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.