Malmesbury Bikes

Your pedals wobble and it’s not a loose crank, so it’s probably the bottom bracket (it’s “BB” in cycle-shorthand) – what do you do:

A – keep pedaling until something catastrophic happens.

B – panic and call the local bike shop.

C – fix it yourself.

When it happened to my old MTB last year I chose option “B”, which in hindsight was probably right, as they had to use a lot of heat to get the old BB out and then respray the frame to get it back together, all for the original quote.

But when my Cannondale hybrid BB started to wobble a few weeks back I went for option “C”. I’ll let Sheldon Brown explain some of the intricacies about bottom brackets – suffice to say that for the majority of Shimano-equipped bikes, the BB will have a standard diameter, so all you need to measure are the width of the bottom bracket housing and the width of the spindle to ascertain what size to order. Alternatively you can just take the old one out and check what’s written on the inside of the BB.

Removing a bottom bracket is where the panic is likely to set in, but rest assured it’s really easy. You will need the Shimano BB tool, which costs about £12, and a very large adjustable spanner (or plumber’s wrench), but once you’ve got those the job is really easy.

There’s a small caveat – if the bottom bracket has never been changed and/or the bike’s had a hard life, then this job could be considerably harder, involved copious quantities of WD40 to loosen the threads… but then, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The freehub on my mountain bike seized several times over Christmas - the pedals went round, but the wheel didn’t because the freehubs’ rachets wouldn’t engage - so, rather than replace the whole, I opted to replace the freehub body. This is a relatively task, apart from two issues:
1 - The bike’s hub must be pushing ten years old, so there were some compatibility issues with the new Deore hub that I used as a source for the new freehib.
2 - Getting the freehub off of the wheel was easy (using the wheel for leverage), but getting the freehub off of the hub was a different matter. I’m not sure how cycle shops resort to a two foot long plumber’s wrench to mend bikes, but it worked a treat on this little task.
I’d love to say that the result was perfect, but it wasn’t and has resulted in the bodge from hell to get me out this morning:
A - the cassette wouldn’t sit back on the new freehub, so I resorted to some inventive addition of some old sprockets and spacer - the smallest ring is now the second one in!
B - the brake set-up wasn’t quite right so, after the first few miles of feeling like I was on an exercise bike with the friction set to max and no adjustment available, the rear brake blocks were discarded to free up the wheel. The bike ran like a dream after that. . . just didn’t stop very well.
So, moral of the story - don’t mees around with old bike components, just replace the bits in bulk. . . is that an excuse for a new bike??

How many times have you put off some tiny bit of maintenance because of the hassle of getting changing before rummaging around the garage in the dark searching for oil. I’ll explain about building a simple workbench shortly, but my better half bought me an Icetoolz Workshop Apron for Christmas and it’s fantastic.

No more worrying about getting a rim smear up a smart(-ish) shirt or lube mark down my jeans. Just pop on the apron - which fits well and is really comfortable - and get mending those bikes.

So those tiny fixes that have cost me dear in the past (normally gear adjustments) now get done and my cyclerides are painfree… well, at least the bike works.