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wd40

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Everything posted by wd40

  1. what I usually do is 'power brake' in the driveway (I have a long one). stand-up pedaling with moderate braking force. works best with the old Six Million-Dollar Man theme in your head, but Chariots of Fire is fine. an old trick was to run water from a hose over your rotors when you're doing this. I don't understand the physics behind it, but it seemed to help. we still occasionally squirt camelbak water on our rotors if they're making noise with fresh pads, on the trail.
  2. interesting. I've never opened up the system to press the pistons back to zero for pad reinstall. just use the butter knife pushed all the way through the caliper so I can put even pressure across the face of the piston. just googled it and it looks like this is how at least a few youtubers also do it. probably means it's wrong. as far as the der clutch, I've never used it. I just put the drive train in a high gear (small cog) and that's been good enough. I mean, remember the days before clutch ders? how did we survive? speaking of ders, the last piece of the puzzle just arrived today: a 12sp chain, ordered shipped (free) to Sun&Ski on Anderson from their Tulsa store. no one local had one in stock (even pure online shops seemed to be out), and SnS surprisingly had the best price. the hidden price was having to wait for Fedex to rout it from Tulsa to California, to Cypress, to Pflugerville, back to Cypress, then back to Pflugerville with no deliver date estimate. So I was surprised to get an email from the store this afternoon that it was ready for pickup. the OEM packaging had definitely done some traveling. hopefully, the chain itself isn't bent. can't wait to climb without dying, in this blast furnace.
  3. automotive brake cleaners are fine. it's what I use. current have a can of Blaster brand, but have used Gum-Out. what isn't paint-safe is the mineral oil Shimano uses in their brakes. bleeding Shimano brakes is super-easy. just have to buy their bleed 'kit' which consists of a cup with a removable plug that you thread into the reservoir at the brake lever. have to be very careful to minimize and immediately clean up any spillage.
  4. fair point. I assume we have an export version and the 'full' version of the more advanced systems, but maybe not. I saw some discussion about the M777s we were sending that were missing the boxes for guidance systems, for example. as 'unforecasted demand', we may not have any of the export versions immediately available of the HIMARS. but yeah. we probably really are just dumb.
  5. the whole argument is stupid. if a Uke is standing at a border crossing and pisses over the gate, the russians will start barking about their badass nukes again. we know all this. if there's any debate to be had, it's about US-built tech getting captured, and what kind of rules we can fet the Ukes to follow to keep it safe. hell. I'd be sending them the longest-range shit we got. if the russians are good at anything, it's stealing.
  6. some pics from last sunday. much better day. found some trail I hadn't seen before in an area I've been riding for 20 years.
  7. one reason the piston cleaning is #1 is because if they're not clean and moving freely, they're probably not moving uniformly, so you may have one pad extending more than the other and doing all the work, and wearing faster. obviously, caliper alignment can cause this result as well. but you're smart to be nervous about over-extending the pistons. so again, liberal application of brake cleaner spray can get in there and flush out dirt and buildup without that risk; if not the warm fuzzy of eyeballing your shiny clean pistons. as far as truing the rotor, it doesn't have to be any more complicated in than just spinning the wheel at a speed where you can detect any wobble in the rotor between the insides of the caliper, and/or actual intermittent rubbing on one pad or the other. as far as a plastic knife being thick enough: stack your pads together. that's the minimum thickness your plastic cutlery needs to be to keep from vomiting a piston if you just start mashing the brake lever with the pads out. it's like anything: takes a little practice to get decent at it. but it's not rocket surgery.
  8. agree with rojo. IPA is good. I keep a spray can of brake cleaner around. just fucking drown 'em ever once in a while when they're acting funny. this includes removing the pads and giving them a VERY light pump to expose the pistons. have to be careful not to over-pump the brake when doing this or you'll fuck up the diaphragms and not be able to get them back in. spray and maybe touch up with qtips to get all the gunk off so they move smoothly. I use an old butter knife to press them back in, one at a time. said knife has some flex to it so is fairly gentle on the piston. if you have a thin piece of wood like a paint stick, that could work, assuming you can get it in there. however you do it, cleaning the pistons and making sure they actuate evenly is first thing I do. when examining the pads, make sure you're not seeing the pins that hold the braking material to the backing plate. best way to tell how much life you have left is compare side-by-side with a new pad. if your halfway down, it's probably time. the pins will start to get exposed and will mess up your rotor. check your rotors for warpage (not sure if you did this, above). usually, gentle thumb pressure is enough to bend the warp out. don't worry so much about if it's centered, at this point. getting it unwarped is most important. when reinstalling a brake caliper, or just adjusting it after the pistons and rotor are good, just be extremely methodical: with loose mounting bolts, after a few pumps to make sure it's moving, tight squeeze on the brake lever, tighten the bolts in tiny, alternating increments so they are both even. if you tighten too fast, you'll torque the caliper out of alignment. that right there will cause a lot of vibration and squealing. at least as much as dirty pads. had a pretty crappy ride today. just uncomfortable and not in control. fucking up things I never have before. I did see this, short cutting up to session a feature. seems like there's a story, here. circle of life, etc.
  9. I'd get fired on day 1. wouldn't be able to resist saying "frt-frt".
  10. I love this. it's like Spiderman's from Wisconsin, and he swooped in and shot them with a cheese web as he swung by. Gunny Highway would be proud.
  11. not tryna be negative, but let me guess: your cat wouldn't eat the pureed brisket so you put it on a bun with a stick o' cheese?
  12. noted, on Dahlia's. Thanks. pass thru there a lot, these days. Trailblazer in Burnet has a pretty good cfs, also.
  13. I sort of get that, from a longterm perspective. however, it seems to me, making russia cash flow negative as much as possible might be more constructive in ending the war sooner (again, no thanks to the Eurotrash). let them default naturally. besides, I can easily see the US taxpayer having to cover the debt if the US govt is interfering with the payments. as far as favors from putin, what a joke. that piece of shit has never negotiated in good faith. why would he start now?
  14. dumb question: how does this help anyone not named putin? aside from perhaps amounting to reverse corporate welfare (which I'm very ok with), why wouldn't we want to take russian money to service outstanding debt? doesn't that reduce cash available for the russian war effort if it leaves their country? are western bean counters and bankers so fucking stupid as to open new lines of business with ru, after all this? I thought russia was already a pariah state (well, except to those punkass frogs, germans and italians making up rules to get around their own sanctions to buy gas).
  15. yes. to me, the way the grenades in these videos is always moving around before release, I imagine it's Curious George strapped to the bottom of the drone, grenade in hand, tongue in the corner of his mouth, eyeballing the target.
  16. I don't play the game so I don't understand the jargon, really. but I always liked this video. similar situation. first shared without irony on shaggy (or maybe hf?) by guy known to lose his shit from time to time.
  17. this. plus no one wanted to FAFO and play ATF with the Nuclear David Koresh of global politics and fulfill his paranoid fantasies about enemies at the gates. even now, we still have to take all that bluster somewhat seriously.
  18. my guess is we've understood these things for a long time. it's why we developed the automation we have for our comparable systems: to have a battlefield advantage, or at least make up for the numerical disparity (at the time, in the 80s) with tech that lets us send more shit down-range, faster. but how do you justify that expense to Congress by saying "russian gear sucks, we would mop their asses up just on training alone"?
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