Discovering, after making the purchase of both a new front brake and brake cable, but refraining from the purchase of any brake-cable sleeving because you think you’ve still got some at home, that you have exactly as much as the installation requires.

Perfection is a shy and elusive target, crawling ever further back into the crevice between measurement and asymptote, between real and ideal.

That having been said, the bike now feels 99.9% dialed-in. That only took, what, almost a year? (To be fair, the thing that took the longest was the drivetrain, and I made one costly mistake there, with cascading consequences. I suspect that I’ll turn the next one, whenever and whatever it might be, around much more quickly.)

Unbleached #2 coffee filters, accidentally purchased for use in a #4 machine: useless.

Unbleached #2 coffee filters, for refreshing, through removal of suspended particulates and other gunk, the citrus solvent you just used to leave your chain spotless: perfect.

Cannondale has unveiled its 2007 bike line.

The Carbon Rush family has made its official debut, after a summer of tantalizing press releases, as has a new carbon hardtail frame, the Taurine. There are the usual tweaks to paint schemes and model numbering, of course.

The addition of greatest interest to me, though, is the Rush 3Z. As far as I can tell, it’s a Rush 3 with a conventional fork and matching headset — an acknowledgment, it would seem, that there are people who want a top-of-the-line aluminum Rush but aren’t yet, for whatever reason, quite ready to embrace Cannondale’s signature Lefty design.

It is disquietingly possible that I am in fact one of these people.

I don’t know who the Crank Brothers use to do their component photography, but these people need to be stopped. They’re a menace to public decency and morals.

Seriously, pictures of the company’s new line of bottom brackets shouldn’t be making me drool just because they’re awash in lustrously anodized, lovingly polished, precisely machined metal. This is sick.

“Whatever turns your crank,” they say, but I’m not sure that’s what they meant.

If you own a mountain bike and don’t intend for every last bit of its maintenance to be handled by your local bike shop, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Lennard Zinn’s Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance. In terms of “A-ha!” moments, to say nothing of damage likely spared to your components by the avoidance of stupid mistakes, it will pay for itself in a matter of hours.

It’s not just that Zinn’s explanations are detailed and his prose lucid, or that Todd Telander’s many excellent illustrations shed further light upon the subject, though all of these things are true. It also that pretty much every page makes clear how much Zinn loves the subject; how much of its lore he has absorbed over the years, to the point where understanding seems to seep from his very pores.

Orson Scott Card wrote that “the Maker is a part of what he makes.” Reading Zinn’s book, and surveying his handiwork, one glimpses just what that might mean in the real world.

Marzocchi, I’ve discovered, still makes some suspension forks, notably the MX Comp, with one-inch steerers. Are they good? Are they crap? I don’t know. With luck, I’ll find out Monday.

Oh, and I’m well aware that only one person who reads this blog regularly is likely to even know what I’m talking about, and he’s going to smack me for doing something he explicitly told me not to do. I can only say that I had my reasons. (Maniacally stupid ones, quite possibly, but mine all the same.)