August 23rd, 2018
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Okay, first of all, an update with the Kool Stop brake pad saga. When
they still had not turned up at the end of last week, over a week
after arriving in Finland, I contacted the eBay seller asking them to
query DHL as to what was going on. They were totally useless and
basically told me to wait longer. This Monday I got a letter from the
Finnish Customs Service telling me that I had received a parcel from
outside the EU and would need to declare its contents and value to
them and pay the relevant fees before I could receive it! I was
shocked, firstly because I was certain the contents and value would be
declared on the package (surprise: it was), but also because this was
such a low value purchase (about 40 EUR total, including shipping, for
4 sets of pads, two for the Franken-Peugeot, front and rear, and two
others for my and my wife's everyday bikes). Everywhere else I've
lived has required you to spend hundreds, possibly even over a
thousane, on an overseas purchase before anybody bothers with this
kind of formality. I've literally never dealt with it in my life.
Apparently in Finland the limit is a mere 22 EUR, or 45 EUR if it's a
gift. So, I had to pay 24% VAT for them to release the pads. This
still ended up being cheaper than buying the pads locally, because
consumer goods are practically free in the US, so I wasn't terribly
annoyed about the small additional cost - but I was annoyed because I
thought that processing this would delay the pads *yet further*. But,
happily not - I made the declaration and made the payment online on
Monday evening and the pads turned up - at noon today! Perfect
timing. I took them with me to the co-op, determined to finish the
bike today.
We had a lot of errands to take care of this evening, all of which
involved meeting various people at particular times. I didn't want to
leave everything up to my wife, so I very, very foolishly agreed to
help out with one, which was only possible if I got the bike finalised
and paid for within about an hour of arriving, and then rode it
directly to said errand. Honestly, I should have known better than
this, but the idea of *not* taking the bike home today was
unthinkable, so I imposed a very strict time limit on myself.
It turns out getting two sets of brakepads installed and properly
adjusted on centrepull brake calipers is *not* a straightforward
thing. It's trickier than with sidepull calipers because you also
have to worry about getting the yoke positioned centrally along the
straddle wire and about getting the little bolt with the hole it in
that fastens the yoke to the transverse cable more or less vertical.
If you have either of these off, one brake arm can move faster than
the other. That aside, one of the things that made the Mafac Racers
quite nice brakes for their time is that there are many degrees of
freedom in the pad positioning. You can slide them up and down the
arms, like on any caliper, but you can also adjust the pitch and roll
(from the perspective of the pad, looking forward), but not, without
buying special modern aftermarket washers, the yaw (corresponding to
the all-important "toe-in"). It's easy to get all of these right
while the bolts holding the pads in is loose, but once you tighten the
bolt, the pads inevitably move a bit, or the entire caliper moves off
centre. It's not easy, and you can't rush it, but I didn't have much
of a choice because of my stupid self-imposed time limit. So I got
things "okay", and, with fare less fanfare or gratitude than I would
really have liked, I paid the guy who suggested this project for me,
and rode off to this errand.
I was in kind of a foul mood on that first ride, which is not, at all,
how things should have been. For one thing, I was irrationally
worried about a warning I read on Sheldon Brown's article about
adjusting brakes[1]: "If the shoe is set too low, it can "dive" under
the rim and get caught in the spokes, causing dangerous wheel lockup".
I was terrified that I'd maybe in my haste not done a bolt up tightly
enough, and that if I tried to brake too hard one of the shoes would
come loose, drop down to the lowest position on the brake arm, then
dive into the spokes and kill me. Unsurprisingly, this did not
happen. I was also (absurdly) worried that if I used the brakes too
much on this trip I would start to "wear them in wrong" (like one
short ride could make a huge difference here). So, I wasn't
tremendously focussed on the ride. But one thing that I did notice
was that I was having to lean much further forward than I expected.
The culprit soom became clear - my handlebars were slowly rotating
downward under the weight of my hands. The stem clamp bolt had been
done up just 95% of tight enough to keep them in place under load, and
they had been slowly moving lower since I set them up. I took care of
this at home later today and they are fine now.
Errand complete, I walked the bike home. As luck would have it, I
rolled past a parked bike with a Wald basekt installed. Stopping and
lining my bike up alongside it pretty much did away with all my fears
that a Wald basket wouldn't fit on my bike due to the long headtube
and high stem, so that's nice.
Once back at home, I went about trying to improve the brake setup.
Even though controlling toe-in is not possible with this style of
brake and shoe, I was befuddled that, try as I might, I couldn't avoid
having one shoe slightly toed in, and the other toed out. It took me
an embarrassingly long time to realise the obvious. Neither shoe was
toed substantially in any diretion, and the *caliper* was not sitting
flat reltive to the fork. Lacking the real Mafac mounting washers,
which are flat on one side and radiused on the other to sit flush
against some idealised notion of exactly how curved a fork crown
should be, I had used some random radiused washer I found kicking
around, and I guess because my fork has some pretty rough welds quite
near the brake mounting hole, it just wasn't sitting right. So, I
removed it and bolted the caliper directly to the fork, with nothing
behind it. I actually think this works quite well. The edges of the
caliper's boss, which doesn't move during braking, push up against the
fork arms, spreading the load on the fork and also, I presume,
stiffening the boss. This fixed the bad caliper angle and the
position of the shoes immediately looked a lot better. However, the
situation with the cables (described above) left a lot to be desired.
I couldn't adjust this tonight, because (somewhat annoyingly) you need
*two* 9mm spanners to adjust a Mafac yoke, and I didn't even have one.
This will be a quick and cheap fix, though.
The rear brakes are still in a bit of a state. They, too, are mounted
with random radiused washes and, in this case, even a random bolt, and
it turns out I can't tighten this bolt enough to stop the caliper from
rotating when I adjust the shoe positioning. The nut and bolt turn as
one after a certain point. The bolt has a Philip's head slot in its
head (unusual, but I need a bolt with a very thin head as it has to
fit between the boss and first arm, and this was the first one I found
which fit), but I can't get a screwdriver in there to hold it steady
while I tighten the nut, because the rest of the brake caliper is in
the way! So for now these are badly adjusted, but since the front
brakes do 90% of the work, this is not a deal breaker for now.
Despite today going not at all as I would have dreamed, at the end of
it - the bike is now mine. It's here, in my house, and I can look at
it to check or measure or just admire things any time I like, without
having to resort to crappy phone photos. I know that I'll get the
brake adjustments sorted out in the near future. Not having to wait
for a week between tinkerings is going to speed things up amazingly!
On the whole, it's hard not to feel good.
[1]
https://sheldonbrown.com/rim-brakes.html
