Bike Repairs, This Time With No Carbs

So... I had a dandy little fix for my shifter lever. Then I snagged my judo bag* on it and popped it back off again. Unfortunately, I lost a very small piece of plastic that triggers a lever which releases a spring which brings my bike up a gear.
*The Cathy bag, in case anybody's wondering.
Naturally, I replaced it with something similar to plastic: a dry noodle. I took a soumen noodle I found in my cupboard and broke four small pieces of roughly equal length off of it, then taped them together.

Then I did it again, this time being careful not to snap the noodle by taping too vigorously. At left is the second one that didn't break. I cut it apart so you could see I could stack them and make that super-cool picture.

So... as it turns out, 80%, 15C thermal cycling, and a few heavy rains turn a noodle into a wet noodle. Normally, you don't care when that kind of thing happens, but you don't normally include noodles in bike repairs, either.

To illustrate - and because I was bored in Photoshop a few days ago - I took a few additional pictures.
If you were to look at figure A, you'd see an arrow pointing to the hole where one end of the noodle was glued. You'd also see a bunch of suspiciously mold-resembling spots that are little bits of superglue. I don't know how it did that, but that's what it is.

If you were to look at figure B, you'd see what the noodle-repair looked like in one piece.

If you were to look at figure C, you'd see why it is that it doesn't make for a great replacement for a piece of plastic.

At that's the story of how I fixed my bike with a noodle. The end.

Ish.

Yesterday, while I was talking with Yanavy, I cut a part of a spoon to size and I'm going to try that next. It's actually made of plastic, so I have high hopes for it. I've left it inside for a day to cure, and I had planned on putting the assembly back on my bike tonight, but I don't want to try and explain to the manager tomorrow morning why I'm riding my bike out the front door. I'll probably put it on tomorrow night as a break from studying for my doom kanji test.

Mundane Bike Repairs

My poor, poor bike brakes have been getting worse and worse of late. A few weeks ago, some an old woman in a in a tiny car passed me, swerved in front of me, then stopped suddenly so she could s-l-o-w-l-y turn into the parking lot. I had a garbage truck approaching on my right, and a curb that I was at too shallow of an angle at to jump onto, and you can't safely stop even a bike with good brakes in three feet, but you can at least slow down the impact.

I was fine and only left a trail of tire-smudge across her bright white back bumper. She was almost kind enough to roll down her window and ask if I was okay, but not quite.

Anyway, after ten or so trips up near Kinkaku and back, plus my two-three times daily commute to the school and back, my poor V-brakes were not so much braking anymore as much as slowing. More useful than a kick in the pants, but not nearly as useful as working brakes.

The mechanic was a little confused about why I wanted my old brakes, but I managed to wrest them away from him and flee. Anyway, you can see them at right.

Learned today that the mechanic that usually does work on my bike worked for five years as a racing pit mechanic and spent most of his life working for Nissan as an engineer. Can't remember his name, though.

Bike Repair

I don't know why I have such poor luck with bikes here in Japan. I've had a brake failure on a used bike, fixed that, and that bike got stolen - $120 total expenditure for the first bike. I bought a new bike for $250 with some metal pedals ($20) because they slip less and I just destroy the plastic ones. Too fat, I guess. Then that bike was stolen - $280 total expenditure for the second bike, bringing me and those I leech off of (ie, parents) up to $390. $125 of this was refunded as insurance, fortunately, for a new total of $255.

I'm currently on my third bike ($250), but I'm using two locks now ($12 for the extra lock - one comes standard on almost all bikes) and have the normal plastic pedals. All is well with this bike, until someone got a little overzealous trying to park their bike and managed to snap off the upshifting lever. Kind of them, I know.

At right is the part that was broken off. I was fortunate enough that it happened to fall on the ground in a gutter, so nobody stepped on it or anything. I stuffed it in my pocket and headed home. At left is what remains of the shift lever that is attached to the bike.

A few days later, I took it into a bike shop and asked them what it would cost to fix. They said they'd have to replace the whole unit, which, after some runaround, turned out would be $60. I think $5 of that was labor, in case you're wondering.

I'm not upscale enough to make this kind of repair worth $60, nearly 1/4 the original cost of the bike, worthwhile to me. But you know what is?

A $3 tube of superglue and some duct tape. Yeah, classy. I know.

So I dabbed some superglue on a few contact points and fixed the whole thing in place with duct tape, then let it set for about two hours.

It seemed pretty secure at that point, so I turned the whole thing on its side and filled everything that didn't look like a moving part with superglue. Then the duct tape again. My bike is back outside, nursing its wounds, but I can now shift up again. It's not a Knife Man Dan level of glue-ninja, but it holds the thing on.

Total cost of materials:
$4 - Scotch-brand superglue
$3 - クリームパン等 - Tasties
$20 - Incidental costs in visiting a hardware store. IE, "Look, gloves!" and "A non-slip pad! I can freem that on the bottom of my DDR mats and make for bonus goodness!" and... Well, you know. I bought a six-pack of chopsticks, for some unknown reason, and almost spent $10 on glow tape.

I very nearly bought this flashlight, as well, and I think most of you can understand why. It's 5W, making it nearly three times as powerful as my current 1W belt-carry. The thing looks so nice and Mag-Lite-ish, too, as you can hopefully see through the cellophane wrap. I may buy myself that for Christmas if I have money left...

As a last random picture, I also found these hammers. They completely outnumbered what I consider to be normal hammers. Out of frame is a massive wooden mallet, various sizes of crowbars ranging from six inches to 3.2 feet, and a Japanese couple running away from the gaijin with the 1-meter crowbar in his hands.