Bike jobs you loathe

Pop the springs out and bring the arms together with an elastic band. Adjust the pads with that bit of pressure, then tighten.

Now my Curve cantis, took about a decade to get really good and develop a bit of a system, and I had to fettle them a lot to get anywhere near the best out of them. But my bike shop gave them to me, and they looked so cool, and done right, they did have more power than the Shimano units they replaced.

Clearly a case of practice then - I've mostly owned cantis with the occasional visit from a V brake!  I'd have been happy to spend the time on curve ones though, they did look the biz.

The rhombidish ones. Kona put them on some of their top end MTBs, I reckon someone had insisted on Vs, the shop Cycology in Crowthorn, gave them to me as I was moving up to Birmingham. 

I had to make my own straddle cables out of 2mm brake cable (difficult enough to find, the XT braided one was better than the standard twist) filing down the perpendicular barrel to a smaller in line one.

The rears were always easier to set up, for some reason, and once I'd fitted the brake booster to the front, it could take many frustrating hours to get those right. There were occasions I would have to give up, set up the Good Bike for the commute and try again later in the week once I'd built up a bit more will to try some more.

exactly this, all the spacers, the weird concave bobbins things, they all seem infinitely adjustable, which just means its a pain to set up. I think one of the pivots is corroded as its sticking abit, or the spring doesnt spring as much anymore.

Then there is trying to balance them. WHatever you do, one moves and the other sticks. Ah, I'll tweak the tensioner - problem swaps over.

When I was pro, the worst to adjust were the cheap Apollo brakes where the legs were plastic so you could not get any brake pressue, they would just flex. I used to be able to get Tektro V-brakes for about £1.50 a set in bulk. Any time I had an Apollo in I would simply refit those as I reckoned I would spend far more than £1.50 of my time not getting the Apollo originals to work.

As for adjusting - it became easy with practice several times a day - firstly reset adjuster on lever, you just learned the sequence of the 93 odd shaped objects you had to juggle onto the brake bolt, do a test swing to check whether it was thin or thick inside (generally MTBs thick inside, hybrids, thin inside), grasp the brake together against rim, pull cable through, back off about 1/4". tighten, spin wheel, tweak, job done.

True - as they haven't been on my own bikes (so eventually upgraded if not up to stuff) they've possibly been low end and just not very good.  Can be like trying to use cooked spaghetti as a ruler.

On the plus side it doesn't tend to involve the use of a file / "you've got one shot at this".

But looking after the drivetrain, no matter how tiresome, is the job that brings the most benefit.

My commute can be especially filthy, and used to sometimes require a nightly wipe down, with a deeper clean at the weekends. Otherwise noisy and bad shifting would result.

Now with my rohloff set up, it's a lot less essential and far quicker, but the start of the week was so wet that I did have to do my first midweek clean and lube this week.

Got the mud tyres out, to get them nice and round on Wednesday, but by Thursday it had started drying up. So not quite yet.

So, I'm going to add a job that I really could do without, trying to get the old dried on rubber solution off tubeless tyres. And there is a lot of surface on my 27.5+. And fitting tubeless. Fitting tubed was never fun and joy filled, but was relatively quick and easy, I'm not looking forward to fitting the mud tyres.

I have never fitted Marathon's.

Woldsman wrote:

I did take in my disc braked MTB for new pads as I have no tools for hydraulic disc brakes.  

You shouldn't need any to replace the pads, exactly the same as mechanical (or is for all models I know). Just be careful that you don't accidentally (or absentmindedly, as I once did) squeeze the lever when the pads are out or you risk popping a piston and getting brake fluid everywhere.

Rendel Harris wrote:

Woldsman wrote:

I did take in my disc braked MTB for new pads as I have no tools for hydraulic disc brakes.  

You shouldn't need any to replace the pads, exactly the same as mechanical (or is for all models I know). Just be careful that you don't accidentally (or absentmindedly, as I once did) squeeze the lever when the pads are out or you risk popping a piston and getting brake fluid everywhere.

