Too hot to handle (Part 1)

I got my bike repaired and now I have these really awesome brakes so I wanted to try them on the most extreme hill in Penang named Penang Hill. So today I biked to Penang Hill and took the train to the top. My goal was to ride down without stopping since before I had to stop many times because my hands and forearms were tired from squeezing the brakes hard. This time I would not need to squeeze hard.

At the top I adjusted my front and back brakes so they were always rubbing hard so I would have to do even less work. This meant that I would be breaking hard front and back the whole way down. This would also be a stress test for my brakes pads to see if they could take the heat.

Riding a bike with cheap-o brake pads would be suicide. Within minutes they would heat up and melt. You would either melt them down to the metal in about 10 minutes or the brakes surface would melt and go liquid and become like oil or ice and you would have no brakes essentially.

The hill is so steep, you can go from 0 to 60 in about 5 seconds with no brakes. The hair-pin turns are so sharp that you literally need to slow to about 10 mph to take them. It seems that they have designed it so that if your brakes fail you will either go into the woods, go into a pile of dirt or hit a dirt wall. There are 20 to 30 foot drop-offs but only if you can turn 90 degrees which you can't if your brakes fail. You're going to go straight and crash into a tree or a hill which is a lot better than launching off a 30 foot cliff.

After about 5 minutes of down-hill, I was rounding a hair-pin turn and my rear tire gave out. I was losing air fast! I had a flat! It was good timing because it happened right before the largest rest-stop so I stopped there. There were about 10 people there.

I discovered that my rear rim was too hot to touch, even with gloves on. I now knew why my inner tube failed. It got too hot! I actually smelled rubber burning. When I pulled the tube out, it was obvious where it had melted and failed along the rim. One of the men watching me repair my bike took a look at the tube and asked if he could keep it as a souvenir so I gave it to him.

One guy saw me struggling to remove my tire so he offered to help and ended up doing the whole repair for me. I kept trying to say that I know what I'm doing. He had as much trouble as I did removing the tire. It's a tight fit but I have 4 tire removal tools and lots of experience removing tires much tighter than this one so it wasn't a big deal but he somehow assumed I was some kind of newbie even though I expressed to him I'm an expert at this.

I'm glad that I got to talk with these hikers because I learned about the various trails down the hill. I only knew of this one road but apparently there are many ways down the hill so now I have a lot of new paths to explore. These motorbike paths or dirt paths will take much longer to get down. They said it will take about 2 hours by path so make sure you give yourself enough time before it gets dark.

They all left and I was alone. I was about to head down when a woman on a Mt. bike came riding up the hill. Her name was Zari (rhymes with Sorry). I told her that I had just gotten a flat because my rim over-heated. She told me that I must stop every few minutes and let my rims cool and that it is impossible to ride from top to bottom without stopping.

I followed her down and after a few minutes we stopped. My rims were too hot to touch even with gloves, once again! We waited 10 minutes and they cooled and we rode a few more minutes, then rested while our rims cooled. There were quite a few monkeys near the bottom. I skid to scare them away because they didn't seem afraid us and I was afraid of hitting one.

Finally we reached the bottom. I'm not sure what happened to my rear brakes but the spring on the left no longer worked so the brake pads were always touching and there was nothing I could do about it. The heat must have done something to the spring so I rode home trying to find a taxi. That turned into an adventure in itself but I'll save that for my next blog post.