Monday, February 22, 2010

Tool

Ah yes, the dual meaning title...

I've become a reasonably ok bike mechanic. When I say reasonably ok I do not in any way mean that you should trust me to work on your $5000 bike and not eff it up, but I at least trust myself to work on my own expensive bike and then ride it. I do have a bad habit though of letting maintenance type stuff go way too long and then of course it ends up being more expensive and a big pain in the ass. Case in point: I finally got around to pulling apart the whole front end of my steel cross bike for the first time in 2 years. Let's just say that I got some quality time with some sandpaper while I cleaned the rust off of the steerer tube. Anyways... so my latest is that the rear shifting on my road bike has been getting kinda stiff and flaky for a while. I knew it was time to change out the lower piece of housing at least and probably replace the cable too. Well tonight I tried to just swap out the housing and grease up the cable a little. Lacking a very good cutter (the proper TOOL), the ends of the housing were a little ragged. In the process of threading the used cable through with it's imperfect end, I got a couple of strands caught and proceeded to peel them a ways back and basically destroy the cable. Of course I didn't have a spare on hand. So I have now disabled my bike over a $2 part because I procrastinated and wasn't careful (I am a TOOL). Ah well... easy problem to back out of at least.

5 comments:

solobreak said...

Buy 10 cables now. And a roll of good housing. Get the Shimano cable cutter if you can. The Park will do though.

The steerer tube - the rust was probably not an issue, but I'm surprised Mike didn't paint it. Even cheap steel forks usually have a token effort at a paint job on them just to keep them from getting too rusty in the warehouse. But a lot of small builders I've seen are notorious for just leaving bare tubing laying around getting rusty and then worrying about it later.

trackrich said...

Mike seals all the tubes except the spots he can't (steerer, head tube, seat tube). For those he treats it with Frame Saver and then he told me straight out to clean and re-treat once a year. I just got lazy.

Yes, I need a good cutter. I had enough spare housing, I just did a crappy job cutting it. I had some lightly used cables too, but my bikes require a full-length brand new cable to be long enough. These were off of older bikes so they were a hair too short.

solobreak said...

Yeah you probably need tandem cables don't you?

trackrich said...

Almost. I pretty much just throw a new cable on there and don't cut it. Cable length out of the box isn't uniform so I have come across some that were too short.

Scott Sweeney said...

Rich, if you have a dremel tool, you should hit the ends of the housing with it to make that nice and smooth. Cool little trick that Jeff showed me. No more fussing with the ends of the housing and worrying about a frayed cable. And yea, you need a good cutter!