Tag: Ultegra

More Maintenance headaches. 

Been quite a maintenance heavy week. I decided to change the cassette and chain, and after changing out the chain there was a terrible metallic scraping noise from the front derailleur.

I could not see where it was scraping on the derailleur, so I changed the cabling, reset the derailleur. Still the scraping. Looking at the inner chainring, there was a slight deformity to some of the teeth. Nothing major, but it was enough to keep hold of the chain on each rotation.

So, decided to replace the inner ring, as it had done nearly 3k, but finding one was harder than I thought. These things where rarer than hens teeth, Everyone was out of stock. However chain reaction sent an email the next day, they had four in Stock that day. I grabbed one while they had them, they where all sold by the end of the day…

Dismantled the drive chain, full clean and fitted the ring. All good. Bolts snugged down and ready to go.

Bike rides silently again. Back to the pleasures of silent running!

But getting used to a 12-25 cassette again..

Bolts and Grief

One of those routine jobs, should of taken 5 mins, but ended up being a hours worth of bashing. 

I had intended on removing the rear brake, clean and replace. Soon found the bolt that holds the caliper to the frame has seized in the frame. 

Even some serious force applied to the hex wrench didn’t help. In fact it made it even worse by stripping the head. Luckily it was so seized, spinning the whole brake got the brake off. But the nut was still in the frame, and no amount of poking and prodding was getting it free. A look round the garage for a bolt with the same diameter as the brake bolt left me disappointed, so it was a case of removing the front brake which has a longer bolt, inserting it into the rear nut, and smacking it with a hammer. 

Eventually, the nut was free. Looking like the winter salt had got in, and jammed it in. A good clean out of the recess, and enough salt to provide my local chippy for a week cleaned, I was ready to rebuild the braking system. But no spare nut in my repair kits. Great, someone’s really trying to piss me off with this now. 

A quick trip to sjscycles saw them out of stock for the correct size and flange. So a full new caliper ordered. Two days later it was finally fixed. 

Lesson is, always full clean your bike at least every couple of months in the winter. The road salt causes all sorts of issues. (including getting in the wheel axles and QR skewers)