Diamonds

While running my errands with my bike on Saturday I noticed that there was a bit of a drag on my back wheel from the brakes. I decided when my shopping was done to go and put my name on the list at Bike Pirates. I knew I’d have a long wait because it had been about an hour since they opened and I was right. There were about eight people ahead of me and the volunteer behind the counter confirmed that it would be at least an hour. So I signed in and went home. When I came back an hour later I was still down on the list so I went home and had lunch. There was only a slight shortening of the line of names when I returned. I came back every half hour for the next while. I took a half hour nap and then went back to check the list, then I went back to bed again. When I returned to Bike Pirates after about 45 minutes I discovered that there was a question mark beside my name because they’d already called me. The desk person said she’d put me in next, so I went to get my bike.

It was already after 17:00 when she led me to a stand with a clipboard to set at the table beside it. She reminded me of a maitre-d with a menu. I told her she should be wearing a tuxedo.

Dennis seemed to be the only volunteer working and so there was a lot of waiting when I didn’t know what to do. One of the back brake pads was too close to the rim. Dennis told me I could loosen the nut behind the brakes and tilt the brakes till the pads were even. He also advised me to loosen the brake cable a little and that would separate the pads a little more. He added that my rim could use truing, so since I was there I thought I might as well do that. I put the wheel on the truing stand and oiled all of the nipples of the spokes. I probably oiled them a little too much, so then I had to wipe most of it off. Dennis did the truing and it didn’t really take very long.

It took me quite a while to get the wheel back on and evenly balanced within the frame but every time I tightened the lock nut the wheel moved against the left side. I tried and retried and then I waited for help from Dennis for half an hour. He was understandably busy while helping people at all eight stands. When he finally came around he just applied some extra torque to the wrench and the brakes were evenly balanced.

I took my bike off the stand to roll it out back for a test drive, but almost as soon as the wheels were on the floor the brakes were sticking again. But then I realized that it wasn’t the back brakes that were sticking and that was very strange, since the front brakes seemed to be working fine when I came in to the shop and never once were they touched while I was there. I tried loosening the nut at the back of those brakes and after a few failed attempts at test-drives followed by more wrench work, the front brakes seemed to finally be balanced. It was already after closing time and the two volunteers were pretty anxious to leave. I took a successful test drive, paid $6 and went home.

That night I watched an episode of Maverick based on the real life San Francisco diamond swindle of 1872 when two prospectors brought back some cheap cast-off rough diamonds from London and Amsterdam for which they paid $35,000. They scattered the diamonds about a field in Wyoming and then took some of them to San Francisco as bait for investors. They were eventually paid more than half a million for the fake diamond field.