7 Essential Maintenance Skills You Need To Know

today I'm going to run through the seven basic maintenance tasks that I think every Rider should be able to do at a minimum and that's not a snobbery thing that's because I think these tasks are easy to learn and hard to get catastrophically wrong and it may be it will make you feel more confident in looking after your bike and if you can look after your bike it'll look after [Music] you you don't have to be an expert in setting up suspension or even understand how it works but setting up your sag is a really good place to start and it makes a big difference I've seen so many people with incorrect air pressure and all this can be solved with just a ruler pressure charts on suspension websites are just a guide and they're a starting place the only way to know for sure that your sag is set up correctly is to use a ruler now what you need to do is measure the stroke on your rear suspension shock or the amount of travel on your forks so with this I've got 170 mil Forks that's the total amount of travel so on a calculator if we do 170 / 100 and times 30 then that lets me know what 30% sag is so for this it's 51 mm so I know that if I sit on my bike and I get 51 mm of movement and my O-ring moves up to 51 mm M then I've set my Forks at 30% sag now 30% sag is probably a good starting point for Enduro and gravity oriented bikes for cross country maybe you want 25% but these are just baselines and you'll have to muck around with them and see what works for [Music] you whether you get a local bike shop to refresh your gear cables or if you've done it yourself they'll almost C certainly get slack after a few rides and that will cause the gears to skip and crunch this is totally normal and to be expected with all new gear cables but you'll need to know how to tighten them back up afterwards so if you've got new or recent cables and you're trying to shift up into a bigger or an easier gear on the cassette at the rear and it's not going perhaps it's flicking or it's just not moving at all there's not enough tension on the derailer to move it and this isn't a problem with your derailer you're not going to have to play with that you just play with the barrel adjuster up here so if you're looking directly down at the barrel adjuster down the shifter you want to be moving it anticlockwise which will move the outer cable away from the shifter and it will put tension on that inner cable and that should help you move your gears up into that easier gear now tip two is to always do this change while you're pedaling the bike now this could be moving it in a stand like I've got got here or it could be pedaling the bike out on the street make that shift if it doesn't move keep adjusting the barrel adjuster anticlockwise until it does shift and that should solve the problem going forward we all get punches and whether you are tubeless or still running tubes you'll probably need to change a tire at some point I've heard some horror stories before but I swear most of these problems can be solved if you kick off the following tips my first big tip to remove a tire is to make sure there's no more air in there at all this will make it easier to manipulate and then my next tip is to move it off the shoulder of the rim break the bead off and move it into the central channel of the rim this Central channel will have a slightly smaller diameter than the shelf of the rim and this will leave your tire feeling a little baggier and much easier to get a tire lever into my next big tip is to have at at least two levers uh better to have three as well and definitely you want some nylon or plastic levers not metallic because they will damage your rims so make sure they're softer than your actual rim material and also if you can get hooks on the end then these go a long way to holding the tire over the rim and hooking into your spokes and that way you can use two on either side hooked over onto your spokes and then you can even use a third one in the center to leverage it out and rotate it all the way around the rim to get it off now once you've done your repair or put your inner tube in a similar principle applies to earlier where it makes things a lot easier if you can get the bead of that tire into the center of the rim and that means it won't be so tight when you chase it back round you should be good to [Music] go we mentioned torquing up bolts a lot but what does that actually mean now a torque wrench basically controls the amount of Leverage you push through a bolt because if you overtighten something like a stem or a break on the handlebars you could potentially crack the component it is clamping to or you could round the bolt or even strip a thread so these are very handy devices to have so every bolt on every part of your bike will probably have a different torque setting you'll know because it has a number followed by NM which means newton meters so I've got a six newton meters written on the part up here I've even got 15 newton MERS written down here and if any of the bolts don't have any writing on them then do check your website or the manual for your P to see what the torque setting is for that so something like this preset torque driver only has one setting so as you can see it's got a big five on there and that