The Missing Piece

Or missing pieces, as the case may be.

Yes, the last of my bike parts finally came in. And by last I mean "the last for now, until I tinker with it some more, which I wholly plan on doing."

Got the rear tire, the chain (which was supposed to be black, but the rainbow happened to be available sooner), and, quite importantly (and most expensively), the brake/shift levers.

The levers had actually been a point of stress for me. Not only were they the hardest part to track down, but I had previously had a bad experience with building up Purple Haze where the banjo bolt stripped out in the lever on one side, completely ruining the lever body. At the time it wasn't too big of a deal since SRAM sent a free replacement, but I didn't fancy trying my chances twice, especially given the whole parts shortage mess going on.

But, luckily for me they must have learned from my experience, and the new levers no longer use a banjo bolt that threads into the lever body, and instead have a small coupler that uses a regular barb-and-olive compression fitting.

This is going to be so much easier to deal with. And yes, it's called "stealth-a-majig."

For those of you wondering why I'd be so concerned about detaching the brake hose from the lever: I run my front brake on the right hand side, the correct side. In North America, however, due to some asinine reasoning along the lines of "oh no the front brake is scary so we should put it on the left so that people won't use it when signaling with their left hand," everyone else gets stuck with backwards brakes. While the brake calipers on a groupset like this are identical, the front brake hose is only about half the length of the rear brake hose, which is the limiting factor: the hoses need to be swapped to fix the brake-handedness.

And for people who have somehow launched themselves over the bars by grabbing too much front brake: for fuck sake, learn how to ride a bike and stop ruining things for everyone by refusing to take responsibility for your own failures and blaming it on everyone else instead.