It seems every time I undertake a bike repair I get the impression I’m suffering from cosmically bad karma. Take my last venture.
A while ago, I had replaced the handlebars on my Univega. While I was at it, I figured I’d put on a set of aero brake levers I had laying around. For those of you that are wondering what I’m talking about, in the bad old days, brake cables used to stick straight up from the brake levers themselves, and snake around until they finally got to the brakes. All bikes these days that are not of the K-mart variety have the aero version, which routes the cables sideways under the handlebar tape, and have just a stump where the cables used to come out, suitable for impaling yourself on in a crash. But I digress. So I installed the aero brake lever, making my bike infinitely cooler than it had been. Of course, I only installed one, so it’s kind of a hybrid, but I wasn’t sure it could take the shock of the full thing.
There was a minor problem with my installation, though. it turned out that I had routed the cable on the wrong side of the stem, with the net effect that turning the front wheel more than about 5 degrees to the right had the effect of locking up the rear brake. Since the headset had brinnelled itself enough so that it was somewhat difficult to turn the wheel at all from the straight ahead position, this was not as much of a problem as it would appear at first. However, it was rather annoying when as the rear wheel locked up when I wheeled the bike in and out of my building at work.
As Susan will attest, the extent of my laziness knows almost no bounds, and I pondered the problem for quite some time without developing a plan of action. Since I had gone to great effort to install the brakes, wrap the handlebars, etc, I was rather reluctant to undo all this great work. Then, it came on me in a flash, all I had to do was disconnect the cable at the brakes and reroute it leaving the handlebars intact. Or so it seemed ...
So one day in the garage, having just completed another major maintenance task (moving my Niterider bracket to the other side of the handlebar), I felt I was on a roll and ready to tackle the brake cable.
Now the Univega, in the milieu of ’80s ten speed bikes (yes, ten, all together) was a rather classy model. It had no less than three braze-on cable guides for the rear brake cable. In those days, bike quality was directly proportional to the number of braze-ons you had. It was many years before I owned a bike with a braze-on mounting at all. So three of these for the cables was Cadillac city.
I undid the cable at the brake, and snaked the cable through the rear braze-on. So far so good. Next I attacked the middle one, and here we have trouble. There is no way under heaven and earth that I can get the cable to slide through the braze-on.
So I put on my apron, turned on the radio, and prepared myself for the long haul.
By dint of yanking and twisting, I managed to tear the outer housing so that now it was really impossible to get it through. I had two choices, leave it there for all eternity and undo the handlebars, or ... cut off the braze-on (I guess you’d have to call it a braze-off). I must say I agonized over this decision for quite some time, destroying the braze-on would in effect be vandalizing a classic frame, sort of like ripping the hood ornament off a ’56 Chevy. But laziness is a powerful force, and I managed to rationalize my decision. After many years, the cable guides served little more than a place for water to collect and create rust, and three guides was bit of overengineering anyway. So I got out the diagonal cutters and performed a braze-off. I still had the rear one and the front one, that should be plenty. Until I realized that the front one was in the same situation. So well on the way down the slippery slope, the front one eventually met the fate of its sibling. I rerouted the cable, which by now was all twisted and mangled from my unsuccessful efforts to extract it from the guide, and I fastened it down with a couple of cable ties. Success.
Now I just have to try to live with myself.
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