Month: March 2017

 

If I had a nickel for every time I said that upper headset bearings never wear out, I’d have… a few bucks anyway. Upper headset bearings usually do last a very long time. Lower headset bearings take all the pounding, and they are located in the second dirtiest area of a bike, at the top of the fork where the front wheel sprays up road grime.

The dirtiest area is at the back of the bottom bracket. (Hey, let’s mount the rear brake there!) But this is a story of headset bearings, not bottom brackets and brakes.

A friend showed up in the garage recently with his tri-bike. It had serious problems, not least of which was a rear bar-end shifter that went slack in the middle of a full Ironman, requiring him to ride the remainder of a hilly bike leg on the 11 cog. And also not least was a completely seized rear brake mounted guess where? But this is a story of headset bearings, not shifters and brakes, so on to headset bearings. Continue reading “Upper Headset Bearings Last Forever, Except When They Don’t”

Forty three years ago I worked a summer as a roustabout on an oilfield work gang. A large part of my job those months was operating a 48” pipe wrench to tighten and loosen threaded connections of all sorts. The senior guys on the crew watched me struggle for a few days (to build character, I guess) before sharing their “secrets”. Some of what they taught me is not applicable to bicycle mechanics, like beating on a corroded flowline thread with a sledge hammer to loosen it. But a lot of the principles of wrangling threaded connections apply.

Bicycle pedals are notorious for being hard to remove. One reason is that they self-tighten as you pedal.  This is a good thing – they tend not to fall off. This is why the left pedal has a left-hand thread. Unfortunately this self-tightening effect, along with a bit of corrosion, can make them very difficult to remove, even if they were not over-tightened during assembly.

It gets worse. Many manufacturers have eliminated the wrench flats to shave off a few grams. A 6mm or 8mm allen key must be inserted into the end of the spindle. Try getting any leverage in this position!

Over the years I have attacked a lot of stubborn pedals, and I have learned some tricks that have enabled me to remove pedals that no one else could. Continue reading “Help, I Can’t Get My Pedals Off!”