Just finished up the most exhilirating bike ride I've ever had. I did the Bukit Timah circuit in a bit less than forty minutes at nightfall after a torrential monsoon rain had soaked and saturated the track completely.
My bike really proved its mettle in the conditions. I set the shock absorption to roughly 'medium' settings (giving you an idea how sophisticated my 'tunings' are...) and took off. With a mediocre bike light on, powered by crappy Korean batteries, I could sort of make out the trail between the light and the falling sun, but there were large stretches where I was making downhill banking turns at high speed and I would feel the suspension taking massive blows, but was able to keep on going, unphased. It was really impressive. It was thrilling to be going too fast to really know what was going on, instead letting the bike sort out issues for me.
Today has been a big biking day for us. We originally planning to goto Johor State to ride at some plantation called Plentong. But when I woke up, I wasn't really in the mood for a ride over the Causeway. Sitting in the cool morning air reading the Economistand drinking strong coffee was more pleasant. So afterwards we took our bikes for a second attempt to find the Jalan Kayu trail.
We found it. I'll do a full trail writeup at some point, but basically it consisted of riding two miles through a two to six inch deep clay mud that smelled like human feces, followed by ten or fifteen miles of riding on sidewalks back to homebase. The lameness of this trail was attenuated by the unseasonably cool weather. Stupidly I snakebit my tire about two miles from the finish, so I stole Ling's bike and went ahead to collect the car and recover Ling. Nice cardio trip, but awful as an adventure exploration.
Throughout the trip I was having more trouble with my brakes, this time the rear brake seemed to have lost 80% of its power--basically useless. It felt like the brake control was pretty soft as well, so I figured it was a hydraulic problem, not a pad problem.
We took the bike over to Treknology 3 in Holland Grove (I recommend going to this branch -- they are very friendly here and quick to service the bikes) to have the tire fixed and the brake investigated.
Their diagnosis was brake pad contamination. They said they cleaned the pad with isopropyl alcohol and recommended I do the same for the disk. Frankly I suspected they were wrong in the case, but I couldn't test the brake because there was a sumatran monsoon soaking everything, and these aggressive knobby tires I have are hell on wet concrete.
Well, from there we stuffed ourselves with Margaret Road dumplings and then went home, repacked, and went off for my aforementioned nighttime run. Turns out the brakes were fine, and their solution accurate. Not sure what the contaminant was. Perhaps the disk got hit with some chain lube when I last lubed the chain or something. At any rate, it grabs ferociously once again and all is well.
Posted by Nils Blutig at April 19, 2003 08:49 PM | TrackBack