Department Store Bike Rebuild

My previous post showed you how to take apart a cheap old American made bike. Now I can show you how to put it back together in better working order than when it first left the store. My first step was reinstalling the fork. I greased the bearing cups, dropped the ball bearing retainers in, and slid the fork in place:

Then I reassembled the top half of the headset and tightened the locknut, again using the mop handle to keep the fork from spinning:

The important thing is to check for play in the fork after tightening the locknut. If you can feel the fork rocking back and forth in the frame, then loosen the locknut and screw the bearing race in until play disappears, then retighten the locknut. Check the fork again to make sure it can turn easily.

Next I greased the front wheel bearings and reassembled the cones:

 

The adjustment is pretty easy to dial in since there are no locknuts on these old Wald hubs. It's important to clean any grease off the threads before screwing the cone back on so that it won't unscrew itself too easily. I also added blue loctite to try to hold the cone in place better (although the best solution is to find some thin locknuts to hold the cones in place).

Now I wanted to work with the bike upside down, so I reinstalled the seatpost and handlebars:

Next I greased the bottom bracket bearings and slid the cranks into the bottom bracket shell:

The hard part is trying to maneuver the cranks through the shell, so don't push the bearing retainers into the cups until the cranks are through in order to give yourself enough clearance. Once it's through you can tighten up the bearing cone until play disappears:

Now replace the keyed washer and tighten up the locknut. Spin the cranks and see if they turn easily without rocking back and forth. If there is play, or the cranks don't turn smoothly then loosen the locknut and turn the cone to solve the problem (tightening the locknut can make the cranks feel harder to turn so adjust for that).

The spokes needed a lot more tension before I would consider the wheels safe to ride on:

Tensioning and truing wheels takes a little practice, but here's some more info on it. I also took the front tire off to patch the inner tube.

After bending the left pedal back into shape and dripping oil inside both of them, I could reinstall the pedals:

Make them nice and tight, and put some oil or grease on the pedal threads first.

The brake levers were a bit too low on the handlebars, so I decided to unwrap the tape and reposition them:

There should be a screw inside that's visible when you pull the lever down, you can use a flat bladed screwdriver to tighten or loosen it in order to move the levers.

Now for my least favorite part:

I only hate doing cables because I always get my hands covered in oil, and used cables don't like to slide into the housings at first since the ends are flattened out by the pinch bolts. I always drip oil into the housings first, then coat the inner wire in oil before threading it through to reduce friction (this makes a big difference to how your brakes and shifters feel when you're done). Once the cable is threaded all the way through the housing you can pull it tight and secure it by tightening the pinch bolt:

 

Repeat for the rest for the rest of the cables:

The front derailleur's housing was too long, so here is how I measured the correct length:

Remember my broken saddle? Well the rails were still intact, and I just happened to have a nicer Schwinn seat with a broken rail. I drilled out the old rivets, then cut and bent the rails to fit the Schwinn saddle:

Now the bike is mostly finished:

All that's left to do is ride it around for a while and adjust the brakes and shifters as needed. It should be a pretty solid bike now, and it didn't cost much money. It only needed some time and a little bit of skill to fix it up.

Edit: The brakes would squeal, and I noticed that the pads were angled away from the rim. I used an adjustable wrench to turn the pads the other way, giving them an inward toe. This immediately quieted the brakes:

You should really only try this on cheap steel brakes. Heat treated aluminum calipers might crack so don't even think about twisting those. Again, be careful and don't overdo this (and if your brakes don't squeal then don't worry about it). You might also have to center the pads around the rim, so loosen the nut behind the part of the frame that the brake attaches to. Then rotate the brake until it's in a good position and retighten the nut. If the whole brake rotates as you tighten the nut, try oiling the threads before screwing the nut back on. That's about all I have left to say. Finally, check your shifters and make sure the limit screws are set properly on the derailleurs. Cheers.

Department Store Bike Teardown

I came across an old department store road bike that needed a little work. It's an "All-Pro" brand, but it's pretty much the same as an old Huffy, Murray, Free Spirit, AMF, etc. Bikes like these aren't valuable, but if they're taken apart and rebuilt properly then they can be pretty decent. This one is in rather rough shape, unfortunately:

It has a broken saddle, damaged left pedal, the headset doesn't turn easily, brakes and shifters don't work, the tires are flat, the spokes have very little tension, and the back wheel is out of true. Sounds like fun. My first order of business is to get rid of the broken seat. First I loosened the seatpost clamp bolt:

Then the nut that holds the saddle clamp onto the post:

The pedals don't spin freely, so I took them off to bend the cage back into shape on the left one and to get some oil inside. These come off with a 14mm wrench (9/16" or a thin adjustable works too):

Time to undo the cables:

That front derailleur cable was routed pretty badly, no wonder it didn't work. I like to remove the inner cables from old bikes to check for frayed wires. This is especially important for brake cables. In this case the cables were fine, but the front brake looked a little weird:

