Wisper rear brake basic adjustment

[allen-uk]

Hello.

The Wisper manual bangs on about measuring distances, adding spacers, etc., etc., when all my poorly-working rear brake seemed to need was the cable tightening up a bit.

Is there something special and odd about Wisper brakes, or do others just go by instinct (and many years of bike adjustments)?


Allen.

 

[JuicyBike]

Is it a disk brake Allen?

 

[allen-uk]

No Bob. Discs at the front (which work only too well, of course, so I avoid pulling up too hard on them!)

'Ordinary' brake shoes at the rear. They DID stop, but the brake lever was touching the handlebar grips when fully pulled in, so I've just taken about 5mm slack out of the cable at the back end, so that the brakes lock before the lever gets that far.

The bike was brand new about 5 weeks ago, so I'm guessing that it's just cables etc. stretching a bit.

Allen.

 

[JuicyBike]

I'd say you did the right thing, and for the right reasons. Producing a manual which covers all the permutations of bike models, clearly and able to cope with all abilities, is a daunting task. I know we need to work on ours.

It does shock me how little mechanical confidence there is amongst, in particular, the younger generation (did I really say that!) and the need for spoon-fed, step-by-step instruction makes writing manuals really difficult.

On the other hand, a bike offers the young a great introduction to mechanics and opportunity to develop some basic skills.

 

[flecc]

It does shock me how little mechanical confidence there is amongst, in particular, the younger generation (did I really say that!)

You did, and it's very justified. It's an undesirable but inevitable result of the increasing use of complex designs in most things which are only diagnosable electronically and repairable by sub unit changes, or even only by replacement.

That has resulted in part from an insufficiency of technically qualified people to carry out repairs.

So it's a self generating problem, the more we answer it in the way I describe, the less opportunity there is for the young to learn from practice and the less we get technically interested people.

The bicycle is one of the few simple mechanical devices left for the young to learn from, but with parents increasingly unwilling to let their over-protected kids own or ride bikes in today's traffic, even that possibility is minimised.
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[JuicyBike]

We're lucky in Buxton, the local College still has a slimmed-down engineering department, but we had to fight to keep it open during the expansion of FE in the first decade this century.

It now only has "Motor Vehicle" courses but at least provides some hands-on training.

The thing with cars are the large chunks of complexity that cannot be broken down into fix-able compoments. Beautiful (complex) design and efficient production techniques also bring a de-humanising, intimidating wastefulness.

What's great about bikes is that pretty much everything can be broken down into small, inexpensive, replacable parts.

Maybe bike maintenance should be on any new national curriculum...

 

[allen-uk]

I don't want to start a 'Luxury' thread (e.g. "In my young day we only had two bits of stick to fix t'bike wi'" etc) but it's true! Well, nearly.

My tool kit was someone else's discarded Meccano spanner and screwdriver, and an old pair of pliers, and I managed to keep my bikes going from the age of about 10 to 16 with that lot. Come to think of it, I was still using the Meccano screwdriver on my old bangers some years later.

...

Allen.

 

[flecc]

The thing with cars are the large chunks of complexity that cannot be broken down into fix-able compoments. Beautiful (complex) design and efficient production techniques also bring a de-humanising, intimidating wastefulness.

What's great about bikes is that pretty much everything can be broken down into small, inexpensive, replacable parts.

Maybe bike maintenance should be on any new national curriculum...

Yes Bob, I'm a qualified motor mechanic from the days when we did everything, from machining new parts out of raw materials to sewing upholstery and roof linings. Such things are unthinkable now.

A few years ago a motor fitter friend of the newer generation was moaning about a part for a carburetor he couldn't find, it was a small but complex linkage component, part turned, part milled and with holes in differing planes. I took the old broken parts from him and machined a new one from a block of metal that evening and gave it to him the next morning. The look on his face was priceless, it baffled him how someone could produce the part from the raw in that way!

A universal bike maintenance course would be an excellent way of promoting cycling as well, maybe something our cycling promoting governments should be considering, "killing two birds with one stone".
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