From the Annals of Bicycling/Maintenance [bicycling]

Yesterday morning, scrottie and I bundled ourselves up and hied ourselves to Troy. It was time for a hardware store run. I needed a bunch of supplies for projects in the lab, and S figured it was time to pick up a bunch of other supplies off the hardware list.

We discovered, joy of joys, that the full length of the bike path was plowed!

However, the ramp up to the Menands Bridge and the bridge itself were not, so there was about 0.5 miles of bike-pushing there. On the return trip we took a slightly different route instead.

There were Too Many Humans at the hardware store in Troy but we were able to find most of the things on our lists, which was really nice.

Then we stopped by the coffee bar that a friend recently opened and got some Oaxacan Mochas plus some pastries from the nearby Placid Bakery for the road. I'd hoped to be able to enjoy a few sips of the mochas before heading back to Albany but was quickly dissuaded by the hordes of random people around, some masked, some not. Especially the unmasked man who really wanted to mainsplain to us about bicycling while looming too closely to our bicycles.

I appreciated that the bakery had a large max occupancy sign posted on the door.

The treats tasted amazing by the time we got home - most especially the Danish, closest to S's mug:



It has been a while since the last time we had an opportunity to obtain food cooked by other people. I think that was in November when we kayaked to the farmer's market.

One of the things obtained at the hardware store was a fresh set of drill bits, because after a bunch of discussion we came to realize that probably NONE of the drill bits we have on hand right now are sharp, and working on getting them sharpened is just one project too many right now. Further, I learned that the cheap metric drill bits that S had acquired some time back were probably also so cheap as to not have or be able to hold a point. Which might explain why I wasn't having any luck whatsoever using them to extract Frodo's brake lever bolt.

I gave various of Frodo's parts a bath yesterday, and then today it came time to make a decision: should I try and deal with a second stuck/stripped bolt for part of the rear fender, or should I just shrug and reassemble, kicking the problem further down the road?

I eventually figured - maybe I'd better at least figure out the scope of the problem now. I applied the new drill bits and found, to my great surprise and pleasure, that they actually appeared to be drilling through the metal.

My attempts to use various screw extractors were less successful, but eventually things reached a point where I was able to grab the head of this second stuck bolt with some pliers to turn it.

My drilling wasn't perfectly dead center, so I probably lost some threads, but that particular braze-on is much less important than the one for the brake lever, so I think I'll survive.



So now, at long last, several months later, everything is finally reassembled, hurrah!

It felt so wonderful to take Frodo around the block for a celebratory/test ride.

...except there still seems to be one very small lingering problem.

The stuck half of the brake lever was on the left side, so the right side has already been on the bike for a while now. When I tried to tighten in a fresh brake pad, it seems that I now cannot get it to hold in place without slipping, no matter how much I try to tighten. This is really not good because it means the brake pad will twist and ride up and down against the tire.

This particular problem could actually be from the rear-ending last summer.

I think I may actually take this problem in to the bike shop to get a second opinion.

I guess if it's not one thing, it's another.