Riding More with Less: A Future for Bike Repair

INTRODUCTION

When your bicycle needs repair, it may be simplest to visit your friendly local bike shop for their service and expertise. They probably deserve our support—precious few strike it rich fixing bikes, and our business helps ensure their continuing presence—but there might be other options as well. Given the time and inclination, odds are good that you can learn to fix it yourself.

This book explores resourceful approaches to bike repair. As we’ll see, just how things are made becomes a major factor here. Among the better-quality goods sold at our independent bike shops, the fetishization of intellectual property can sometimes present complications—while such an emphasis may have helped some small-scale inventors and creators along the way, the enduring effect on the actual practice of fixing bikes has been the construction of arbitrary barriers, each walling off contrived fiefdoms. Beyond various expedient formatting standards, our major bicycle and component manufacturers literally design some of their products not to work together. (The industry’s endemic product recall patterns suggest the innovation fig leaf typically proffered as justification here merits greater scrutiny.)

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the budget bikes sold in big-box stores share far more in common with each other, but only in the negative sense: their sneeringly misanthropic manufacturers represent the worst possible failures in motivation and imagination. Yet budget bikes still dominate the market, because most people are still denied their due dignity, even as bicycle transportation remains undersold and undervalued.

Taken together, these circumstances demand a fundamental and thoroughgoing overhaul of our industry’s priorities, as well as its productive capacities. In this respect, community bike shops may be ahead of their time—while no two are alike, they tend to be comfortable places where you can find good used bikes and parts, learn repair skills, and even fix your own bike. Best of all, community bike shops famously provide for truly welcoming and inclusive environments.

For purposes of this project, they also lend us some excellent points of reference. Creative mechanics at community bike shops the world over keep countless riders safely awheel over all manner of obstacles, to sometimes include a lack of funds, and there is much they can teach us. As a means to broaden our understanding, this volume thus includes technical insights, commentary, and survey data (both individual and collective) provided by staff at thirty-four community bike shops in four countries, as listed on page 248.

Finally, while I remain grateful for everything our friends have shared for purposes of this project, I am principally responsible for assembling this book, and any errors found herein are mine alone.

I

TOOLS

Bike repair stands do two important things: they bring everything up where we can work on it more easily, and they lift the wheels off the ground. We can check our work on the brakes and drivetrain, and without kneeling or squatting.

Better stands have heavier bases—they won’t tip over. Their clamps will be adjustable as well, accommodating frame tubes of varying sizes. Be careful when clamping high-end aluminum or carbon fiber frame tubes, which can be vulnerable to compression damage—grab the seatpost instead. And if the post is ovalized, or itself made of carbon, use a dummy post of the same size. Pull it out a bit if the clamp needs more room; mark the original height with electrical tape.

See page 9 for more on identifying different frame materials. Clamps can erase decals and stickers: wrap a clean rag around the jaws if either is precious.

If you are working on a regular steel frame—far and away the most common, for all of human history—go ahead and chomp down on the seat tube just beneath the top tube, with the clamp’s adjustment mechanism facing into the frame’s main triangle. Clamping on the frame instead of the post makes it easier to reposition the bike to better angles more suitable to different repair tasks—tilting the back end up near level to work on the front brakes, for example.

Park Tool and other manufacturers produce stands with removable clamps, which can be useful indeed when working on more substantial machines like tandems, adult trikes, or electric bikes. First, remove the clamp and chomp down to a midpoint on the frame before hoisting the package up into the stand. You might ask a comrade to assistance here, depending.

Park Tool PCS-4 repair stand.

No stand? Flip the bike upside down on a hard surface before applying significant torque to pedals, cranks, and bottom brackets. Alternately—for less strenuous adjustments on cables, brakes, or derailleurs—you might just hang the bike up. A simple alternative to using a repair stand is two lengths of rope hanging from rafters or a tree branch, notes Jody Chandler at the Hub Bike Co-op in Minneapolis. One rope comes down, goes under the saddle and back up to the rafter. The other does the same under the stem. If ½ webbing is used, it can be mated with toe straps to give easy height adjustability."

