Bike maintanance blow by deadly blow

I'm a bit waylaid today vis a vis actually doing stuff...I was all set to make a trip to the New Seasons on Division to get some fresh ground peanut butter and proudly mounted my new hybridized (mutated?) mountain bike when...whoops, no breaks! I put my feet out like I did when I was a kid and rolled up on a driveway. I looked down and realized that although I had set the breaks to function until I met resistance up top, the calipers weren't actually squeezing down on anything! I was just reaching the limit of the tension built into the break mechanism; it seems that my skinny new wheels were entirely too svelte. I won't reveal how much time I spend carefully tinkering with the cables to get them calibrated to exactly that level of complete ineffectiveness (Lie: about forty-five minutes!) I took the bike inside and fiddled around until I had the back brakes in some sort of contact with the rims, but the front brake is a lost cause in its current configuration: the cradle that catches the stay on the metal housing is longer in width than the wheel itself! Crap.

All this seems in retrospect very obvious...but my little brain usually doesn't bother with a thing like Newtonian physics when trying to figure things out ("Of COURSE two objects can occupy the same place at the same time! I saw that movie about the angry water droplets!") Additionally, while this bike stuff is all very interesting, I've never much bothered to learn it before, so most of these ten minute processes take much longer. Still, I am pleased everytime to know a little more about what's going on.

With that bike still in an infirm state, I'll have to rely on the repair job I did on Sean's Cannondale. On Friday I was riding home when my rear derailer spontaneously exploded two cars down from a stop sign. With a very understanding driver in a pickup looking on, I gathered up the relevant chunks and pulled to the side of the road: the screw that held one of two spring-loaded pulleys had loosened itself and had dropped its load all over the street at the moment of collapse. I walked up and down the street a few times looking for a screw which turned out, several hours later, to be still attached to the bike ("Having a nice walk down the middle of the street?" one biker enquired. Answer: No, still three miles from home and wearing barely legal bike shorts around hipster Belmont scrapping up pieces of derailer while my back sweat cools.) I ducked into the Portland Buffalo Exchange and swapped into my hipster camo gear (jeans and a semi-ironical candy stripe shirt) and spent a few dismayed 10 minute blocks staring at high top Vans that I know won't fit my No. 2 pencil feet before walking home. I live in a beautiful place where the autumnal sunsets happen to be particularly explosive so you can imagine how miserable that 3 mile walk home was. Add to that a run to Limbo for some gorgeous fujis that would look good oiled up and put in a poorly written movie about pizza delivery turned amuck and suddenly it doesn't even matter that the other pulley, screw and all, decides to pull out too and splatter itself all over the sidewalk.

The next day I grab the screw from the second pulley and take a somewhat justifiable car ride (had laundry to do too!) to Bicycle Gallery on Woodstock, where a graybeard takes a solid 25 minutes to look for its match (actually still loafing out of sight on my bike frame, tucked behind the derailer's mainland apparatus). He then recommends checking out Sellwood Bicycles, where they are known to keep random screws around for some length of time.

Anyway, I go there, they're very nice, and I get my screws. I take it home, wipe the grease off, and put it back together. Two days later, she's still functional (and I'm just now finishing off this overly-detailed blog entry).