How To Make A Cheap & Easy Cotter Pin Press For Cottered Cranks
I show how to make a cotter pin press tool for cottered crankset removal from old bikes. This can be made for around $5. Park Tool used to make a cotter pin press (CR-2) to remove cranks, but they don’t any more. To make the press, I use wide throat top beam clamps that I …Read more »
Installing Smaller Chainring On Homemade Fixie
The 53t chainring was just too big for the fixie. But I sort of knew that when I built it, but that was what I had on hand at the time. I looked for a deal on a 46t chain ring and got one on ebay. So I installed it on my fixed gear bike …Read more »
Straightening A Bent Chainring
I show how to repair a bent chainring (chainwheel) on a bike. I bought this bike used (A vintage Legnano), but it needed some work. The chainring was bent when I got it. The tools I used were a screwdriver, an adjustable wrench, and a VAR Chainring Straightener tool. But the job could have been …Read more »
How To Repair Damaged Crank Arm Threads
The bike I have been working on had damaged threads on one of the crank arms, making it difficult to remove. It seems like maybe they had been cross-threaded at some point. I bought a crank arm thread chaser tool from Bicycle Research Tools (TC-8) and used it to fix the threads in the crank …Read more »
Installing Compact Crankset On DIY Cyclocross/Gravel Bike
I install a SRAM X5 crankset on my homebrew cyclocross bike. At the recent Black Fly Challenge mountain bike race, the bike just didn’t have low enough gearing to make it up some of the steeper hills. So I decided to install a new crankset with smaller chainrings. This also involved adding spacers to the …Read more »