Yesterday, I intended to grease all the axles, install the new wheel, and adjust the derailer. At ~100 miles the mountain bike was getting way out of alignment. One click of the shifter would move 2 or 3 gears. Slowly rotating the pedals and wheels revealed a little stickiness. Like you could feel the bearings rolling around.
The front wheel went on with some effort, but I got stopped by the crankshaft. In all the bikes I’ve worked on, you remove a pedal, unscrew several things, and pull the whole thing out. Impossible on this bike. The nuts on the pedal arm/crankshaft were for appearance sake. Somehow the two are held together like a round peg in a square hole, literally. I guess they shrink the crankshaft with cold, before putting the two together. Christopher suggested I install a grease zerk like a car. I was going to table it and just put it back together, but an hour of trying to screw on a nut, which got off center every time and started rethreading itself, changed my mind.
Life is too short. A racing style with light frame and dropped handlebars could be had at Walmart for $210. That’s worth my time. The front wheel pops off and on easily. It fits in the car so much better. There were a few times fighting the mountain bike that I thought I would lose and rope down the lid of the trunk.
So, today I repeated last week’s Saturday course 40 minutes faster. 9.5 mph vs 14.5 mph. This silver little thing just wants to fly. It’s so much easier to push around.
One little annoyance. Click shifters suck. They are ALWAYS wrong. You should know your bike well enough to roughly (within 1 or 2 sprockets) know what gear you are in. If you don’t know you bike that well, you probably don’t really care. Maybe, I can figure out how to turn the clickiness off.