’s what I’d been doing when necessary (not often), but I figured I might learn something and besides, these are not expensive brakes.
Luckily McCully Bike had everything I needed. I replaced the Avid levers with some Tektro levers they had on hand. The handles are a bit bigger and seem to fit my hands better anyway. They aren’t high end by any means.
While I’d love to buy nothing but top shelf stuff taking a bike that works somewhere tops not going somewhere with expensive gear everything. Besides top end stuff breaks too and travel is…as I said, rough.
I had to get brake cable and housing as well. It turns out there’s something like six feet of it on my Friday. Make that six feet twice. Now that seems like a ridiculously high number for bicycle and normally it would be. But the Friday has to fold and using a lot of cable is one way to allow that. The other would be to get cable splitters. I may do that someday.
In any case I got everything I needed pretty cheaply and headed home. I only had an hour or so before I needed to leave for the first game of UH baseball double header and made the decision to skip the first game so I could work on my bike. I made the first game. On my bike. With new brakes, levers, cables, the works.
This should not be taken as me pumping my abilities up. I’m not. In fact I’m more or less a klutz when it comes to mechanical things. Nope, it wasn’t me. It turns out it was just pretty easy. Really. I just followed instructions.
That worked so well that the next day I decided I’d take on the derailleur and Dual Drive cables. After my brake experience how hard could it be?
Once again it turns out to be pretty easy, taking about an hour from start to finish.
This one turned out to a real blessing as well. I’ll be honest and say I’ve always been a little confused by derailleurs. I’ve only rarely managed to get them adjusted on my first try. Well this time, having to change the cabling seems to have triggered something in my brain because all of sudden it seemed like I knew what I was doing. This is different from doing it well. I’m not saying that, but I am saying I finally got the why of what I was doing.
The Dual Drive was even easier. It’d dead simple to change cables. Really.
An hour after I got home I was back on the bike with new shift cables. Sweet. It all worked.
There’s only one little problem. It seems my BF had about 6’4″ of shift cable and housing for both the derailleur and the dual drive. I’d accidentally measured only 6′ so I came up a wee bit short. Luckily, as you can see by the photo my BF above there’s a lot of cable. Being 4″ short does not mean anything is tight or the front wheel won’t turn. It all works just fine and even looks pretty much the same. I can tell though and when I pack the bike there may be a wee bit of trouble. I will, of course, pack the bike to see if it is so that I can do it all completely correctly if necessary. I doubt there’s going to be problem but I’d hate to get to Iowa and discover I can’t shift.
If you’ve read this far, you probably agree with me…enough for now!
I’ll try and take a couple pictures of my Friday with it’s new livery so you can see what I mean
Aloha!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…