A carnival of technology

Man, bicycle brakes are annoying. Atlanta is hilly, and I’d rather not launch myself into a speed bump or stopped traffic while racing downhill at high speeds instead of, you know, doing those things, so I have a definite need for brakes that make me slow and even stop, and I use them a good bit. I wore through the stock brakes after three or four months, and I wore through the replacements I got from Roswell Bicycles a week or two ago. They were Avid, I think. It’s probably just as well that they didn’t last too long after the wheel replacement, since Avid seems to have a reputation for eating rims. Maybe this is more of an issue for people with ceramic rims; I don’t know. They did make some unpleasant grinding noises from time to time, and if that was indeed the sound of damage being done, I’m glad to be rid of them.

Brakes are complicated. Rather than the traditional bicycle part feature matrix of durability, lightness and cheapness (pick any two), brakes have a dozen other factors to consider, such as kindness to rims, stopping power, noise, and probably some other stuff. While I do have preferences on some bicycle parts (Vittoria has me sold on tires, since they’re reasonably light and I haven’t been able to puncture them with anything short of a nail), I’ve not formed any serious opinions on brakes, so I just bought two pairs of the ones that were on sale at Nashbar. They’re Aztec 2 pads, which I now guess are supposed to be pretty nice, but the problem I immediately encountered was that the front brakes scream like a banshee. Like a car, most stopping power comes from a bike’s front brakes, so this was kind of a problem. It’s embarassingly loud. Brake squeal is most commonly caused by improper toe-in, the technique of positioning pads so that the trailing edge with respect to rim direction (the edge nearest the front of the bike) hits first in order to pull the rest of the pad against the rim, but no amount of positioning, cleaning the rims and repositioning changed the noise in the least.

At this point I consulted the Internet for advice, and in this I learned two important lessons: firstly, I should probably check for reviews of parts before I buy them. I was somewhat upset to see reviews of Aztec pads at mtbr.com contain phrases like “they will probably stop you eventually.” Secondly, I should probably double check the brand before I go looking up reviews. Aztec 2 pads are different from regular Aztec, and Aztec is rated much higher, so much so that Aztec 2 is in the mtbr hall of fame, whereas Aztec pads are only .19 (out of five) points away from the hall of shame. So they’re good brakes or something, but they’re still noisy as all hell on my bike. I decided to try what I did last time for brakes: walk into Roswell Bicycles and see what they hand me. This completely ignores my first lesson, of course, but it worked ok last time. This time Roswell Bicycles handed me a pair of Koolmax Thinline pads, which are kind of weird and still kind of noisy. Maybe I should just have the shop put them on and see what they can do.

The Koolmax pads are weird in that they have an extra little chunk of rubber at the leading edge of the pad intended to make the pad work better in wet conditions. The idea is that this wedge will scrape water and mud and whatever else off the rim before it gets to the rest of the pad. That sounds like an ok idea, but it raises questions as to how the hell they’re supposed to go on. I’ve tried a variety of configurations, and though they’re less loud than the Aztec pads, I still can’t get that comfortable quiet hiss that I so crave. The Internet was of no help here. One guy suggested toeing them out. I found a post that Sheldon Brown made to some forum that suggested positioning them flat against the rim (and thus sort of toed-in, since the front and rear of the pad will be touching the rim, but not the back forward of the wedge) would be the most effective use of the squeegeeing power of the brakes. I went with this flat(ish) configuration, and for now I’m just living with a bit of noise. I guess the pads have a break-in period, so I’m hoping it’ll go away after a while. If not, I left one pair of pads unopened, so I can return half of my purchases if I decide the pads suck, and maybe I’ll get the shop to try to work some bike shop magic to reduce the noise.

In other news, I’m still playing Zelda II, but I’m not playing it very much. I’ve reached a somewhat frustrating point in the game. This iteration of Hyrule is separated into two large halves crossable through a short dungeon, and everything interesting at this point is in the second half. The hammer can be used to open up the road between the two halves, but I don’t think I get that for a while. To do anything in the game I first half to pass through the same annoying dungeon I’ve crossed a dozen times and then open myself up to annoying forest and swamp encounters before reaching the road again. The overworld monsters in the first Legend of Zelda were kind of neat in that you could ignore them if they weren’t blocking anything. In Zelda II, an encounter takes you out of the overworld entirely, and you have to fight your way back. In addition to that, the means of fighting is very different. Link is two sprites tall, and attacks can come high or low. Standing, you attack high and defend high, and ducking you attack low and defend low. So you have to pay attention to what’s coming at you and the vulnerabilities of your opponent. This is especially annoying on the enemies that can simultaneously attack and defend at different levels, and these seem to be the same ones where the full-health shooting sword is ineffective. The fighting is becoming annoying, and I’d like a return to a simpler system, or at least to overworld enemies that I can ignore while I walk to the levels.