Centre-pull Brakes

            After the food bank on Saturday I immediately rode down to King and Dufferin to get some money from the bank machine so I could afford to work on my bicycle-building project starting noon at Bike Pirates. When I got home I still had almost half an hour before I had to take the velo to the shop, so I put my food bank groceries away and drank the now cold coffee that I’d made earlier.

            I carried my project down the stair of my building and noted how much lighter it was than any bike that I’ve had. I briefly owned a new Raleigh International, which I bought for $500.00 in Toronto when I was 19, which might have been comparatively light but I never really developed a relationship with it at that time because I didn’t use it enough. I took it with me to the yoga ashram in Val Morin, Quebec, where I moved early in 1975 and after that to Montreal, but I ended up selling it for $200.00 to pay my rent when the dregs of my small inheritance ran out.

            I had to wait outside Bike Pirates before they opened about five minutes late. The first volunteer was Derek, who was assisted by the young volunteer in training, Sebastian, who has been there for two or three years.

            I was the first customer in though there were others close behind me and soon the shop was full. I clamped my unfinished machine to stand number three and when Derek came around to ask what I was doing I told him that I’d installed front brakes on the frame on Tuesday, but had later remembered that I had a set of Weinmann brakes, matching the ones at the back, that had been dangling from the frame by its cable when I bought it. I asked Derek whether the ones already on the bike were just as good or if it would be better to switch. He shared that his personal preference would be for the Weinmann brakes but he added that was an individual choice. When I asked him why he preferred them he seemed a bit defensive at first, but finally told me that he likes how quickly they release the grip of the pads after one applies them.

            I made the decision then to install the original brakes, but Derek told me that meant that I had to remove the headset stem because that kind of brake system requires that the cable runs from the left handle to the stem and then vertically down to the brakes. That meant that I either had to remove at least one of the spacers I’d piled up along the stem or we could cut the stem. I told him I’d like to keep the handlebars high and so I removed a spacer and went to look for the part through which the brake cable was supposed to run. It took a while to find in one of their bins the part that I needed that also fit. The one that I found was aesthetically pleasing but the next problem that arose was that the locknut that I had left very little thread at the top, which he said wasn’t safe, so I had to find one that fit better. When I finally found that, Derek offered the view that my headset looked a lot better then without all of those spacers. I told him that Melissa had said it looked like something from the Jetsons. He agreed that it looked futuristic but argued that the future is not always good.

            I asked Derek what was the next thing I should do and he inquired about my work sheet. I told him I didn’t have a work sheet and he said I needed a work sheet, even though my project was one that I took home with me. It turns out that everyone that starts a project bike from a frame that they get at Bike Pirates is given a work sheet. Derek insisted that I needed to get a work sheet from the front desk, so I went to get one but the guy at the desk couldn’t find them. Finally Derek got me one. It contains a list of things for someone to check off as they are building a bike. Frankly, I found both the work sheet and Derek to be a bit anal. It seemed strange to me that after my bike was almost finished I would suddenly need a work sheet. I think though that Derek misunderstood when I asked him what I should do next. I assume that he thought that I meant after I get the brakes done whereas I meant within the context of fixing the brakes. A worksheet seems useless to someone like me that doesn’t even carry a grocery list with him when he goes to the supermarket. After all of that, which took up half an hour, Derek finally answered my question and told me that I should put the headset back on.

            After the headset was back on, I wasn’t sure how exactly to run the cable from the lever to the brakes. The place was getting pretty busy and in addition to the people working on their bikes there were a lot of curious people coming in that Saturday to ask questions at the front desk and Derek seemed to revel in the role of answering them more than helping with bikes. He would come back from time to time to help if I called to him but his style of helping tends to be to tell you what you should do, then to walk away without demonstrating or even waiting to see if the person understands what he’s talking about. There were quite a few volunteers helping by that time but the one that noticed me the most was reluctant to muscle in on Derek’s territory and explained that he might take me in a direction that would be different from what Derek had in mind. Derek seemed to spend more time helping the young woman using stand number two and asked her if she wanted a coffee. In all my many times of coming to Bike Pirates no one has offered me a coffee and only Dawn has ever offered to feed me. During one period of standing on hold for Derek, I made a point of watching the clock and it was half an hour before he returned. The volunteer that noticed me most went up front twice to remind Derek that I was waiting for him.

