💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › bikes › franken-peugeot › log › agd_2… captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:12:28.
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August 23rd, 2018 ----------------- 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