is five newton meters so it'll click as soon as it will get to five newon and it won't let you tighten anything beyond that so for a bike I think it's good to get an adjustable one like this where you can rotate the dial to the appropriate newton meters so we can choose four or five or six on this one alternatively you might see these ones are more popular and this will allow you to go down to decimals of Newton meters as well now all you have to do is dial the bottom in order to get your correct Tor setting in the window and then you also have some extra adjustment to get 0.5 0.8 and different decimal versions of that newton meters as well bonus tip for you if you're talking things up correctly and you still feel like parts are slipping then you may need to use an assembly grease or something like a Max grip carbon paste because this has grit in it and it'll take up the infections and help you torque things correctly tubous Tire plugs are brilliant inventions they mean that we can often fix a puncher without taking the wheel off the bike or even the tire off of the rim now my big tip for you is to find the hole by using your ear and the side of your cheek and move that wheel around so that you can hear and feel the air and then you'll find the hole and be able to plug it my second big tip is to make sure you push it in gently and push in so that there's two halves either side of your plug and then it will fold in place and give you double the amount of plug in that hole and you want to push it gently in enough that the end is just poking out enough so that it doesn't go into your tire but also you don't want too much sticking out of the tire as the trail might rip out along your way bonus tip for you here if you have the time a little bit of puncture repair glue around the edge edes will seal it in on a more permanent basis and it will make it a lot more secure a loose headset is actually really common but it's one of the simplest things to fix so if you feel a knocking in the front of your bike perhaps a rattle or maybe your bike's even juddering when you apply the front brake down a hill that's probably a loose headset and the way to know for sure is to apply the front break turn the handlebars and then get your hands around the headset area and give it a good rock now I can feel a knocking and I can even hear it there so I know that headset is loose now this is the bowl that is compressing your headset but what you need to do is release the tension on your stem first otherwise we'll be just tightening this bolt into the stem so first loosen off the bolts on your stem and then we can tighten up this bolt and we just do it by hand until that rattling has stopped if you tighten it too much you could end up pulling the starnut from the fork steer tube out completely once you've tightened that up you can go ahead and tighten up your stem bolts as this is simply just clamping around the steerer tube in order to stop that from rotating bonus tip here I like to line up the handlebars with my Fork Crown to ensure that my steering is really straight but you can stand the other side and line up your stem with your tire if you want and finally if you've tightened this all up and you still think your headset is loose could be another thing try undoing the top Bol and having a look at how much Gap there is between the steerer and the top of the spacer or the top of the stem there should be three to four mil difference in order to compress the headset [Music] enough if your brakes are really noisy perhaps they feel quite draggy or if you spin your wheel and they come to an abrupt stop chances are you need to realign your caliper now that sounds really scary but it's actually really simple so this noise here is the disc rubbing on the left hand side of the pads and that just means that this caliper is not Central around the disc and all we need to do is loosen off both bolts for this caliper and we can see that this caliper is now loose to move so we can move that and make sure that the disc is now Central so with all your fingers out the way of the disc and the tire moving it will allow the disc to rotate freely inside so all we need to do is tighten this up slowly Often by ey just to get that disc in the center and moving freely again okay so that caliper is now aligned and the disc is Central however if you've done all of this and you still have a little bit of rubbing perhaps there's an intermittent noise chances are your disc might not be entirely straight now there are tools out there like this disc cheing Fork which will allow you to straighten that disc by bending parts of it back into line however this will only save you on some occasions some will be Beyond saving and you might need to replace it and get a new one but anyway maybe I'll save that for my next seven maintenance tips uh that's all I've got time for today so let me know down in the comments below if these are seven maintenance tips that you have tried that you want to try but you haven't yet uh I want to know your story and perhaps we can encourage some people to try something new um but for now thanks for watching

Channel: GMBN Tech

Views: 208,054

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Id: u-1oMaaNJCY

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024