20220122

2022 01 22

Fixed the known broken parts of my bike today! The new shifter cable install only took the youtube bike mechanic about 6 minutes and it took me over an hour! I naively tried it at first because they made it look so simple so I thought there couldn’t be much to it. It wasn’t shifting when I passed the wire through the shifting housing which should have been a warning sign to check out why that wasn’t happening, but I thought maybe it had to be attached to the derailleur before shifting (Ron Howard: “It didn’t”). So I had to take it apart and see what I did wrong. Turns out I hadn’t properly seated a stopper on the end of the shifter cable, and this stopped is what the shifting mechanism moves to move the cable and thus shift the gears. I tried monkeying around with the shifter and somehow got the cable stopper stuck in the shifter housing. To get it out I then had to take apart the housing and undo this bolt that had little folded metal plated up against the nut seemingly suggesting that you should not undo that nut. So I folded down those little metal plates (breaking them in the process because metal doesn’t like to bend) and was able to loosen the nut enough to give me the space in the housing to free the cable stopper. Then I could finally reseat it properly and verify that I could shift correctly, and then hook it up to my bike. Mission accomplished!

This was actually a nice learning lesson about how the shifter mechanism works and it also got me realizing how it would be nice to build up a bike from parts next time I get a bike so that I know how to easily fix or fiddle with any part. This would be a nice skill to have when I start bikepacking more too!

Daily Listening Listened to a vaporwave album that spotify suggested to me. Pretty decent!

Daily Reading I did start reading Freedom’s Forge which has so far been interesting. The focus for now has been on William Knudsen who helped scale up Ford’s production of the Model T and then helped revive GM after Ford started treating him as a rival. An interesting anecdote about his character: he was making nearly $1 million dollars in today’s dollar value and was worried about resigning from Ford because he donated so much money to charities in Detroit as well as to his family abroad in Denmark. At GM once when he was upset with factory workers not following his processes he knocked one out (he was a first rate boxer). This incident then led to him learning that is not the right way to get you workers doing what you want them to do and he instead started to treat them as equals and listen to their inputs. Later on during the war government officials would not trust him at first because he seemed to meek and lacking conviction - quite a change from someone who leveled a factory worker with a punch!