Rudge, Bike Works NYC, and How To Overhaul a Dura-Ace BB7700 Octalink Bottom Bracket

OH GOD, IT HURTS…

photo by Bike Works NYC

Hi.

That captivating chainwheel belongs to a Rudge cottered crank from the early 1900’s. Rudge was a renowned British bicycle manufacturer of antiquity, or at least of what passes for antiquity in the history of bicycles. Rudge produced all of the parts on its bikes, right down to the bearings, and incorporated the hand logo into most of them, always as elegantly as possible. The origin of the logo itself was the Red Hand of Ulster, which was used, in the manner of an emblem, by British families of Northern Irish origin. If I’ve piqued your curiosity, take a look at this.

I’m using the photo courtesy of the good wrenches at Bike Works NYC, the “Lower East Side Cycling Center,” who collected it and others like it into an archive on their website that you’ll have to see to believe. I could provide you with a direct link to the chainwheel archive, which itself is divided into chainrings and chainwheels because, as we all would pretend we knew, they’re not the same, but that would dishonor the way in which both the website and the shop are set up, namely, to browse, and hopefully find what you weren’t looking for. However, I will fold and provide you with this direct link to their chainwheel kaleidoscope .

And of course, if you find yourself on the Lower East Side, stop in. It’s a crazy, classic shop, like Kraynick’s in Pittsburgh, or Citybikes in Portland, that makes you want to browse, sit on the curb with a cup of coffee, or just close your eyes and feel, well…bikey. Track racers and fixed-gear aficionados will feel especially welcome, but trendy wendys beware….

I HAVE A CREAK

Actually, it’s a creak, a click, and an occasional crunch, and it’s my bottom bracket, which I have studiously avoided overhauling for well over a year now, or maybe two, or three….

And all because overhauling a bottom bracket is one of the dirtiest, most painful acts of bike maintenance there is, not to mention that I happen to have one of the only bottom brackets that can make that act even more painful by virtue of its very design: the dreaded Dura-Ace Octalink.

Not the Octalink II, mind you, with its external sealed bearings and proud ways. No, I'm talking about its short-lived predecessor, the Octalink, with its two sets of needle bearings and two sets of ball bearings, all of which have the habit of falling out of their retainers and disappearing forever the moment you open the assembly.

The thing is, Shimano's components are engineed and produced to the tightest tolerances possible, especially at the higher end, which is one of the reasons why I've always used Shimano on my own bikes. The Dura-Ace Octalink bottom bracket is no exception, and when it's properly lubricated, installed, an adjusted, it it allows its rider to stretch maintenance intervals to their breaking point with no conspicuous drop in performance.

Alas, this work can wait no more: yesterday afternoon, after meticulously cleaning and lubing my chain, which is to bike maintenance what paying minimum balances is to credit cards, I placed my hand on my bike and asked it once again if it would turn its cranks for me. And this time, from deep inside, came a tiny reply: “no.” I tried anyway, and the cranks turned a quarter turn halfheartedly, then stopped.

Which puts me in mind of a story my father once told me….

A TALE OF THREE DEGREASERS AND A GREASE

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess named BB7700. Though of royal birth, BB, like all 7700’s, was given a task to perform, in her case nothing less than the creation of momentum from motion. Though she carried out her task without complaint, and with joy in her heart, she was shunned by the rest of her family, who hated her for her narrow q-factor, and abused her, telling her that she was finicky and refused to adjust despite their best efforts. Finally, she was made to live in darkness, and toil in water, dirt, and grease.

A year passed, or maybe two, or three, and BB’s suffering grew boundless. First her ball bearings roughened in their endless rotations, then her needle bearings, then her spindle, until she was sure her races were damaged beyond repair. Finally, her heart broke, and she seized, and would turn no more. She slept, and dreamt of the day when she would spin again, twirling around and around and around in smoothness and light.

One day, three degreasers of the Finish Line family came riding along. Their names were Citrus, Multi, and Speed Clean, and they were followed by their prince, Teflon-Fortified Synthetic Grease, a tacky fellow, to be sure, but unfailingly smooth. Weary from their journey, they finally came to

THE POINT

What follows here is instructions on how to overhaul a Dura-Ace BB7700 Octalink bottom bracket.

