Johan Bornman

Use standard rubber grease. The red stuff. It is sold at Builders in the car section in tubes. Herschell (SP?) is the brand they have. Midas also has some. In the workshop we use RiChem Hydraulic and Pneumatic Seal Lube but it only comes in a large, expensive tub. Not for the DIYer. Although some "rubber" is impervious to petrolium grease, you don't know whether your shock's o-rings are made from Buna, Nitrile or Viton. Rubber grease covers all bases.

Sorry, no. A spoke is made from a hookean material. This means that once they are in tension (even low tension), each un it of weight added will create exactly the same stretch as the previous weight. E.g. 1kg will stretch the spokes 1mm. 2kg will stretch them and 3kg will stretch them...you guessed it....3mm. Therefore, no matter how tight you make the spokes, the wheel flex will always be the same. The only way to create stiffer wheel is to use a heavier rim, more spokes, thicker spokes or all three options. Marketing will tell you otherwise. All they have to do is to make the spokes from Zircon (yes, it is true, ask Mavic) or the rims from "aerospace aluminium" or the spokes from 18-8 stainless steel. Then miraculously the wheels are faster, stiffer, smoother and...wait for it, more compliant. Only in the marketing department can you have your cake and eat it.

You're confusing us here. Most of us are talking 15mmTA. In my post I mentioned 20mm and the differences. A test on this is very, very easy. We stay away from the subjective "feel." We take two exact forks and the same wheel, with a Hope hub. We clamp the fork in a jig and hang a weight from the wheel in two or three different positions. We measure the deflection. We clamp the idential QR fork in a jig, convert the wheel to QR and repeat the experiment. I'll provide the deflection meter, jig and wheel. Someone needs to come up with the two forks and some beer. The Yellow Saddle Laboratory awaits the white coats.

Quite observant. Yes, I purposefully didn't say anything about stiffness because I think it is nonsence. I'm very cynical about anything that is supposedly better through the mechanism of stiffness. We dont feel huge twisting (as in turning the steering) forces through the handlebars when we ride a bike. This means that there is no such force. Hold your bike in the upright position with the saddle between your knees and the back wheel between your ankes. Have a friend twist the front wheel with a force that you expect would flex the hub/fork joint. Notice the huge force on your handlebars and tell yourself that you've never felt force like that when riding. So where does it come from? It doesn't exist. Most of these "stiffer" arguments are all post-rationalised. Usually it is just a better design (TA, tapered head tube, hollowtech etc etc) than the original. It doesn't make for great brochure writing to just say, "New, Improved Design." The old one was crap but we tried again". It is far better marketing to say, better, lighter. stiffer, faster, hence the huge emphasis on stiff. The same ad agency that works for Pfizer's Viagra department, I suppose. But back to the stiffness. Most of the flex is hubs was eliminated when front wheels became suspension-firendly. This was the increase in diameter of the hub's centre section. Just compare a 1990s MTB hub with today's. After than, I don't think the TA did anything new. If you analyse the TA, you'll notice that the axle (the part that screws into the fork) sits relatively loose inside the wheel with some play.To me this means that the axle simply provides clamping and the end cups on the wheel provide the support. Some of them are even made from plastic or thin alu. Not steel, not press-fit on the axle. Just a loose, easy affair. Had we really required stiffness there the mechanism would have been far beefier as on DH bikes. Here the axle is usually pinch-bolted onto the fork at both ends or in the case of semi-QR models, screws in on the one side and press-fits on the non-screw side. In summary, I believe we have adequate stiffness even in QR for the little forces the wheel experience. TA is better but for other reasons.

I doubt that serious watts were involved. Whether you're a "dude" or not. Once the BB is installed there is no torsional force between it and the BB shell. However. Ask your bike shop to remove the crank while you're there. Now fit a BB spanner onto that BB and manipulate it (without loosening the BB) and see if there is movement between the BB Shell and frame. Your photo isn't clear enough to show the construction up properly, but I suspect that crack is just on a filler ridge around the BB shell insert. An insert that's loose usually creaks.

Through-axle on the front wheel is one of the best moves the industry has made in a long time. The QR on a suspension fork is stupid in that fitting and removing the wheel is anything but quick or convenient. It required a lot of fiddling. Now with TA, it is flip, spin, boom finished. Further, there is no danger of botching the fitment and riding with a loose wheel. The system that Fox uses whereby your can dial-in the position you want your lever to point to, is also nice. If you're buying a new fork, consider TA but remember, there are front wheel implications as well as implications for bike racks that clamped the fork dropouts, if you had such a device.

