This month for Back From The Dead I thought we’d have a look at some of the oddest/grossest/more vomit inducing repairs I’ve tackled recently. The jobs where two pairs of gloves, eye protection and a face mask are a must!
I would like to make it clear right here at the start however that this is all written with the utmost respect for the riders of the bikes you’re about to see and there’s no shaming anyone for their lack of (or attempts at) maintenance here. Lessons have been learnt and hopefully past errors won’t be repeated!
So while calling the article ‘Your Bike Hates You’ may seem like I’m having a dig at folks for not looking after their bikes, please be aware that any reference to people’s mechanical aptitude is purely in jest and all in the spirit of good fun!
We’ll start off with my pal Robert.
The hardest man in Yorkshire, Robert is a pure cyclist. He absolutely lives for it, it’s all he does and it’s all he thinks about. Any local Audax riders will know him as ‘that guy that’s at every event’, but not only does he ride every event, he rides to the events! And then back home! Hundreds and hundreds of miles every single week!
I first met Robert when he came in with ‘a bit of knocking’ coming from his bb shell on his beloved Ragley Cragg Vale. Someone had already made an attempt to remove the BB from the frame with what I can only assume was the hammer and chisel method due to the, shall we say, slightly reshaped tool fittings on the cup.
My Campagnolo square taper BB tool is one of my least used tools, so I only have a basic one and this BB was majorly wedged in the frame, not to mention the damage to the cup. So some minor bodging was done to clamp the tool to the frame using a selection of bits of BB and headset tools.
What then followed was about an hour of painstakingly tapping the tool around a fraction of a turn at a time but perseverance paid off and the BB that Robert was worried would be the end of his frame was finally out.
This was only the start though. Now it was time to clean out Yorkshire’s smallest but most densely packed salt mine. Over the 11 years that Robert has had his Ragley, this is only his second bottom bracket. This would be pretty amazing for a bike that only sees fairly regular use, but for someone like Robert riding thousands of miles a year, that is absolutely insane longevity.
The only problem with having the same BB in for half a decade and riding a million miles on it is the need for regular maintenance is easy to ignore. If it’s working, it’s working. Right?
Well yeah, until it’s not! Every drop of sweat that’s dropped off Robert’s head onto his bike has spent the last decade slowly working its way into his frame running down to the frame’s lowest point, the BB shell. The salt deposits left in Robert’s frame after the BB was removed would put Calderdale council’s yearly road salt supplies to shame.
The normal plan of action for a grotty BB shell is a quick clean out, run the tap through it and give it a refacing if needed. In this case much more drastic action was going to be required. A wire brush attached to the drill got the worst of the grot out and after a good run through with the drill and a few passes with the tap set, the shell was just about in a condition where I wouldn’t mind screwing a new bottom bracket in.
On another note, since I fitted this bb for Robert we’ve found a crack in his frame which has left Robert devastated! He does have another bike but this one he really, REALLY loves. So on the off-chance that anyone has an old Ragley Cragg Vale frame in a 54cm that they wouldn’t mind parting with please let me know at Happy Days and we could make Robert’s year! Is the ‘Brant Brant Brant’ spell a myth, or will he magically appear?
Next up from the workshop nightmares folder is the greasiest bike I’ve ever seen.
This bike had been previously owned by a moto trials rider who clearly had different ideas about bicycle frame design than actual bike designers… Maybe a few of his friends had frames with grease ports built into the suspension linkages and he felt he was missing out? Maybe he was a big fan of those old WTB Greaseguard headsets where you could inject them with fresh grease without removing the stem?
Maybe he just wanted to have to wash his hands every time he touched his bike?
I’m not really sure all I do know is that this bike had a grease nipple drilled into the side of the headtube!
Not only this but the entire frame had been FILLED with grease! And when I say filled, I mean filled! From the headtube, the entire downtube was full, to the point that it was escaping from the cable entry ports!
I’m not the biggest fan of grease ports anyway. I always prefer to use a well greased, good quality bearing to begin with and find that purging bearings with a grease port usually does nothing to increase bearing life. In fact for UK riding it may actually be a detriment due to extra dirt building up if the old grease isn’t extra fastidiously cleaned away.
I’m especially not a big fan of grease ports when they’re fitted without any reason in the middle of a headtube that wasn’t designed for them, drilled right next to a weld and then filled with the grimiest most industrial grease available! If the person that designed your frame didn’t put one there it (probably) doesn’t need one…
Next up we’ll go back to the grotty BBs for this masterpiece!
This SRAM GXP BB had been fitted to a beautiful Ti Sunday Cycles frame that had spent several static years on a turbo trainer. Once again it had fallen victim to the perils of a sweaty rider and a lack of maintenance, but in a rather spectacular fashion. While the BB came out of the frame fairly easily what was left behind was quite impressive: large chunks of the alloy BB cups had completely corroded away to dust!
Thankfully due to the magical anti corrosion properties of the Ti frame the BB shell was in perfect shape under a layer of aluminium and salt dust.
The one where we run away…
From beautiful Ti works of art to the complete other end of the scale, we now move swiftly on to one of the very few bikes that I’ve ever refused to work on. A folding bike that had been homebrewed into an E-bike in the sketchiest manner I have ever seen…
So to start off we have the erm, seatclamp?
It’s not a seatclamp. It’s a bolt.
Drilled directly through the seat tube and the seatpost.
This is because the seat tube has been inexplicably trimmed down to be flush with the top tube, making sure to cut into the top of the welds on both the seatstay and top tube for good measure.
Next on the list of reasons not to touch it, we’ll move onto the mass of loose wires hanging out of the bag on the also very sketchily attached pannier rack.
Topping it all off though is the brake setup.
The front brake had so much friction in the cable that an external spring had been added to the caliper to help it return. Not only this but the enormous front hub mounted motor made adjustment of the static pad impossible without first removing the wheel.
At least there’s a decent Shimano v-brake on the back though eh? They always work well! Except when they’re running against a rim designed for disc brakes… in that case you may struggle somewhat for proper pad alignment…
I did quite like the single sided front and rear shifting set up on the bars though!
Next workshop nightmare, it’s headsets.
This bike came in having been bought second hand from someone who ‘really knows his stuff with bikes’. Hmm…
The customer just couldn’t get rid of the knocking coming from the headset no matter how tight they did it up. A closer inspection revealed not one, not two, but three whole crown races jammed in the lower race. Only one of which was correct, but still wouldn’t work without a 1 1/8 to 1.5 adapter! Seems Mr ‘really knows his stuff’ might not know quite as much as he thinks.
I’ve still got loads more of these in my phone so I might come back to #yourbikehatesyou sometime, but that’s enough trauma for now. If you want more, head to Instagram. Right now, I’m off for a therapeutic ride in this beautiful sunshine. And breathe…