But first, a disclaimer: my intention is to offer my opinion on how to overhaul the above bottom bracket, not on how to extract it, disassemble it, upgrade its bearings to ceramic, reassemble it, or modify it in any way. It’s not because of liability issues or anything like that, just that overhauling it is already more than enough for this post. It’s work you have to obsess over, because even though the bottom bracket sees the highest stresses at the highest frequencies in the dirtiest conditions of all the parts on a bike, the time and effort required to extract it mean that it also gets the least maintenance.

And that’s too bad, because a dirty, poorly adjusted bottom bracket can create massive amounts of drag. Even if you have a sealed bearing bottom bracket like the Octalink II, you should overhaul it regularly, as described in the instructions for overhauling a sealed bearing I provided in my June post.

Anyway, because it’s work you have to obsess over, and because this bottom bracket in particular consists of many different parts made with different materials, I feel the use of all three Finish Line degreasers is justified, because they actually take care of things more efficiently than any one of them alone, and they work together to provide the best results.

To begin with – and this the only thing I’ll say about extracting the bottom bracket – always make sure to clean out the splines on the bottom bracket lockrings and cups, as well as the splines on the bottom bracket tool:

Bottom brackets can be almost impossible to extract, and often require considerable leverage to crack free. If the splines on the bottom bracket and the tool are dirty, you run the risk of the tool slipping under torque and absolutely destroying the splines, and with them any hope of extracting the bottom bracket without considerable cost and effort. This is true even if you use one of the many improvised tools at your disposal to keep the tool in place on the splines.

With that said, let’s put on some soothing music and get started. By the way, I don’t mention it in the instructions, but the stiff wire brush I use to clean out the cups and the races is part of Finish Line’s superlative Brush Set, which I love and use all the time, especially during ‘cross season.

The Scribd player below contains my instructions in the form of a Powerpoint 07 presentation (.pptx), though you don't need Powerpoint to view it. You can view it as a slide show, book, or in tiles, you can zoom in or out, and you can view it full screen, though when you're done viewing it in full screeen, you'll need to click the back button on your browser to return to this post. If you really like it, you can go to Scribd's website and download it for your own use.

bottom bracket overhaul - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: bottom bracket overhaul

And Princess BB7700 and Prince Teflon-Fortified Synthetic Grease were married and spent the rest of their days spinning blissfully ever after.

IN CONCLUSION

To end with – and this is the only thing I’ll say about reinstalling the bottom bracket – use Finish Line Antiseize Assembly Lube when reinstalling the bottom bracket, instead of grease, Permatex, or Teflon plumber’s tape, all of which work, sort of, but not as well. Use gloves, and apply it to the threads in the bottom bracket shell instead of the threads on the cups, because it’ll make less of a mess, and believe me when I say you don’t want to get this on your hands, because it’ll get on everything you touch, though it does glitter and look pretty. If you’re using one of the tubes, squirt it directly on the shell threads, then use a piece of cable housing to swirl it around and distribute it all around the threads. If you're using the can, you're all taken care of, because it comes with a brush attached to the cap.

FULL CIRCLE

You know who else likes Finish Line Antiseize Assembly Lube? Arone Dyer, the New Voice of Bike Repair in the cycling industry. At least she claims to like it in her article in Bicycling magazine..

And do you know where Ms. Dyer works when she’s not writing about Finish Line Antiseize Assembly Lube in Bicycling? Bike Works NYC.

And the chainwheel turns round and round and round….

Incidentally, that really was my bottom bracket, and I really did overhaul it, and I really did just put it back into my bike to the sounds of trumpets and swallows. There are clouds creaming on the western horizon. I’m going to ride toward them and see where that takes me.

Photo by Bike Works NYC

Bye.

Six-Minute Maintenance Tips, Bike Shop Stories, and Independent Fabrications' BMX Bike

Listin’ To Me….

So as of last Sunday there's been a link to this blog at http://www.finishlineusa.com/, probably because I mentioned their products in the first entry. Apparently 9 people have read it since then. 3 of them have been me. However, one of them was Bulgarian, and to him I say, Здравейте, Моя луд приятел!

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a race going on in Ireland right now, the FDB Insurance Ras, known in its heyday as the Milk Ras. Although this year’s edition has the misfortune of occupying the same space on the calendar as the Giro, and now the Volta a Catalunya as well, and has lost some of the cache it had back when names like Roche and Kelly were on the start list, it’s still a race of considerable pedigree, not to mention difficulty. This year, it will include, for the first time in its storied history, a team from Bulgaria, Team Nessebar. One of their riders, Martin Grashev, came in a solid fourth in today’s stage, and now sits in seventh overall, nine seconds back of the leader. Късмет, Martin!

