and all for the want of a horseshoe nail

 On the Yellow Maserati, my titanium bike, the rear brake wasn't stopping the wheel. The front brake was fine (which is probably why I never noticed it). but the rear brake wasn't doing the job.

Brake pads are cheap (even the specialty Kool-Stop salmon wet-weather ones I like), so I headed over to my usual supplier, Universal Cycles, to order a pair. (Ramblin' Wrench, my maintenance business, isn't big enough to have an account at QBP, and Universal has a huge inventory and reasonable prices.)

Well, the shipping cost is almost as much as the item. I'm going to need to change tires soon, so let's get a couple of Vittoria Rubino tires, too... and one of the bikes I expect to be called to work on soon has a barrel adjuster that's going to want to be replaced. They're cheap, so let's throw that in the cart, as long as I'm getting all this stuff anyway. 

These brake pads are getting expensive.

But I'm close to the free-shipping threshold, so what else can we throw in? Gloves are safe, and I like those Planet Bike ones, because the padding goes all the way across the palm, rather than being split right where I want to lean on the bars. And oh, my stars, there's a pair of socks with a dumpster fire on 'em. That kind of describes how I feel a lot of the time, and they'll get us over to free shipping.

Then, two or three days later, I remembered what Sheldon Brown said about oil and grease deposits on rim brake pads and braking surfaces, and I wondered, even though my brake conditions aren't what he described, whether the brake performance dropoff could have been caused by contaminant on the pads or braking surfaces. So I cleaned 'em up with Simple Green, and rinsed well... and the brakes work like new.

(The should. They've been on for about a year, and have plenty of meat left.)

So I didn't need that order. All that stuff will eventually be put to use, of course, but budgeting is budgeting, right?

Hrmph. I hate being reminded that I'm not as smart as I think I am.

And if the title of the post doesn't resonate with you, click here.