When disk brakes attack

 The first time I saw a brake rotor draw blood was with my old dog Seamus. Seamus loved to chase bikes, he was a great dog.  A black and white border collie lab, he was born in Crested Butte and later honed his bike dog skills on the singletrack trails of Bend, Oregon.  

I wouldn't say he was cuddly and loving, he was more like a heroin junkie jonzing for a fix. As soon as he saw me or any other human he would find some item to drop at your feet and begin begging you to throw it. He would lift the stick or slimy tennis ball up and try to spit it into your hand. If you hid the ball he would find a stick. If you hid the stick he'd find a rock. He was relentless.

His lower teeth were chipped and broken from his fetching habit and he kept himself in constant motion, desperate to chase or retrieve. He was a dock jumper, frisbee catcher and bike chaser. The first bike he learned to chase had Vee brakes. So neither of us were expecting what happened when he chased me on my new dirt jumper.

We rolled down the trail with him along side me. I heard him make a tiny yelp and stopped to check on him. He bounced ahead urging me to keep going and I felt a spray of blood speckle my shin. I looked down in horror to see that the little white tip of his tail was gone and he was spraying blood  each time he wagged it. I managed to inspect the wound and could see broken bone showing where the last inch had been. He was disappointed that we couldn't keep going.

We took him to the after-hours emergency vet and were surprised to see our friends John and Krista with their dog Jade. Jade was staring into space and swaying slightly. I looked at the dog and its pupils were totally dilated. It looked like the people I'd meet at raves.

John explained that she must had found some mushrooms in "the compost heap" and eaten them. The Vet led the trip hound into one room and us into another. They applied a bandage to the tip of Seamus's  tail and put a cone on his neck. He constantly wagged his tail until the bandage flew off, and he refused to acknowledge the cone on his head. He would run through the house as if the cone wasn't there, smashing the plastic against door frames and corners. Within a few days the cone was a broken ring a plastic and we had to remove it. He kept flinging the bandages off, but eventually the tail healed and the white tuft on the end even came back. R.I.P. Seamus, you're a good boy!

About this same time 29" wheels started to trickle into the world and my buddy Andy bought the first 29er I had seen. It was a hard tail with disk brakes and he loved it. He rode a bunch and I would see him every few weeks to share ride stories. One day he showed up with a bandage on his pointer finger and proceeded to tell me the story. He had been way out on a trail and noticed an annoying sound coming front his front brake. He flipped the bike over and spun the front wheel. It made the sound, he tried to pinpoint the source and poked his finger just near the...ZING! The rotor cut the tip of his finger off below the nail! He threw the bloody tip into his water bottle and pedaled back to the trail head.

His story seared into my memory. I thought, surely I would never make a dumb mistake like that. I have a much better understanding of the complex mechanical system of disk brakes. I operate at a higher level than mere mortals. So here's what I did.

I was making a blistering run down the hill and crashed just a little, not enough to get hurt, but enough to tweak my bars. At the bottom I fist bumped my bros and then pinched the front wheel between my legs to straighten the bars. And that’s when I permanently branded myself as a SRAM rider for life.