No Friday

After starting the biking season with a $350 repair bill for what largely amounted to two tune-ups (plus a little more), I’ve been trying to do more of my own bike maintenance as a way of saving money and getting to know my machine a little bit better. So far, it’s been a mixed bag.

Before I went on the weeklong trip to Panorama, I installed and bled my own hydraulic disc brakes. Despite a few stressful moments, I was happy that I was able to do that successfully.

At Panorama, I pretty much destroyed or had some type of mechanical issue with every part of my bike, but fortunately the awesome tech crew from Gord’s bailed me out many times.

Back in Seattle, I had some residual damage to take care of. The shifters were fairly beatup, I needed to reinstall my front brake (I borrowed Ming’s spare after I cut the front line in a fall), and I needed to re-bleed the rear brake since it wasn’t as responsive as I liked. For the most part, I handled all that successfully. I was particularly happy that I was able to install the shifters and cables and get it shifting mostly correctly – I did take it to JRH to do a final tune, and it turned out the issue was mostly the fact that the rear derailleur hanger was bent a bit from Pano. Shocking.

After my last ride, the creaking in my crankarms had gone from occasionally squeaky to really freaking annoying. I wasn’t sure if it was the bottom bracket, the crankarms, or something else. So I went to my friend Dan’s, who knows more about bike mechanics than I do, and we took apart and reassembled the BB and cranks. The BB seemed fine, so it was probably just a loose crankarm, which in retrospect I probably could have dealt with, but it was good to have the second opinion.

The last two nights, however, have been a borderline disaster. My self-install of the brake lines + the adjustments due to the cut cable have resulted in the brake lines being a little too short for my liking, to the point that I am afraid they might snap during a hard fall. Thinking that I had mastered the art of maintaining Magura brakes, I didn’t think fixing this would be an issue. Cut some cables, install the pin and olive, fasten the lines, bleed the brakes. Done. I was wrong. I got the lines cut and installed well (maybe a bit too long actually), but now:

• I can’t get the rear brake bled properly – it works but it feels too loose. I spent a few hours last night re-bleeding and a couple tonight, and no luck.
• The brake pad screw on the front brake won’t come out. I think it’s cross-threaded.
• I might have contaminated the rear brake pads from constantly re-bleeding.

Unrelated, but on the “can’t fix myself” todo list for the bike shop:

• Fix the busted travel adjust cable that was also snapped in the Panorama fall.
• Fix the rear derailleur hanger
• Cut my new seatpost down to size (another Pano injury)
• Fix a missing piece on the front brake lever

Bleh.

At least I am learning a lot, despite the setbacks. I’ll be curious how much the next bike shop trip will set me back though.

This entry was posted Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 10:27 pm and is filed under General. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.