I added another locknut onto the front of the bolt, but then I noticed this:

 
I wonder what caused that? Well here's my solution:

 Moving on to those handlebars. They're positioned so that the drops are horizontal. This usually hurts my wrist so I wanted to adjust the angle. All I had to do was loosen the 9/16" nut on the front of the stem:

Then I just positioned them how I like, and tightened the nut again. The headset bearings needed an overhaul though, so off comes the stem:

If the stem bolt rises up as you unscrew it, but the stem doesn't loosen, just give the bolt a sharp hit with a hammer:

Next I removed the cranks. This is the solid "one piece" type that's secured by a large nut on the left side. Unscrew it clockwise:

Cranks out:

Wheels off:

Time to remove that fork. I like to use a big adjustable wrench on the locknut, then brace the fork legs with a mop handle:

On a nicer bike you would want to protect the paint with some cloth, but on this bike quite frankly who cares. Here's the fork:

Time to do the wheel bearings. The front hub doesn't have locknuts to keep the cones in place, instead the threads are serrated where the cones meet the hub. These come apart with two 9/16" wrenches (or adjustables, they're really not tight at all):

Soaking the bearings in mineral spirits:

Eww:

At least the wheel bearings were still pretty clean. I also noticed this on the crankset:

This bike definitely isn't old enough to use 1" chain, I'm guessing this was a way to cut costs. 

This is as far as I went to take this bike apart. The chain and derailleurs were fine, so I didn't remove them. If you still wanted to, then you can break the chain with a chain tool, and undo these bolts to get the derailleurs out:

 

These kinds of bikes require more work to fix up since it seems like everything will be damaged or out of adjustment on them. On the plus side, you only need adjustable wrenches and a screwdriver to take the entire bike apart. I'll show you how to reassemble these bikes correctly in my next post. Cheers.

Bike Specific Tools

In my previous post I rambled on about wrenches. There are many special tools that you may still need to perform specific repairs, like straightening a wheel or replacing a chainring. I'll discuss the more common bike tools here. Let's start with cone wrenches:

If you want to service your hub bearings you will need cone wrenches. These are thin wrenches designed to fit on the flat sides of the bearing cone. First you slide the cone wrench on the cone to hold it steady:

Next you unscrew the locknut with a regular wrench or an adjustable:

With the locknut out of the way you can service the hub (here's the full tutorial). Front hubs usually have 13mm cones, while rears have 15mm cones.

The next bike tool I'd like to show are spoke wrenches. You use these to turn the spoke nipples, and thus adjust the tension on the spokes:

There are 3 common sizes - 3.2mm (black), 3.3mm (green), and 3.5mm (red). If you do lots of work on different bike wheels then you'll need all 3 wrenches. The idea is to use the tightest fitting spoke wrench, and press it onto the spoke nipple as you turn it to avoid rounding off the nipple (which is unfortunately easy to do since they're made of soft brass).

Here is a simple bike tool used to remove chainring bolts:

It's very simple, and it's only purpose is to hold the nut in place as you unscrew the chainring bolt with an Allen key:

Now here is one of my crank removal tools (middle piece):

This tool threads into the crank after you've removed the crank bolt, and then pulls the crank off an Octalink, Isis, or square tapered spindle. First you screw the base of the tool all the way into the crank, with the inner piece fully unscrewed:

Then you tighten the inner piece until the crank slides off:

That's really all there is to it, and I wrote another tutorial about removing cranks here.

The rear gear clusters on derailleur equipped bikes need special tools to remove as well. There are two varieties, freewheels and cassettes. Each type use a different set of tools. First, here is a freewheel tool next to some freewheels:

A freewheel tool should fit the specific freewheel that you want to remove, and there are many different types. To use the tool, slide it into the freewheel's splines and unscrew it with a big fun wrench:

 

I posted more detailed information about freewheels here. The other type of gear cluster is the cassette, which requires both a lockring tool and a chain whip to remove:

To tell these apart, count the number of teeth on the smallest cog. If there are 12 teeth or less then it isn't a freewheel. Also look for a flat lockring in front, with splines for the tool to fit in. Anyway, to use the cassette tools you need to brace the cassette with the chain whip and insert the lockring tool into the splines:

Put a wrench on the cassette tool and press down on both the wrench and the chain whip to unscrew the lockring.

There are two more tools I'd like to show - the bottom bracket tool and the chain tool:

The bottom bracket tool looks like an oversized freewheel remover, and works the same way. You would use it to unscrew a cartridge bottom bracket from the bike frame (full tutorial here).

The chain tool is used to disconnect/reconnect a bike chain. There is a small pin that pushes a rivet through the chain link so that you can remove the chain from the bike. I made a more thorough post about it here.

There are definitely more bike specific tools out there, but these are some of the basic ones that most bikes tend to use. Many of them can be the difference between a quick and simple repair, and a nightmarish day-long ordeal. These tools are really cheap too, and the frustration they save you is well worth the initial cost.