During the debut ride of Dionysus (née Ol’ Paint), I felt that the brakes needed more tension. They were working fine, but there was too little effort required on the lever pull (and hence a rather weak return when the brakes are released). So I decided to increase the spring tension on the brakes.

It didn’t take long to tighten up the springs and readjust the brakes. But when I went to return Dionysus to the parking garage I noticed I’d left the rear brake undone. “That’s funny,” I thought. “I’m pretty sure I finished that.” So I did up the brake, and right away it was dragging too much. I tried to adjust it on the spot in the garage, but I found another issue while I was doing that: the cable housing was too short. So I undid the brake again and brought Dionysus back to the Workshop in the Sky.

I cut a new length of cable housing, erring on the side of having it a bit too long this time.

With the new housing in place, I had the cable back in place and trimmed to length, and then the brakes adjusted, all in a matter of minutes. In the process I found the rear wheel wasn’t quite seated squarely in the drop-outs. So that’s something I’ll need to keep an eye on going forward whenever I’ve got the wheel out for maintenance.

One last thing I hoped to get to today was the chain stay protector. It’s already starting to peel up at the end. I bought some clear vinyl tape to wrap around both ends. But inspecting it today, I found that the derailleur cable is just at the same spot but on the underside of the frame. So I’ll have to either cut the tape very cleverly, or perhaps trim back the cable guard to a point where I can wrap tape around the end without it interfering with the cable stay.