Saturday, January 3, 2009

brake thru

The brakes on Mindful Mule have been squeaking for months now and it’s driving me crazy. It’s getting worse. Is that because of the cold – the pads hardening? I tried cleaning the rim with toothpaste – that only made it worse. I’ve tried all sorts of angles and approaches to toe-in the brake pads but nothing worked. It’s gotten to the point where I won’t even stop at stop signs because my brakes are too loud – I don’t want to wake up the entire neighborhood.

Finally, today, a dark, cloudy, ominous day, holed up in a darker garage, I had a stroke of genius (queue maniacal laughter.) This definitely goes into the category of things I wouldn’t recommend to anyone including myself, but desperate times call for desperate measures. What I’m about to say may make some of you want to puke and could even be considered sacrilege. Feel free to post your hate mail in the comments, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…

You know the old saying, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease...” well... I greased my brake pads. There, I said it. And, you know what? I’m not ashamed because it worked… It worked! Silence is golden…

2 comments:

mindful mule said...

Greasing the pads only lasted about 24 hours. Back to the drawing board... maybe I'll try rounding off the edges of the pads...

mindful mule said...

I promise I'll stop writing about my brakes at some point (I mean, I did go on a great nine mile run today with Hilary - I should probably write about that - and stop commenting on my own blog...) but I did just do some work on them. I sanded down the edges of the pads – rubbed them on concrete. This may have done something, but not much - still squeaking. Then I angled the pads so that they’re pointing down at the rims (a random shot in the dark) - what might be called siding-in the brakes rather than toeing-in, which, because of various articles online, I've decided is bogus and some sort of bike shop conspiracy. Siding-in or topping-down or whatever you want to call it seems to confuse the brakes just enough to shut them up. We'll see how long it lasts.