Saturday 26 November 2011

Maintenance day


Riding in the rain isn't that good for bikes. Water gets into everything, along with the odd bit of mud and grit, and that doesn't make for rapid forward motion. I pulled the front wheel off today and gave it a spin - I could feel how gritty the bearings felt. When I pulled the axle apart, about a teaspoon of water ran out of where it shouldn't have. The two "shiny" bearings were on one side, the two muddy ones on the other. I cleaned the whole lot up enough to stop it from seizing up on my next outing, but clearly it's time to go shopping for some new stuff.



I also checked the rim wear by holding a spanner up flush with the rim. It should be flush with the spanner handle, not as concave as a waning moon. I've had rims wear to the point before where they gave up, cracked and then exploded. Thankfully, I was not on the bike at the time - having a rim explode and then getting stuck in your forks would be a recipe for going A over T. With a car, you just replace the disks on the disk brakes rather than the whole wheel - in the case of a bike, the brake disk also happens to be your wheel rim.

I could get the wheel rebuilt with a new rim and new innards in the hub, but I think I'll just replace the whole damned lot. I have replaced the wheels entirely twice before, and had two wheel rebuilds. Did someone once say that cycling was cheap?

2 comments:

sfw said...

Why aren't you using sealed bearing hubs?

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