Progress

Here's what holds a disk brake caliper onto the front fork. The bolt has washers and interestingly shaped spacers that allow a big degree of adjustment in the final position of the caliper. This is important to make sure you get the maximum braking power from the assembly without losing your momentum to the pads dragging the caliper.

Details. You'd never know how much engineering thought has gone into the smallest details of a quality bike. Until you look very closely.

Here is my crew from a couple of weeks ago. We mounted the front disk brake and got it working. As at every step we discovered some other things that need to be attended too. The headset was really sloppy even though very tight. We took it back apart and figured out we had left out one spacer. Oops.

We wondered what that spacer was left over from.

Joshua and a great kid whose name I can't remember. Some kids are naturals at working on mechanical things. They instinctively are interested with the spatial relationships of the parts. They like the way it feels to snug down a bolt. They are born gearheads.

This guy is one of them. He attached the whole front caliper with a tricky little torx wrench and six little screws. He has good patience and coordination.

Here's Trey trying out a top of the line mountain bike. He likes to ride wheelies. They call it cat walking around these parts.

Where we are: we have replaced all the brake and gear cables and some of the housings. We put the derailleurs on. The only things that remain to be done are putting on the chain and then tuning the derailleurs to make it shift right. The bike is done except for that and I want to disassemble and check the fork to make sure it is working properly.

Shambrika installing the disk caliper on the fork. It really is amazing how interested these kids get in how stuff like this works. I let them figure out how to use the wrench and how to decide what needs to be done next.

Watch for updates soon as we finish up the project and figure out who to give this bike to.