Park TS-2 truing stand.

As with our repair stands, the better wheel truing stands are heavier—they’ll hold a wheel without letting it shimmy around while you work, which makes truing (straightening) the wheel a lot easier. Mechanics often secure truing stands in bench vises or bolt them to wooden bases for just this reason.

For hand tools, a set of quality screwdrivers would be a great place to start—3 mm and 6 mm flat tip, alongside a #0 and a #2 Phillips—followed by set of metric box wrenches, 8 through 17 mm. A hammer will unfortunately earn its place on your bench, as will a rubber mallet, metal and woodworking files, box and needle-nose pliers, and a strong magnet. Our metal tools of course prefer dry, slightly oily environments.

The standard set for metric Allen wrenches includes 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 mm keys, and among the bikes we’ll find uses for all of these. The best Allen keys are known as ball drivers: the longer ends are beveled and drawn in, allowing us to make adjustments at angles, greatly simplifying our access to the various tight spots we’ll encounter. They can also be spun more quickly, rolled across the fingertips basically, but only the Allen wrenches’ short ends will deliver the torque required to truly secure bolts. Shorty’s corners wear down in consequence, until the wrench eventually slips right off the bolt head—a problem the nearest bench-mounted grinder should be happy to fix. Just grind ’em flat again, filing off any resultant burrs. The bike shops’ ubiquitous 2/2.5/3 mm and 4/5/6 mm Allen Y-wrenches both earn their keeps, as does the equally common 8/9/10 mm three-way socket.

With only a few exceptions—the English bottom brackets (BBs) foremost among them—the threading used on bikes is wonderfully, increasingly standardized. Almost every bolt head accepts a metric wrench and bears metric threading as well: M4, M5, or M6, most often. We may use 3, 4, 5, or 6 mm Allen keys to turn any of these, depending where we find them. (Older Campagnolo crank bolts may require a 7 mm Allen key, but nobody else will.)

You should never require much force when starting a set of threads. It’s always a good idea to make sure the two sets of threads are entirely parallel with each other, lest you face the tragic but all-too-common trauma of cross-threaded parts. Keep threaded fittings clean—clear out any rust or other debris with a rag before engaging them. And unless you’re installing brakes, as we’ll see, dab a smudge of grease across the threads’ starting point before putting things together.

The modern spring-loaded adjustable wrenches are preferable to the old dial-up versions, in that they’re far less likely to strip out our nuts and bolts. This said, the bigger crescent wrenches can deliver useful torque in certain larger applications, such as with threaded headsets. Some of the oldest threaded headsets feature adjustable nuts bearing only knurled surfaces, rather than wrench flats, and these will correspond best with a big pair of Channellock pliers. The dreaded Vise-Grip pliers are most useful for holding other tools—making extra-long Allen keys, for example.

Side cutters are best for cutting or trimming zip ties. They’ll also cut brake cable housing, but a cable housing cutter, which you’ll need to cut any linear-wrapped shifter housing, will give better results. Wound steel control cables will yield to these, or to cable cutters. Either may loosen with use—the jaws should be just loose enough to pivot freely.

The uniquely useful fourth hand cable puller directs its charge into a cable-sized alley, allowing us to hold the cable’s position while tightening the binder bolt at the same time. These are key when working on caliper or cantilever brakes; we can also use them to help stretch out new cables. (There was also a third hand tool, which merely held the brake pads to arbitrarily fixed positions alongside the rim, but these are long obsolete.)

All but the oldest cable housing is lined with plastic. Cutting the housing compresses this. This doesn’t always prevent new (uncut) cables from passing through, but the rest will get blocked or frayed. We reopen compressed housing segments with a cable-sized pick or awl. These are easy to find at hardware stores, but you can also just sharpen up a broken spoke on a bench grinder. Crimp a couple 90-degree bends to the far end and you get a kind of minicrank, which is easier to use.

