There was this moment, about 90 minutes in, when I’d unwound the bar tape, stripped out the old cables, trashed the old brakes, had a pile of new bits to install facing a gutted bike, and I thought to myself, “You know what you’re doing, right? ’Cos you can’t reverse out of this mess if you don’t, eh.”
“Nah, nah, nah, mate, she’ll be right.”
“Are you saying that for my benefit, or yours?”
”Also Frances, buy some fucking wire cutters, for fuck’s sake. You know how pliers butcher the shit out of cables.”
Lucky for me it turns out I more or less do, and it more or less did. If I don’t experience catastrophic improperly installed brake failure in the next few weeks, I reckon I’m good.
These are by far the easiest cantilever brakes to set the pads up on, and set the spring tension, and cable length, I swear, all that wasted time with shite cantis when I could have been using these. Enough time left after setup even to commit to drivetrain cleaning and swapping out the chain. Nice new Ultegra links to match Avid Shorty Ultimate braking mayhem. Finally I have cantis that I can skid the rear tyre on without doing a slight endo to de-weight the rear. Plus I swapped left and right levers, cos like driving on the left in the Empire’s former colonies, so too do we mash the rear brake by grabbing a handful with our left. I tried to be all proper German slash EU and swap to Rear is Right, but a lifetime of ingrained braking habits refused to change, and there’s nothing more confidence destroying than hammering a sketchy trail having to consciously think of which hand to squeeze.
Yay! Brakes! Yay! Still new wheels! Yay! awesome tyres! I took it for a shakedown ride this morning, plus fiddled with my saddle position. Well tasty. Gonna be putting some miles down on this in the coming weeks.
