Heartbreak comes in many forms, and when my local bike shop shuttered my thumper cracked.
Living in Oregon, local takes on new meaning. My town doesn’t have a bike shop, and really, it’s just a 20-minute drive to Salem. There are plenty of options there.
But when a bike dude and his buddy set up shop in Monmouth, just 17 minutes away I was thrilled.
Not that there’s anything wrong with most of the Salem shops — aside from the dude who wanted $400 to repair what the guys up the street fixes for $50 — but supporting a local business in a small town is my kinda thing.
Since they were just getting started, and I just moved here, they gave me the type of attention a bike moron like me needs.
They helped me find the tires I love, bled my hydraulic brakes more times than I can count, and found creative alternatives to some issues to save me bucks when I lost my job.
But more than anything, they made me feel like a pro whenever they changed the shoes on my disc brakes — even though they took the time to show me how to do it myself.
Every time they pulled those fronts off — which, by the way, was far more often than most folks — they would marvel:
“Raz, what I love about you is that you’re the only person I know who understands that the front brake is supposed to be used, and used often!”
As Bill Murray brags in Caddyshack, “so I got that going for me!”
Oh, they also praised me for how much I beat up and wore out my bike:
“I love that you actually ride and need a tune-up. Most tune-ups we do are on bikes that have barely been ridden since the last.”
But back to the front brakes for this week’s question: Do you use your front brakes regularly, or only in emergencies?”
I recall a ratio which suggests that the front brake has 75% of the braking power to the rear’s 25%. Truth? Fiction? Whatever, I use it a great deal. I’m not sure I’ll ever get the nose wheelie though…
Front brake: rear brake at least 2:1 or so, right, whether bicycle or motorcycle? In LCI classes, we teach students how to modulate front and rear brakes to optimize the mix; in fact, I need to practice that before the next class. Been a long time since my Sears coaster brake bike that we used to deliberately hit the coaster brake and slide the rear wheel around.
I’m a front brake devotee. I learned just how devoted when I rented a bike in New Zealand, where they reverse front/rear.