We can also supplement the mighty fourth hand with a simple homemade extension, speaking of this lining—just snip off a thumb’s worth of brake cable housing, capping each end with a housing cap. Racks, fenders, and the like can sometimes prevent us from cinching up the fourth hand directly against the brake as we’d like to; this surrogate extends that interaction back to a more convenient distance. In keeping with the theme, in my last book I proposed we call these spare fingers.

Only older bikes will have any use for spanners, which hold the adjustable cups on the oldest bottom brackets while we finalize their adjustments. (We’ll discuss the spanner specifics in due time, on pages 179–80). Lockring tools trace back to the same era, meaning to address various old-fashioned hub, headset, or track hub lockrings.

Neither the box nor the crescent wrenches will have anything to say to the conspicuously narrow lowermost wrench flats aboard old-style threaded headsets, which are far too narrow for them—we need the broad and flat headset wrenches instead. Possible sizes here are 30, 32, 35, 36, and 40 mm; 32 and 36 mm are far and away the most common. Also: check out the drive-side bottom bracket cup, just inside the chainrings. See any wrench flats? These will almost always be 36 mm. There is of course a specific tool for this as well, which grips the full circumference of the cup, but a 36 mm headset wrench might fill in as needed.

The pedals’ wrench flats are sometimes just as narrow, but they also require a lot of torque for safe installation and removal, so you’ll want an actual pedal wrench as well. These may have two sets of flats: we’ll use the larger one (marked 15 mm) for most pedals and the slightly smaller one for those found on various older, cheaper, or kids’ bikes. (No flats? Look for a metric socket around back, cut into the axle’s base. Your 6 or 8 mm Allen wrench should work.)

Cone wrenches are wispy little creatures; far too thin for use with the pedals. Their sizes range from 13 to 18 mm, with the odd sizes being most common. We use them to adjust our hubs. The offset brake wrenches are similar, but the wrench flats are offset 90 degrees, to better greet various older road bike caliper brakes. Sizes range from 10 to 14 mm, with an odd one meant for grasping the caliper springs as well.

Cranksets arrive in a few distinct formats—read from page 176 for more specifics. The originals, known as cottered cranks, were attached with steel cotter pins. We’ll still see these on the road sometimes, but cottered cranks haven’t been standard on new bikes in the North American market for more than fifty years. We rely on threaded crank extractors to remove the more modern (cotterless) three-piece cranksets. A few standards have been used with these, as we’ll see, of which only two remain common.

The crank threads and bolt head may be hidden beneath a dust cap. You’ll want a 14 mm socket for the bolt—or, more rarely, 15 mm. More modern crank bolts marry the dust cap to a fitting for a 5, 6, 7, 8, or 10 mm Allen wrench. The 8 mm, mostly. Nicer three-piece cranksets use clever self-extracting bolts, obviating the need for the extractor, but the sad truth is that the wispy crank threads are too easily ruined—stripped cranks, as we’ll see, can become a real problem. Use all due caution when pulling three-piece cranks, as described on page 181.

What are sold as consumer crank extractors feature long, flat handles. The shop versions skip the handles, offering sets of wrench flats instead. The central distinction among crank extractors, however, relates to the width of the bottom bracket spindles. We’ll use a tool such as Park’s blue-handled CCP-22 to remove cranks from the older and narrower square-tapered spindles. It will be another tool, such as Park’s black-handled CCP-44, that addresses cranks on the newer and wider-splined pipe-style spindles like Octalink and ISIS Drive. Older versions of the CCP-22 extractor also feature a second, shorter and slightly wider stack of threads: these only correspond with older Stronglight cranks. Some older Campagnolo cranks require a proprietary extractor with left-handed threads.

A crank backer such as Park’s CNW-2 will hold the backs of the chainring bolts as you tighten them. Nothing else really works here: small, and thus inexpensive, but crucial.

Excepting the bolt-on track cogs, the gears on rear wheels will either thread into place (freewheels) or slip down over free-spinning splined freehub bodies (cassettes). The internally geared hub sprockets look more like track cogs, but they function more as cassettes—see page 216 for more.