Incidentally, if any of you are wondering how I know about the Bulgarian reader, take a look at www.google.com/analytics. Sick, yes, but don’t get all worked up about how I’m monitoring your browsing habits while you’re innocently reading this blog, because I’m not, and you won’t get any unsolicited emails with photos of me shaving my legs or anything like that. To be honest, I don’t even really care how many people are reading this, or what connection speed they’re reading it at. Mostly, I love the thought of how unbelievably global cycling is. I wonder what the riding’s like in Bulgaria…

Anyway, when I heard there was a link to this blog on Finish Line’s website, I read my first entry again, and immediately decided to write another one, if only to get the first one archived and hopefully out of the public consciousness, where it clearly has taken up a most stubborn residence (9 people makes it public, right? 8, no, but 9….) It’s not that it was all bad, it’s just that I really waxed way too poetic about lube, forgetting that you order the Happy Meal for the toy inside….

So what I’m going to try this time is lists, sort of like what Samuel Pepys, the Original Blogger, did in his Journals…

What I Could Have Done In The Six Minutes It Took Me To Read The First Entry Of My Blog

• Filled a Chain Cleaner with Ecotech Multi Degreaser, clamped it on my chain, run the chain through, dried the excess off with a rag, lubed the chain with Pro Road CR, eaten four black cherry Clif Shot Bloks, wiped off the excess lube, and had a drink of water, in that order.
• Sprayed Speed Clean on my rear rim, wiped off a month's worth of road grime, repeated on the front rim, and inflated my tires to 100 psi, not 120, because they're Michelin Carbon Pros and seem to handle best at 100 or else.
• Done the same on the V7 rotors of my Hayes Stroker Carbon brakes, then inflated my Michelin Tubeless tires to only 30 psi, or dreamt of doing that, because I don't actually have that equipment, and will never be able to afford it. In fact, I'm currently using a 1997 Judy SL with a 1" steerer, and a head tube reducer installed in the 1 1/8" head tube of my Ellsworth so that it'll fit. I've convinced myself that it's retro, and therefore cool. Girls pick up on it immediately.
• Played with my dogs.
• Sprayed my embarassingly filthy Trek 5500 frame with Bike Wash, wiped it off, using a rag to get between the cables and tubes and making certain not to forget the underbelly of the downtube, then sprayed it down again with Teflon Bike Polish and wiped that off as well, all the while delighting in what I believe to be the fragrance of watermelon as it wafts into my nostrils.
• Ridden one mile on said 5500. Yes, six minutes for one mile works out to 10 mph. It was a long winter.
• Called my mother, asked how she was doing, then hung up halfway through her weekly rant about how irresponsible it is for me to still be "working on bikes at this age."
• Made an appointment with a therapist.
• Dipped the wire brush from the Finish Line Brush Set into a can of Citrus Degreaser, shifted my front and rear derailleurs to the largest ring and cog to open them up, brushed out the insides of each parallelogram with the moistened brush, sprayed any remaining dirt out of the derailleurs with Speed Clean, ate four margarita-flavored Clif Shot Bolks, wiped the derailleurs off, and sprayed them both down with Teflon Plus to keep them running smoothly at the pivots.

Yes, that last one would only take six minutes, actually around five and a half, because I just went out and did it to make sure. And here’s the kicker: if you added up the first, second or third, fifth, and ninth points above, in other words all of the ones that actually have to do with maintaining your ride, you would end up with a perfectly clean, lubed chain, clean rims, inflated tires, a clean, polished frame, and clean, lubed derailleurs – all in twenty-four minutes.

And you’d be bouncing to go ride, because those Black Cherry Shot Bloks pack 50 mg. of caffeine apiece.

You Smell Nice

You may have noticed that I mentioned something earlier about the fragrance of watermelons wafting into my nostrils while I’m cleaning my frame. It’s not because I hide watermelons in my garage so that aliens don’t take them, because that wouldn’t make sense, now would it? I mean, it’s not like they can’t get into my garage...

