Simple Pleasures

It’s Spring Break, friends, and while I’m not letting myself take the entire week off from real responsibilities, I am allowing myself some garage time. Today I went in there with the goal of replacing the back brake cable and guess what I did today – replaced the back brake cable! How many times have I gone into the garage with a goal and walked out having reached that goal? Probably like, once. Maybe. Now, replacing the back cable is a relatively simple procedure, which is why I titled this post “Simple Pleasures”, but it still made me so happy that I did it. Here’s how it went down:

This is how I left things last time, with the brake pedal hanging out from the frame:

The left piece is the brake cable. The right piece is electrical I’m assuming for tail light (Why are there so many wires? Must be for something else too. Maybe turn signals light up when you brake?).

So basically I was pretty easily able to remove the pin at the end that holds the cable on, which was a surprise because it has a cotter pin on it and we all know how I feel about those. The part where I struggled was that nut above the pin. In the picture it is a bit darker because I had just sprayed it with some WD-40. So I worked at it just a bit and then watched this video again and realized that piece did not exist in the video. So I took a closer look and realized I think my new cable is different than the old cable and does not require that piece. So I cut it off. It was very satisfying. I figured I could put it back in if I needed it, but upon closer inspection, it seems my new cable doesn’t even fit in there and is designed to work without it. Here is that piece cut off:

Notice in the larger picture that the end of the cable does not have a loop or anything on the end. Frankly I’m not sure if it was attached to that pin at all. Instead, I think it is squeezed together by that nut and bolt. Here is the new cable in its place:

This was me just holding it in there to see if it needed that piece. The end has a hole on it that the pin goes through, and it wouldn’t even fit through that other piece if I wanted it to. So I installed the new cable without it. Please let me know if that was bad before I try to brake while going downhill and can’t.

Okay so here’s how I did the cable. It was suggested to me by Ben of scooterhelp.com to do this technique and I am very VERY grateful for the advice. I opted to do this back cable first since it is the shortest so that I could work on my technique and that ended up being one of the better decisions I have made. Also, if you like laughing at idiots, you’re in for a treat cause I was one.

The back brake cable is relatively short and it is possible for me to sit next to the scooter and reach both ends of the cable with relative ease. So what I did was removed the old inner cable, leaving the old cable housing in place. Then I threaded the end of the new inner cable into the old housing until I had the new housing backed up to the old one. Then I taped them together, and taped the new inner cable to its housing to keep it from sliding out, which isn’t super necessary but kept things from sliding around. (I used painters tape cause I had it on hand, but I will be using electrical tape in the future because it is stickier and less bulky).

That’s what it looked like. Then I pulled the old cable housing from the back end, which fed the new cable through. It worked like a charm!

Ta-da! I know what you’re thinking, “Kaitlin, you promised I would get to laugh at your idiocy! That sounds like it went well!”. Fear not, friend, here’s where I was an idiot:

After successfully threading in the new cable (and before taking the above pictures), I realized I had forgotten to thread it through that top hole in the pedal first. Oh no! So then I was like, oh wait, I can just pull out the inner cable and leave the housing and thread it back through. Which is the correct answer, by the way. And then I didn’t do that because ?!?!?!? (aka no reason, I didn’t really think it through), so I pulled it all out without threading in the old cable to hold its place just to see what happened, I guess. Then I realized my mistake, and had to thread the cable and housing back through completely blind with no guide, even though I had just done that the right way and it was very easy that way. In the end, I was sort of glad I had to do that because I realized what a total pain it was and that I never want to do that again. I was reckless with this one since it is so short and basically goes in a straight line, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I can’t even imagine re-threading the cables that come up to the handle bars without any kind of guide so in conclusion if you have just bought a scooter, a word of advice: Do not under any circumstances remove the cables before you are ready to replace them. When you do replace them, do it the way I described above, by taping the new one to the old one and letting the old one guide it through. Thank you, Ben, for your words of wisdom. I am forever grateful.

Alright, that was word vomit and I can’t imagine many people read that but I had to write it down because it was so stupid. If you did read it, I appreciate your efforts.

That’s it for today. I’m almost looking forward to doing the rest of the cables since I now know how to do them. I’m going to continue to take it slow so that I don’t make mistakes and cause unnecessary frustration. Thanks for reading!

Ps. Saturday marks 1 year since buying Betty, maybe I should get us a cake.