Maintenance day

Had to do a complete overhaul on both front and rear brakes as salt had got in and was causing the arms to be extremely slow releasing, or sometimes not releasing at all. A good cleaning and large quantities of grease in the posts and inside the brake mechanism should see me through for a couple of months. The grease inside the rear brake assembly had turned into solid black goop.

The rest of the bike is in surprisingly good condition. Everything with exposed steel (screws, nuts, bolts, etc) has surface rust but is otherwise fine. My handlebar bag has a hole in it where it's been rubbing on the frame, I covered the hole with duct tape, then chopped off a section of inner tube, sliced it in half, and duct taped it over where the hole is. Hopefully that should do the trick until either (a) Santa brings me a new one, or (b) I pick up another one in the new year...

I managed to lose half the chain link when I swapped over the chains this afternoon. Fortunately I had one spare, but I think I'll pick up a few more from MEC so I'm prepared for this in the future.