chaff

Had a dream a dog got off its leash and was chasing me on my bike, but instead of barking it was explaining bicycle parts and basics to me in the voice of a human youtuber

I love when my bike is extra orange mode

How do we feel about the ethics of scavenging left-behind tires/tubes/wheels of stolen bikes? (You know, commonly those that are locked to a rack by the quick-release wheel.) In most cases, I feel like I can tell by rust or repeat sightings if the wheel has been abandoned there. And don't get me wrong, I sympathize. It must really suck to have that happen. But I often see brand new fancy wheels and tires lying around, things which should be used, not left for the city to trash — things which the owner could conceivably decide to come back for. But I feel like given the clues I'm getting about the demographic (children? monied downtown denizens?), they probably don't care, financially speaking, and they probably won't be coming back.

My brake pad blew right out of its housing today! Wow! And those were my good brakes. (I am fine)

It took me a while to realize exactly what happened here, (partly because I couldn't examine the pad, which flew off 30 ft. away, lost into a busy intersection), but I might have figured it out.

Based on how hard it broke, the way both the little metal flap and big metal caliper bent outward substantially, also based on just how worn-out the other pad was, I think that probably the failed pad wore down all the way to expose a bit of the bolt thing buried inside the rubber—the hidden other end of the piece you use to attach the pad to the caliper. So, a steel edge in the brake snagged at high speed on the softer aluminum alloy rim of my wheel. This began the event of the whole assembly bending outward, but wouldn't have been enough to grab and rip the pad out; more crucially, probably, it bent and tilted the pad in its place just enough to make it no longer parallel with the wheel rim, dramatically so, in fact, until the pad snagged again (all in an instant, of course) by the butt end of the pad and its housing being pulled forward. Basically the force of the wheel tried to spin the whole pad around, sort of turning the brake pad into a non-circular gear rotated against the driving wheel, a ridiculous movement that would certainly bend the caliper as much as it did. Obviously, the brake does not want to go that way, and the path of least resistance for it to escape this pressure was for the pad to bust out the little metal flap and fly away free into the sky.

The moral of the story is: keep your brakes in good shape, use both your front and rear brakes, don't be a fool like me.