How To Fix A Sticky Freehub

hey viewers today I'm going to show you how to fix a sticky free hub on a bike wheel with a set let me show you what I mean by sticky if I pedal it forward here and then I stop notice how the cassette will start turning again and the the cranks are turnings change turning here you shouldn't do that it should just go nice and smoothly here if I stop it again it'll start turning again the freehub in there is just conked up I actually took the cassette off earlier and turned it and you can actually feel this kind of gunked-up in there it's not gritty or anything you don't get the kind of crunchy feel like bearings are destroyed or anything it just feels like the grease is just really congealed in there so I'm going to show you how to fix that the first thing you want to do is remove the bike wheel from the bike now I want to remove the skewer from the wheel like that and I always put the cap back on here because I don't like lose the spring now I want to remove the cassette so I use my cassette lockring remover tool here slide that on and I'm going to need a chain whip to keep the cassette from turning so get this on here like this and then I'm going to use just a retro wrench with a one inch socket here and this you look need to do this here so let's just fit right on to a park tool so then I'll loosen that and once I get it broken loose then I can just remove the block ring nice and easily now I get that loosened I can just lift the cassette off like that and there's a free hub and I turn it I can feel it doesn't turn as freely as it should it just kind of feels gunked-up in their side the wheel here turned over with the non-drive side up and I need to remove the axle in order to get the freehub off and what I want to do first is I can either measure how much of the axle sticks out of past the little lock nut here or you can actually count like the number of threads on there so let me see let's talk about five or six threads stick pass beyond there so I'm going to use a cone wrench here this is a 15 millimeter cone wrench and I'm going to remove this lock nut here that pull all these little spacers off and you want to keep track of the order that these spacers were on there and which side of the axle they went on so that when you go to put them back on you put it back on in the same order I'm going to lock a wrench on to the other side and then I want to remove this cone there's the cone I'll set that over there and we'll flip the wheel back over to the other side and this point I can go ahead and remove the axle and I'm set this to the side and the bearings fell out of the other side which is fine don't lose them if the bearings are in good condition go ahead and reuse them but general I just replace the bearings because they're not expensive and then you'll have nice fresh bearings and while you're in there might as well now I need to remove the freehub from the wheel and do this I'm going to use a ten millimeter allen wrench on some other free hubs it might be a larger allen wrench on this one it's a ten millimeter and so just going to put this in here and then this may be tight now in some other free hubs you might need to actually come in from the other side of the wheel on this one I can do like this and this may or may not be tight I mean may need a cheater bar yep but nope it's not that tight so I'll just hit unscrew this like this and I lift it off like that now there's bearings inside of here I need to remove these so and LU these a little on the Cubs sticky side here and are they going to come out hmm a lot of times you just pop them out oh there they come pop them out always just reach in and grab them with them Neela's players like that okay so now that I have all those bearings out of there I can push this part out of there as well now I need to remove all the grease and gunk from inside the freehub on a lot of free hubs there's a little plastic ring that's around in here and you could use like a small all scribe here to like pop that out but on this one this one doesn't seem to have one so that's fine so what I do is I'm going to soak this in a jar of mineral spirits just put that in there and let that soak for a while and then occasionally what I'm going to do is pull it out work the mechanism a little bit to kind of help free it up and even right now I could feel it it's already starting to free up a little and then soak that in there I want to try to get rid of all the old grease and oil and gunk out of there and so this just leave a soak for a while and occasionally pull it out and turn it around and get all that stuff loosened up from inside there after you've soaked the freehub for a while and you've worked it and it should be turning pretty smoothly at this point you want to let it fully dry out you can even blow some compressed air or just blow in the end through like the little gaps in there and try to get all the mineral spirits out of there and give it as try as possible now we need to relocate the thing and so I'm going to use fill tenacious oil this is a really good oil for hubs and what I want to do is just drip it down in to the gap here but between like the inner part and the outer part like as you see how this is turning the inside part turns the outside part doesn't so what I want to do is try to drip oil in down through that crack like that and just let it drip down inside there and I'm going to need to be working the mechanism to let it help flow down in there I want to get the oil fully work down inside the mechanism hopefully to the point to where it's coming out through the other side now once you've got the oil worked well down in there it should be a little bit quieter than it was before and hopefully you'll see a little bit of oil have coming out through the inside there meaning you've worked it all the way down into the lower bearings there now I need to reinstall the freehub onto the wheel so I've got these like little parts in here that'll mesh up there so I just