wrenching!

[totient]

One of the several skills I have that I don't use as much as I'd like is bicycle maintenance. I have a whole backlog of projects and all the tools I need and a pretty good spare parts situation. But today I took my bike stand out into the back yard in the glorious weather, and put my Trek 520 up on it, and spent a happy couple of hours doting on the bike. It needed new cable housing in both sections between the right barcon and the rear derailleur, and also I upgraded from 4mm to 5mm, which meant new ferrules. I also replaced the (fairly new) cable since that's easier than threading a used cable through new housing. Then I took off the rear brakes and worked on getting the gunk out of them. They have a somewhat complex mechanism that gives a great response curve, but is prone to gunking up. After a bunch of scrubbing and WD-40 I wound up soaking them in mineral spirits to get rid of it all, and then oiling up the joints so they'd move smoothly and evenly. There are two springs on each side and the secondary springs were pretty far out of adjustment, so I got those nicely evened up too. Since I now had some contaminated mineral spirits, and also a dried out travel pack of baby wipes, I went to town on the other grime on the bike until I ran out of dead baby wipes.

While I was prepping for this work I fired up the grill and made myself a lovely burger for lunch. Soon I'll fire up the grill again to make myself some lovely steak tips for dinner.

Some folks walking past on the bike path commented quite audibly wondering why the siding on our house is so miscellaneous. I offered to explain but evidently they preferred having a mystery to an answer.
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