I Needed a Bike Mechanic

 On three occasions of my wanders that I can recall, I've met people, introduced my name, and received the reply, "Oh, [Mutual friend's name] wanted me to meet you!" The last two were fairly recent, but the first was in the waning months of my teens as a freshly arrived transfer student at UMass. 

I'd been riding practice, dare I say training, laps of the cyclocross course on campus when I saw someone on the road ride past aboard a (I'm pretty sure, but it has been a lot of solar laps and a substantial smack to my head since my teens) Bridgestone mountain bike, so rather than stick to solitary laps, I swerved off course to give chase and ask if he was headed to ride trails.

He looked at my cyclocross bike, cobbled together from a Medici touring bike that frame builder Peter Weigle chastised me as being "too nice for cyclocross", and replied that he was headed into the woods to ride pretty rugged mountain bike trails, but after I promised I could find my way home so there was no need to wait for me if dropped, I was allowed  to join and, um, err, show that waiting for me and my skinny bike would not be a concern.

On the way to the trails, we figured out our mutual connection to Sandy who had wanted us to meet, and we did develop a friendship even though my first semester at the school was his final one, and he was definitely the force behind what he called my corruption, which he started three years later by convincing me to buy a Saab in need of a motor rebuild, and swap to manual transmission, and eventually led to a race official waving a go flag over that car at a rallycross course. No, I hadn't known how to work on cars, but figured I'd either learn how or learn that I couldn't. Either way, it'd be an education, right?

Well, I did learn car mechanics, and I learned that cars are far more complex machines than bikes. To that end, my friend, who definitely failed in certain social mores, would often tell people who worked wrenching bikes in shops that they weren't really mechanics because bicycle repair wasn't involved enough to warrant that title. I'd proved myself on the Saab, so periodically he'd call me and open with a sarcastic, "I need a bike mechanic." He trusted me and knew I'd probably have some cheap, effective solution to his problem that needed only something he already had around the house.

Note the word cheap. To put it nicely, I'm a cheap SOB, so when assembling my race bike in 2022 I'd wanted the reliability of mechanical disc brakes but balked at the price of most that had the dual acting pads I wanted, opting instead for an unbranded Chinese option at an sixth of the price. My expectations for Chinese production are low, influenced by the run of bearing failures an old sponsor suffered after the Chinese factory used an other-than-specified part because "it fit", but I trusted my fake engineering skills to correct for any design flaws.

My skepticism wasn't disappointed. The brake calipers had no pad adjustment, so I ended up cutting thin shims out of aluminum sheet to close the excessive gap from the rotor, and the stopping performance was generally improved even if pad replacement was a bit more tedious with extra parts to align. It worked, but it was still an annoyance, so when I considered other cheapy cheap options for replacement, I double checked to be certain their designs included pad adjustment, which let me to an online video, which showed the pad adjustment bolts hidden under I thought were arm fixing bolts.

Ah, wait, that looks not dissimilar to the bolt design of the brakes I already have. Hmm, yup, take off what looked like an arm fixing bolt and there's the smaller pad adjustment bolt underneath! That's a lot easier, more precise an adjustment, cuts down on the added friction of extra shim plates, and even saves the weight of not reinstalling what I thought were arm fixing bolts but were actually just covers to convince me that there was no pad adjustment. Yay, I just needed an online ("e"?) bike mechanic, but I still hope bikes never become anywhere near as complex as a Model T!

Mechanical repair test rides

are much better

when they include raspberries!