Saturday, October 5, 2013

Purple Trek 800 Tune Up

So I brought this bike home, and it could use bit of work:

It's a Trek Mountain Track 800 (looks like a Trek "80" with the U-lock holder installed). The tires and cables look good, and I dig the 90's purple color. It has a loose front wheel bearing though, so it's fixing time:




That escalated quickly. This bike has a cartridge bottom bracket, so no need to remove the cranks:

 
I took the bike apart to redo the rest of the bearings since 20 year old bike grease is going to be pretty dried up. The frame will also be easier to clean and polish out the scratches too.


When I took the front hub apart, one of the bearing cups was loose inside the hub shell. I guess the bike was always ridden with a loose front wheel. I cleaned out the shell and the cup as best as I could, then epoxied it back in place (edit: that repair is still holding up years later. It certainly beats relacing the wheel to a new hub).



When I did the rear hub bearings, I also took the cassette body off to put some oil in it. I thought this was kinda cool:

That long hollow bolt holds the cassette body in place on the smooth end, and threaded end screws into the opposite side of the hub.



When I reinstalled the brakes, the rear cable had a lot of friction in it. This is the first place I looked:

That housing piece is a bit too long, so I took the inner cable out again and shortened the housing to fit better:

That actually made a big difference. The rest of the bike went back together pretty easily. I did a more detailed writeup of a very similar bike here, in case you're actually looking for useful repair advice. This bike is kind of cool since it has a cassette hub (not bad for a base model), cartridge bottom bracket, and an E-type front derailleur. It also has a sticker on the frame that says "CroMoly" in big letters, and "Seat Tube" underneath in really small letters (why even bother, I mean how strong does a seat tube need to be anyway?). Oh well, it handles nice, and everything works so no complaints about this one.

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