Them's The Brakes

Purple Haze is on the work stand today, as the brakes were getting a little worn.

Well ok, maybe a little more than a little worn. The aluminum backing plate isn't supposed to be getting scrubbed away like this.

Though at least being aluminum meant that it didn't cause any damage to the rotors.

From the side view it's pretty plain to see that there's basically no friction material left.

Compared to the new ones which have, let's say, a wee bit more.

Now while I'm in here I'm gonna take the opportunity to swap out one of the caliper bolts. For whatever reason the front brakes on my bikes tend to go out of alignment way more than the rears, and this can take its toll on the bolt heads.

The one on the right has definitely been through enough. It doesn't help that these bolt heads are really shallow, so there's only a tiny amount of metal for the torx bit to grab onto.

Anyway, I- oops, omelette break.

Anyway, I also took the opportunity to swap out the rear pads since they were just right at the edge of the 3mm minimum thickness.

And since I've got the tools out, I might as well use them.

I thought this was going to be it for the bike maintenance this week, but fate had more in store for me. On Friday I was out riding The Stig on my usual morning jaunt and I happened to get a puncture in the rear tire. This is quite a common occurrence but because I run tubeless on this gravel bike, the consequences are that some time later I notice a slightly damp spot on the tire where the sealant had plugged the hole.

Not this time, though. Instead I got a veritable fountain of milky orange-white sealant spraying out and coating the backside of both the bike and me. To its credit, the sealant did eventually seal the puncture, and just in time to keep the wheel barely off the rim, so I could continue my ride and make it home after topping things off with my frame pump.

Since the rear tire was also almost worn through the tread, though, I decided to swap it out for some fresh rubber. Not only that, since the front had finally almost worn down too, I purchased a new front tire and swapped the front to the rear to burn off the rest of its rubber. Given that I built this bike in 2022, I'd say that's a pretty good lifetime for the front tire.

While I was at it, I decided to record a few YouTube Sharts showing the proper technique for getting a tire on and off the rim, and for seating a tubeless tire. There's a lot of people who have done videos on this subject, but usually they're influencers who have more charisma than braincells and so they usually demonstrate inefficient or just plain wrong techniques. Well, now you can learn the right way.

I uploaded all three of these videos back-to-back, and amusingly about 5 minutes after posting, someone replied to the second one to say, and I quote, "I hope people keep their kids far away from you!" which is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. Presumably they didn't like my nail polish, but what's funny is that YouTube just recognized this as solid engagement and now that video has literally 10x the views compared to the other two.

So I guess there really is no such thing as bad publicity.