There are not many weeks that pass here without something or other arriving through the door in brown cardboard packaging. It’s not quite as bad as Christmas time but we are on first name terms with most of the delivery drivers in the area. Usually my kids sigh and say, “probably more bike parts for dad…” Usually they are right…
This week I had a nice delivery from ChainReaction on Saturday morning with the items pictured below. I got my new chainset, some brake outers, bar tape, snippers and chain link pliers (all added to my annual cost tracker here: How Much?, apart from the bar tape as I’ve not used it yet).
I was excited to use them so set the bike stand up in the garage (weather here on Sat was awful: really wet and windy) and got to work on trying to fix my rear brakes. I’d never changed a brake outer on this bike before but was fairly confident it would be an easy job. How hard could changing a cable be anyway? No need to look up any guides for this is there…?
To start with I unwound the bar tape, clipped the end off the old brake cable and pulled out the old outer through. The rear cable on this bike is routed internally through the frame. It came out without any issues. “This’ll be a 10 minute job”, I thought.
Next stage was to put the new cable into the frame, ready for the new inner. I slowly inserted it into frame and waited expectantly for it to appear from the lower exit point. It reached the bottom and jammed, so I tried again, and again, and again…
I had assumed naively that the cable was routed by some kind of internal trunking, but now realised that the entry and exit points actually just entered the void inside the frame. This made my job now almost impossible! The gap was only just wider than the outer and I couldn’t get anything inside to grab the cable. After fumbling about for 10 minutes or so my mind started to think of possible work arounds: Maybe I could tie it to the outside of the frame with cable ties? Maybe I could take it to the bike shop to have a go? Maybe I would need to buy a new bike? (Hmm, that always seems to pop into my head).
As a last resort I decided to try and see if I could entice an inner cable through instead and maybe use this as a guide. I picked up the old inner from the floor, inserted it into the frame and after only a couple of minutes was gobsmacked as it appeared out of the bottom. After dancing around the garage with glee, I fed my new outer onto this old cable and as far into the frame as I could. When it got stuck I pulled the inner from the other end, which acted beautifully as a guide for the outer which was now perfectly through the frame.
All that remained was to tie the outer to the bars, insert the new inner cable (oiled nicely beforehand), attach it to the caliper, wind the bar tape back on and adjust the pads. After a panicky stage in the middle of this job, I was all done in under an hour. The new chainset will have to wait until next weekend as I don’t have the nerves for anything else going wrong today!
I’ll find out next week if this has been successful in sorting my brakes. It’s a very cold forecast ahead with Wed morning in particular looking bad. This time I am very optimistic… but I was feeling that before…
Top 10 Tips
Before you go have a look at my new Top 10 Tips page. It’s designed to give a few ideas to anyone looking to start out on cycle commuting. Hopefully it will be of use to someone.
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