I think I did exactly that (one brake lever almost touched the bar - and the other led to head turning squealing from the rotor).  But it was worse than that as the rear caliper had to be replaced as well on this neglected bike, and various shifter bits had seized up

The bike shop only charged £45 so I couldn't grumble at that. Should have had it fixed earlier, really.  

Woldsman wrote:

The bike shop only charged £45 so I couldn't grumble at that. 

That's a result - tell me you don't live in London without telling me you don't live in London...

Anything to do with spokes, that's a job for the LBS. Even there most novice mechanic will possess more skill in this than I will acquire.

I can tension and replace them, with a tension meter it's just fiddly rather than difficult. I'd love to be at the level of the LBS guys who just do it by ear though!

Exactly.  However, frustrating though it is, I also find it strangely therapeutic.  

What I don't like are headset bearing changes and generally any job for which I don't have EXACTLY the right tool do do it properly.  I've learned the hard way that a little improvisation usually ends in huge frustration and even bigger costs.

Ping and pong 

Think it depends a lot on how many spokes you have - 32 and 36 spoke wheels are pretty forgiving but my efforts with 20 or 24 have been less successful.

The smaller the wheel diameter, the larger the plane of acceptable tension.  The more crosses, the stronger (within reason).  Most risky are 24-spoke radial wheels, wouldn't touch those as the margin becomes very thin.  When I see some of the portly guys riding those I think they don't know how close to disaster they can come.

But I never build wheels for others, don't think my solicitor would agree.

we do what with the spokes now... ?  Ive never tensioned a spoke in my life, might explain why my wheel is a bit wobbly thesedays, but Im not touching it.

for me the bike job I hate the most, its digging out all the ali pickup out of the rim blocks after the roads have started getting a bit wet and gritty, because its a PITA, you have to dismantle everything to do it, the dirt gets everywhere, and you never quite get the block alignment back, and you know a week or twos rides later, youll be doing the same job again.

Tensioning spokes is fine if the rim isn't damaged, but as soon as you damage the rim, you end up with uneven tension to try and compensate for the rim not being true. So if you go round trying to even up tension (and some wheel manufacturers claim to aim for even tension over absolute true wheel, IIRC) you can still end up with rubbing rims on rim brakes.

My theory was get an even tension and then tweak for wobble. Getting reasonably even tension and no wobble is fine on a new wheel, rarely possible on a repair. Then it is a question of deciding whether the over-tensioned and undertensioned spokes are so far out of wack that the wheel is not going to survive. 

Rendel Harris wrote:

Tensioning spokes, I don't know if anyone else finds this but for me it's like trying to tune my 12 string guitar in that I can go all round the wheel with the tension meter and spoke key getting every single one perfect then when I recheck the one I started with it's off again...

It is the same reason. As you tune your 12 string, the change in tension of one string affects all the other string. Iterative process. If you have to make a big change in tension, then you know everything else will be affected in the opposite way on a guitar, bit more complicated on a bike.

When I tune a guitar, say to an alternate tuning, I know that it is pointless aiming for the exact note first time around, and if I am detuning for example, I might tune the first string a bit flat, knowing that as I detune the other strings, the first string I tuned will start bearing more load.

IanMSpencer wrote:

It is the same reason. As you tune your 12 string, the change in tension of one string affects all the other string. Iterative process. If you have to make a big change in tension, then you know everything else will be affected in the opposite way on a guitar, bit more complicated on a bike.

When I tune a guitar, say to an alternate tuning, I know that it is pointless aiming for the exact note first time around, and if I am detuning for example, I might tune the first string a bit flat, knowing that as I detune the other strings, the first string I tuned will start bearing more load.

One tip for easier trueing (once the wheel is nice and round concentrically) that I do is for each spoke that you add tension to, relax a bit of tension in the opposed/adjacent spokes so that hopefully the total tension is largely the same, but pulling the rim over to the desired position. With rear wheels, you have to guess a bit to allow for the different sides being at different tensions.

That is exactly what I was taught as a young lad working part-time in my LBS workshop. It's pretty amazing how straight you get a wheel again by being methodical and patient like that.