set that on there I've got this little part that came from the inside there so just drop that down in there and I've got my ten millimeter allen wrench so I'm going to screw this in like that and then tighten it in and I want to try to tighten it in as tight as it was before like that now I need to replace the bearings that came out of the freehub here that those are actually bearings for the axle and so here's one of the bearings that came out and I got my park tool bearing gauge here and so it's they're not 7/32 and they're quarter inch bearings so I have some brand new quarter inch bearings and there were nine bearings that came out of here and there were also nine bearings that came out of the other side of the wheel so I'm going to replace those I need to get some grease into the race where the bearings will go my preferred grease for bike hubs is marine grease that may change it's changed over time so I must use my little a dual Co grease gun here to squirt some grease into the race and I want enough grease it it's going to hold the bearings in place and then there should be like nine bearings to go in there so I'm going to use a pair of tweezers to go ahead and shove the bearings into place to form a continuous ring around the race and there and the grease should hold them there are nine bearings inside there now I need to flip the wheel over and put the bearings in the other side of the hub now you probably pull this dust cap out of here but I don't want to because I could damage it so I'm just going to squirt grease down around the hub like this sometimes you can replace the little dust caps and sometimes you have a hard time finding them so you know if you don't need to take them off just don't take them off and so now I'll insert the nine bearings over on this side okay nine bearings in there now we need to reinstall the axle I didn't take these parts off a lot of times I'll take these parts off clean them and put them all back on but since I left these on it makes a lot easier to put it all back together because I already have the spacing on this side so when I get everything adjusted I should have the spacing over on this side if I had taken these off then I would just again I counted the the number of threads or up here so there was like about five threads to come up there put a little bit of grease on to the axle here and that will help keep it from getting rusty or corroded in there and like get a little bit on the threads here just makes a little easier to get all the little nuts and stuff on there and this side came from the drive side so I'll slide this up through there like this and I be careful not to knock any of those bearings out of there wipe off some of this excess grease there the first part that came off was a wash the last part that came off was the cone so that goes on there first and I tighten the cone down against the bearings in there and then the next part came off was this little spacer there then this space are there and then the lock nut like that and the little rough parts there we're facing out so I'll get this on there like that now to make it a little easier to adjust everything here I put the bottom locked out the drive side lock nut into a vise here and so that way it will hold that so as I adjust the cone up here I can tighten that tighten this feel how it goes I want to make sure that there's like no play but that it turns smoothly and is not binding and like maybe loosen that up just a little bit and then I can hold that in place and then tighten this lock nut in against the cone then turn it see how it turns and then check for play and everything feels good but I'll take it out of the vise and try turning the axle and see how it feels it felt just a hair rough so what I'm going to do is loosen the locknut here loosen the cone just a little bit and then tighten the locknut and we'll see how that feels and I feels much better now we need to reinstall the cassette so here's the freehub and there's going to be a wide notch on here so I want to find that wide notch and I think is set here and a lot of cassettes here least respond ones there's like a little arrow right here and that arrow lines up with the little wide tooth part that goes into that wide notch there little spacer here again there's going to be a wide notch and there's a little arrow there so I get that lined up and then I have the small little cog here and I'll slide that on and I've got the lock ring got my lock ring tool tighten that in like that let me use my torque wrench here and on cassettes generally there'll be a number on the lock ring here to tell you how to torque it down 40 nm Newton meters is the pretty common so I'm going to torque this down to 40 Newton meters put it like that now I'll reinstall the skewer the levers part goes on to the non-drive side so slide this up here put the spring on put a little nut part on here like that okay I've got the wheel remounted let's go ahead and give this a shot pedal it around here I'll stop pedaling and if the freehub doesn't start the cassette and chain and cranks all turning again it stays nice and still the way it should it's nice and quiet and everything's nice and smooth I can turn it back and that is how to fix a sticky free hub for like a bike with a cassette anyway I hope this helped hope you found this interesting if you did please click like I always appreciate getting likes on my videos and helps me out if you're not subscribed to my channel click the big yellow button and subscribe my channel you'll see new videos as they come out and I'm always coming out with new videos especially having to do with bikes and I also on Facebook RJ the bike guy and go over there and I post a lot of stuff over there you see the various things I'm working on anyway thank you very much for watching

Channel: RJ The Bike Guy

Views: 250,622

Keywords: Bikes, Bicycle (Product Category), Freehub, Cogset, Wheel

Id: iQ6XgztsfmU

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 16 2014