Freewheel removal requires an extraction tool, a funny-looking socket basically, of which there are several. Cassette removal enlists a chain whip, a cassette lockring tool—of which there are also a few—and either a vise, a second chain whip, or a big adjustable wrench. Tools used for freewheel and cassette removal are detailed beginning from pages 64 and 70, respectively.

To my experience, Park’s CT-3 is our best chain tool. The CT-5 provides for essentially the same design advantages in a smaller and less expensive package. Cheap chain tools suck—they’re poorly made, and they break. You’ll also want a decent floor pump for tires, tire levers to fix flats—I’d recommend the mighty Quik Stik—and a patch kit.

We use spoke wrenches to true or build wheels. The wrong wrench either won’t fit or will strip out smaller spoke nipples, so the sizing is key here. Park’s red-handled SW-2 is most common; the black-handled SW-0 fits new or replacement spoke nipples; the green SW-1 is for some older bikes, in the US market at least. (A tiny fraction of high-end racing wheels eschew the spoke wrenches all the other wheels use. See their vendors for more info, if this is you.)

Other tools hold us accountable. A tensiometer can verify a given spoked wheel’s health and strength; the torque wrench is like a lie detector for bolts. ("Are you really tight?") This last is most important with the pedals, cranks, and bottom brackets. Component manufacturers provide torque recommendations, and a torque wrench is our only way to check.

Finally, get yourself an encouragement bar—the down tube from a dead bike frame, for example. A long pipe wide enough to swallow a big wrench’s handle, for use when you need extra leverage.

Lubrication? The ideal chain is just wet enough not to squeak, yet dry enough to avoid attracting excessive debris. On that basis I’d recommend using so-called gel lubricants like Rock N Roll, which suspend oil in an alcohol base—this evaporates, leaving the chain sublime. Whatever you do, try to use an oil dropper rather than a spray bottle. It’s often easy enough to refill Tri-Flow and other oil dropper bottles—just grip the plastic tip with your pliers, pull it out, and fill. This will probably flatten the tip’s tiny hole—rotate the pliers 90 degrees and squeeze to round it out again. Always wipe the chain down once you’re done.

Working on bearings? Get a grease gun. These, too, are refillable—the home mechanic versions use tubes, which we roll up and clip as we go, just like with toothpaste. The shop versions are unscrewed and literally spoon-fed from tubs of grease. Either provides a precision useful for potentially messy work. And, given the way that open tubs of grease tend to attract all kinds of grit, grease guns can also help us avoid transferring such contaminants into our parts.

Directly opposite the lubricants we find the thread-locking compounds. The vibrations generated through riding conspire to loosen our bikes’ various threaded fittings, and thread lockers introduce friction between them. The original approach to this was strictly mechanical—serrated or spring-loaded split washers, shoving threads together basically. The nyloc nuts are more modern—the nut accommodates a nylon ring, which holds the threads more predictably. We also see a broad range of liquid thread lockers, from blue Loctite’s kind-of-tighter to red Loctite’s not-going-anywhere, for example.

II

FRAMES

Given the opportunity, riding a decent frame can make a big difference. The ride will be more comfortable; the handling will be more consistent; the frame will probably last longer.

Better frames are often lighter. The welds or brazing at the joints will be cleaner and more even. The frame tubing decals—found on the seat tube or down tube, and perhaps a fork blade as well—provide us a useful shorthand here. Be sure to read the fine print: a frame decal only mentions main tubes, for example, when confessing that its fork and rear triangle are made of lesser materials. Butted frame tubes are machined to be slightly thinner through their midsections, a treatment that makes them stronger and lighter both. Double-butted chromoly steel tubes provide a basic benchmark for quality; triple-butted is better and rarer. Either enlists steel’s inherent resiliency to deliver a less jarring ride. Each tubing manufacturer uses their own numbering or naming protocol to describe their own projects, but they’ll all mention butted tubes whenever they can, so this is the key word to look out for.

Frame tubes of any material may be joined with lugs, which are what we call the sleeved fittings joining one or more tubes together. Their presence is not necessarily determinative of frame quality—cheap and quality tubes alike will be designed to either join directly or through lugs.

