Yesterday’s Tour of Britain stage raced from Nottingham to Knowlsey safari Park and was always going to be another one for the sprinters. With Cavendish having missed out on Sunday he was an obvious favourite, and Sky were clearly there to work for him, putting firepower on the front to lead him out. For once, and maybe emphasising his announcement that he would be aiming to leave the team to get the support in sprints that he’s lacked as Sky focussed on GC ambitions, he was beaten to the line. Leigh Howard took the win for Orica Green-Edge while Sunday’s Sky winner narrowly lost the leader’s jersey.
Still, Luke Rowe is apparently being rewarded by the British public in other ways.
In all this competitive riding I imagine you’re missing a nice little mechanical ineptitude story from my life. As if by magic I can provide for you.
After my ride near Waltham Abbey it had become clear that my front brake was work to the point of stupidity, with the screech of metal on metal working well to warn any walkers I was coming up on, but detracting somewhat from the peace of the ride. It was time to replace the pads and I headed to the usual places to find some. With their arrival and, actually having read the instructions, I set to replacing them, finding a deformed spring, that wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but that came out with the pads. This was odd. The instructions spoke of magnets and no clips so I consulted the internet to find that one year’s model of my Hayes Ryde Stoker brakes had no magnet and used a spring instead to keep the pads pushed against the pistons. There was no new spring with the pads and the old one was unusable.
The Internet again provided an answer in the form of Disco Brakes who seemed to be able to supply the springs.
I’m a fairly sensible online shopper and, this site initially gave me nightmares of seeing my credit card cleared out, but for once I took a chance (and made a mental note to check my online banking regularly). In the meantime I fitted the pads without the spring as the simple bolt system made it pretty secure anyway.
A few days later my fears were proved utterly unfounded as a well packaged pair of exactly the right spring turned up in the post. Based on this experience I would say that Disco Brakes are well worth a look for replacement pads and brakes as they seem excellent value, and their efficiency in this case seems to bely the slightly dubious-looking site design and Pay-Pal payment system.
The day that the spring turned up I had earmarked to fit it straight away. My plans were seemingly set back by an evening powercut leaving me in the dark, but I decided to overcome this and plough on anyway by torchlight and candlelight. It was either going to prove how simple the pad fitting system on the Hayes brakes was, or go horribly wrong and end up with injuries, fire and a damaged bike.
Like one of those films where the person narrating from the beginning is put into a life threatening situation which you already know they will survive to be able to narrate the film of the event, it went marvellously.
In fact I may now only fit any fiddly bike parts in the dark as I so far have an 100% record, as opposed to my less than perfect record in the light.
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