Its HOT

Summer has arrived in DC and we're going through a mini heatwave. If you're not sweating off 10 lbs you're getting caught in thunderstorms.

I've passed the 1,500 mile mark commute wise.

The brakes (that I've never been all that happy with) are getting down to the wear line. I did a little searching on the various forums and the Kool-Stop brand got some love. So I ordered a pair of these. So far I've replaced the fronts (didn't want to replace both in case I screwed something up) and they're working quite well.

Brakes

Still having issues with the back brakes. About once a week I needed to restring the brake caliper so that the brakes would engage. Today I decided to take a more detailed look to see if I could figure out the cause. When I removed the right brake pad I noticed the problem: the pad only covered half the rim (I should have noticed this right away as the inner half the rim was "clean" while the outer had buildup of road gunk). Only half of the pad was getting any work, and it was grinding down faster because of it.

I fiddled with the pad and got it set where it should be, rewired the caliper and all is well for the moment. Since now the bottom half of the pad that wasn't getting used is now the primary contact with the hub I expect to continue to have this issue until its ground down to the level of the top half.

I'm also going to look at replacing the back caliper brakes with a disk brake. The Path+ I rented over the summer had them, as do some of the more recent Capital Bike Share bikes.

The weather has been fantastic the last couple of days. Hopefully spring is here to stay.

An update and some stats

I'm getting close to a month of riding and everything is going fairly well so far. The seat cushion I bought has been very helpful, but I lost it during one of the rides so I had to purchase a new one. I'll make sure it has a tighter fit.

I was noticed I was more hunched over riding the Prox than I had been with the rental bike, and I was starting to feel it a bit in my lower back. It never occurred to me that I could adjust the height of the handlebars. So I finally did and its made a world of difference.

The back break is still very mushy, and gets looser and looser by the day. I've had to restring the cable break a number of times on the back calipers, but after a few days of riding the back brake becomes almost useless. I'm probably doing something wrong; I'll have to do a little research into setting up brakes. It looks like the frame is set up to use disk brakes, so I may investigate upgrading to those sometime in the future.

Some stats: 

Since January the 19th I've done 16 round trips with the Prox, saving ~$122 (assuming I would have metroed instead) or ~$100 assuming I would have metroed to work and rental biked home) and have traveled ~360 miles.