Not much new to report. I took the night off from working on the bike last night, which ended up being pretty good for me. I just came home and dyed my hair and sat around being marginally grumpy until my bad mood wore off. I got a big hug from Peter, too, which is always nice, and improved matters significantly.
So I went back over to the garage to work a little bit after work tonight. I've been really unfocused at work the last few days, and, sadly, it carried over to the bike as well. I tried to read the manual carefully and wrap my brain around a couple of logistic questions that I have regarding the bearings I have and how they fit into the bike, but I just couldn't focus on anything. So I ended up just spraying Brakleen (as in brake-clean) on the greasy bits and cleaning them all off. I bought the Brakleen yesterday; I went to an auto parts store near work and asked the nice man for a good degreaser. He pointed me straight to the Brakleen. "But," protested I, "I'm not working on my brakes!" "Trust me," he said, and trust him in the future I shall, because this is seriously hardcore degreasing goodness. All I had to do was wipe off some of the nasty goo, spray this stuff on the stem and the races, take a paper towel, and poof! no more grease! Seriously unbelieveable. Yes, I realize that this is what degreasers are *supposed* to do, and I sound like I just fell off the turnip truck, but dammit, it's been a while since I'd had this much fun with a chemical that I wasn't personally ingesting at the time.
I learned some pretty cool stuff about grease yesterday (I figured since I wasn't really getting any work done at work, I might as well learn something). And so I will pass my knowledge on to you. It's like knowledge communism here at bluepoofbikes tonight. So anyway, grease is made up of two components: the actual lubricant (which is usually oil), and a carrier (also called the base). It turns out that the bases used in different types of grease can actually be extremely incompatible, and therefore, mixing types of grease is very dangerous. In relatively benign cases, the bases might be of different viscosities, causing different parts of a mechanism to move at different rates. More common, and more dangerous, however is the case in which the two bases actually create a chemical reaction. It makes sense, right, since all a base is is, well, a chemical, and two incompatible chemicals can have ... interesting ... results when mixed. To take a sadly non-hypothetical example, there was a recent case in which two different greases were used on a jackscrew which held together the tail mechanism of an airplane. The bases, when mixed together, formed a chemical reaction which corroded the threads of the screw and caused the jackscrew to break off from the rest of the mechanism. You might have heard of this case; it was the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash, on January 31, 2000.
Creepy. Don't mix your greases, kids.