Mostly, "watermelon" is what I call the smell I associate with Finish Line's Bike Wash. In fact, I've been sniffing their products since I began using them at the first shop I worked at almost twelve years ago. Allow me to explain why by describing a day in the life of a first-year wrench....in a list....

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday In Hell

• I hobble in with yet another herniated disc from a collision with a car, and get handed a pile of repair tickets and a bucket of soapy water. "You're late again. These are the repairs you didn't do yesterday. Start by cleaning them." It's 9:30. The shop opens at 10....incidentally, Bike Wash wasn't around at the time, and soapy water took about three times longer, mostly because it leaves streaks.
• The first customer in the store buys a full Yakima roof rack with ten bike attachments for his new BMW, then asks if we have any bikes under $200. "Install roof rack," writes The Owner on a repair ticket, and slips it into a slot on the repair board under Bill's name. Bill removes it and slips it into a slot under mine.
• It gets busy, really busy, because The Owner tells us we must sell a bike to every single person who comes into the shop in order to make room for the order of 40 Treks that happens to be coming in right then while we're trying to sell bikes and get caught up on repairs and eat the half a Clif Bar we found on the floor by the pump.
• I get dollar bills thrown at me. This sounds great, but it isn't, because it's The Owner who's throwing them at me while screaming, "This is what you're doing every time you blow out a tube because you didn't seat the goddamn tire!" It's my third day, so I can see why he's upset that I haven't learned to do this correctly yet.
• It's ninety degrees in the shade, except there is none and I'm trying to install ten bike attachments on a roof rack that takes four. It all feels kind of loose, but we don't have any bikes under $200 anyway, so it's not like he's going to put anything on it....
• The Owner tells me that the UPS truck sounds like someone kicking an empty box down the street, which is beautiful and poetic.
• We order burritos during a lull, then get too busy to eat them, and there's no room in the refrigerator because of all the burritos.
• "Didn't you wash this bike like I asked you to? It's got streaks all over it. Do it again...."
• Don lies slumped over the Saf-T-Kleen tank in the small basment with no ventilation where he was soaking chains in Saf-T-Kleen, then reinstalling them on bikes, then blowing them dry with compressed air, which vaporized the Saf-T-Kleen solvent so that he inhaled it and died. Since he's the third mechanic in two weeks to die this way, The Owner finally decides to drain the tank and replace the solvent with Citrus. Parts come out as clean as they did before, the shop smells like oranges, and everyone, much to their chagrin, stays alive.
• Yadda yadda yadda
• It's the end of the day. I break down boxes out back while the air cools like an engine in the humid twilight. I lift my own bike, mine, onto a stand, and begin going over it carefully, and lubing the chain link by link with Cross Country, because it's supposed to rain in the morning, and it's the Island, so the rain is salty at that. And then it hits me, a smell like jasmine, I kid you not, wafting up from the lube, and I lean in closer, and it's jasmine, I'm sure of it. But the stars are flicking on and that means it's time to go, so we lock up, throw a leg over, and ride our separate ways, disappearing like shouts into the night, streaming...

Maybe I have some kind of olfactory dysfunction that translates odors into floral fragrances, because not everyone agrees that Bike Wash smells like watermelon, or Cross Country like jasmine. Anyway, that was one of the most beautiful summers of my life, and since we were a Finish Line shop, and used only Finish Line products on repairs, every time I smell one, it brings it all back.

Neal, if you’re reading this, thanks for giving me the start.

The Toy In The Happy Meal

Last but not least, check this out:

The photo on top is taken from http://silentkblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/north-american-handmade-bicycle-show-feb-10th/, the one on the bottom from the current issue of Mountain Bike. Both depict Independent Fabrications’ one-off BMX bike featuring carbon tubes and titanium lugs, as displayed at this year’s North American Handmade Bicycle Show. I’m 6’3” and have the bike handling skills of a drunken giraffe, yet I want to ride, nay, race BMX after seeing this thing. I want to start with the most entry-level bike out there, learn the sport from the ground up, and earn that thing, even though they’re not going to put it into production, and I couldn’t afford it if they did. But it’s beside the point: great products ignite passion, and this is one….

Speaking of BMX, check out this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHSLB_0KcDE

Hilarious….you can practically learn how to form the superlative in French just by listening to it….

‘Till next time, when I’ll explain why I seem to always be writing about bike maintenance in general, and Finish Line in particular….

Благодаря ви за четене на това

Stephan