Most bikes are made of steel. High-tensile (Hi-Ten) steel is cheaper and weaker than chromium-molybdenum (chromoly) steel. Both can be heavier than other frame materials, which include aluminum alloys, carbon composites, titanium, and even bamboo. Steel can also rust, which is why mechanics in coastal areas often recommend coating such frames’ interior dimensions with Frame Saver treatment for protection.

Reynolds 853—Seamless Air-Hardened Heat-Treated Steel.

Carbon fiber might crack on impact, especially in the deep cold, and as a petroleum derivative it will also burn. The ride quality can be quite supple, however, prior to any such events. Aluminum is more rigid—a tendency that leads some to say the material is better used for bike parts rather than frames. This comes through in the design of alloy frames as well: manufacturers often pair suspension forks, carbon forks, and even carbon chainstays with aluminum frames, in part to take the edge off.

Titanium and bamboo each have their own advantages, but in our time both may be safely described as boutique frame materials. There are so many great steel frames going to waste, says Jack Kelleher of the Clonakilty Bike Circus in Clonakilty, Ireland. Bamboo appeals to the survivalist in us all, but why bother? The heart of a bike is steel, and that requires heavy industry. There won’t be ball bearings or chains after the bomb. We’ll ride donkeys.

We trust a frame or fork’s dropouts to accept wheel axles of the appropriate dimensions, of which there have been only a few. The original dropouts were horizontal—elongated slits, basically—allowing our forebears to set up their wheels at varying distances from their pedaling axes. We still use this formula to set the chain tension on fixed gear, BMX, and other monocog bikes.

Horizontal dropouts can complicate wheel removal, however. Indexed drivetrains—where gear changes correspond with clicks—also work best when their axles sit at fixed points, rather than just somewhere along a horizontal spectrum. Reducing the distance between our pedaling and drive axes also allows for greater efficiency. Thus do modern multispeed bike frames incorporate vertical dropouts instead; the axle slips in from below. The semivertical dropouts are less common; they split the difference.

With multispeed bikes of any vintage, the rear derailleur will almost always attach to a small threaded fitting on the frame known as the derailleur hanger. These get bent all the time: the bike falls over, the derailleur takes the hit, the hanger gets bent. When you look at the derailleur from the rear, its pulleys would angle inward.

A bent hanger will torpedo your shifting, and possibly even throw your rear derailleur into the spokes, so straightening derailleur hangers becomes a very common repair. This is easy enough on steel frames—derailleur hanger alignment tools, such as Park’s DAG-2.2, are literally designed for this. No alignment tool? Plug your Allen wrench’s short end into the derailleur’s mounting bolt, then grasp its long end with one hand and the derailleur body with the other, moving both simultaneously.

The hangers on aluminum frames, being more rigid, are less easily aligned. If it’s aluminum, I’m not going to bother with it, says Dave Falini of the Newark Bike Project in Newark, Delaware. The slowest, most even pressure might straighten a bent aluminum hanger rather than snapping it right off, but there are no guarantees. This is why more modern aluminum frames use replaceable derailleur hangers. These may be unbolted and replaced, once you pass through the suspiciously dark and confusing forest of replacement hangers: only a precise replacement among dozens of nearly identical pretenders will suffice. Look for your bike’s brand, model, and perhaps even the model year. (Cheaper generic replicas are also sometimes available.)

Bike axles have long been standardized, to 9 × 1 mm front and 10 × 1 mm rear. Newer high-end mountain bikes substitute stout thru axles instead, as we’ll see beginning on page 61. And while 100 mm remains the hub spacing standard up front—excepting the narrower folding-bike forks—the width out back may span 110 to 197 mm, with 130 and 135 mm being the current road and mountain bike standards respectively.

It’s often useful to clarify which side you’re talking about when discussing bike frames. That with the gearing is the drive side; its opposite is the neutral side. You may hear these terms often, discussing repair scenarios at bike shops.

Our frames’ greatest remaining controversies arguably focus on the bottom bracket shell, and to a