            I would have preferred it if Derek hadn’t been my helper. I don’t think that he’s a very good teacher because I think he’s forgotten the time when he didn’t know what he knows now. Finally the other volunteer decided to help me and tried to show me how to use the cable stretcher. I started to get the hang of it but the problem was that whenever I stretched the cable it came off the carrier that pulls up the cross cable of these centre pull brakes.

            I asked the short, tough, serious looking volunteer in the mechanic’s cap about my problem and he told me the kind of cable carrier that I was trying to use is problematic. He went to a drawer and came back with one that had a wider catch on it with a deeper hooking groove and that didn’t come off when I tightened it. I was able to get the cable tight enough but then it was too tight and so I had to gradually loosen it until the front wheel would move. I asked the volunteer who’d paid the most attention to me if he would check my work and he said it was fine. Then it was time to cut the excess cable and instead of using a metal cap for the cable’s end and crimping it, he showed me that they had plastic caps which he likes to use because that way if the cable has to be readjusted one doesn’t have to shorten or replace it.

            At this point I’d been there for three and a half hours when I had wanted to only stay for two. I told the nice volunteer that I was done and asked what I should do with the cable for the back brake that was coming out of the right lever. He suggested that I could loosely tie it to the headset as long as I didn’t crimp it. But then he urged me to just connect the cable and insisted that it wouldn’t take very long. I argued, “Look how long I’ve been here already!” but he countered that now I knew how to do it and it wouldn’t take long. He demonstrated and ended up doing most of the work, for which I was grateful. I asked his name and he told me something that sounded like “Eefee”. I inquired as to how it was spelled and it turned out to be “Ife”. I wondered if when people read it they pronounce it as if it rhymes with “knife” and he confirmed that they often do. I questioned him about the origin of his name and he shared that the source is Nigerian because that’s where both of his parents came from.

            On my way out I had to deal with Derek at the front desk, who wanted me to write down every single part that I used. I had already bought the cables the time before and the brakes were mine, so all I could think of were all the little things that I dug for out of the bins like the lock nut, the cable carrier and various nuts and bolts. I donated $15.00.

            I noticed as I rolled my bike home that the back wheel was rubbing against the frame; so getting that adjusted would be my next job.

            When I got back to my place there was an email asking about the Pentax camera that I’d put up on Kijiji almost a year ago. It started at $80.00 but every two months I’d shaved $10.00 off. The price now was $30.00 and the guy said he would come by that night. He called me later though to say that he wouldn’t be coming until the next morning because the Don Valley Parkway was closed.

            I went out to the liquor store and picked up two cans of Creemore for the weekend, then I rode to Freshco where globe grapes were cheap, I got a bag of oranges, four chicken legs that would have to be cooked that night, a frozen rack of ribs, two litres of milk and some yogourt.

            I watched two episodes of Leave it to Beaver. In the first one Beaver decided that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up and when the family were discussing it at the dinner table, Beaver’s father told him that he should keep a daily journal like Somerset Maugham did. Beaver asked if he was a writer, to which his brother replied, “What’d you think he’d be with a name like that? A linebacker?” Ward bought Beaver a diary with a lock on it and told him that they wouldn’t read it without his permission. But one day when Beaver didn’t come home from school, they went out looking and couldn’t find him anyplace. They finally decided to pick the lock on his diary to see if they could find a clue as to his whereabouts. What they found were accounts of him getting into fights and doing handstands on the railings of bridges. When he did come home and they confronted him about his dangerous activities he confessed that he’d made them up to make his journal more interesting. His parents were very embarrassed to have invaded his privacy after hearing that.