What's wrong with your existing wheels? My bet is that your R3k spent on new wheels will excite you for about 12 minutes and then the effect is lost. R3k doesn't buy you wheels that will be a significant upgrade on anything you bike is fitted with at present. Rather put that R3k into your pension fund. Thank me when you're 60. Right now, go for a ride. Smell the jacarandas and stop thinking about wheels.

The derailer doesn't care whether you have ten chainrings and 20 sprockets. All it cares about is the total difference. I your case, add zero to the difference between your largest and smallest sprockets.

Splat gave you some real life examples on Page 1 of this Fred. You can get the derailer consumer instructions from techdocs.shimano.com. I have a brochure in my hand for the RD-M972. According to that, the capacity for the RD-M972/RD-M772 is 45T (where T=teef) for the long cage and 33T for the medium cage etc etc. As long as your combo is equal to or smaller than the number the derailer will work. Like Lefty says, it may be excessive in some cases, but it will work.

Welcome back.

johanatyellowsaddledotceeodotzeda

Yup. Cut to exact lengh.

Every derailer has a range. This range is measured in teeth, as in sprocket teeth. If you exceed the range (expressed as a number), your derailer will stretch too far forward in big-big and possibly rip off and go into the spokes. Conversely, if you make the chain longer to cope with that problem, it will not create chain tension in small-small, leaving the chain hanging. The range is not widely known but available on the brochure and on the websites. How to calculate the range you need: 1) Take the tooth value of your largest chainring (say 44) and deduct the tooth value of the smallest chainring (say 22). The anser in this case is 22. Keep that in your memory. 2) Take the tooth value of your largest sprocket (say 32) and deduct the tooth value of your smallest sprocket (say 12). The answer is 20. 3) Now add 22 and 20 (for this example only) and get 44. Your jockey for the above example should have a range of at least 44. If it is say, 32, it will create the scenario I started off with. Don't create a Frankenbike with wrong jockeys and large tooth ranges. It doesn't work. Buy the right jockey first time. Edit: Splat beat me to it. Use his real-life examples to create your own answers.

Your rounding down is correct if you use double-butted spokes. If you use 2mm straight-gauge, you may want to round down to 265 only, since they don't stretch much. However, you should NEVER build with such rubbish spokes. @Edman. I have no problem with you uploading that version.May I suggest you first sort the new additions in all the databases in alphabetical order. I know where they are but a newcomer may find it strange to have no order. Once I see yours again with the data 12 months old, I'll upload the new rims and hubs I've since added and people can just add it themselves. Just an aside for those of you wanting to play with your own spoke lengths. NEVER trust a rim manufacturer's ERD measurements. Companies like NoTubes don't have a clue how to measure it and print mistakes on their rim stickers. Always measure it yourself. I've taken the issue up with NoTubes but they're American. When they see an African criticising them they clam up and refuse to communitate. Bunch of poepols they are. I've had this with Raceface, NoTubes, Enve and one or two others that now elude me.

Eish! This is a big one. Question 1: You have to figure out how the spoke calculator calculates the result. DT Swiss' calculator for instance, asks you what type of spoke you're using, which tells me that it already compensates for stretch. I notice that if you put in DT Revolution (thin)in and do the same calculation with DT Champion (thicker), you get two different lengths. The best is to use a calculator that doesn't try and do any thinking for you. That way you remain in charge of the process and can make the intelligent decisions required to bring two disparate entiries togeter - the right length and what is available to me at the time. If you use a calculator that calculates the geometric length, then you would round down by up to 2mm for normal spokes and up to 3mm for Revolution/Laser spokes. The latter are thinner and stretch more. An ideal calculator is Damon Rinard's SpokeCalc.xls. It is sophisticated but leaves the decisions to you. Tolerances? You always use a spoke that's shorter than the geometric lenght - Always!. The reason for this is that spokes can stretch but not shrink. Not even in the wash on hot cycle. Question 2: I can't answer the first section specifically since I don't know how much the first builder rounded down by, if indeed he had. If he rounded by the absolute maximum, then the 1mm could be the difference between seeing thread exposed or not. It isn't really serious but every good wheelbuilder will do that only under exceptional circumstances. Re-using spokes. It would be bad practice in a professional shop but since you're building your own wheels, who you gonna blame? When re-using spokes, try and re-use them in the position they came out of. By this I mean you need to distinguish between left and right and in each of those bundles, between inbound and outbound. They will have different bends at the head and rebending them for the opposite position would introduce accellerated metal fatige. In other words, tomorrow's problem. Calculating spoke length is a mathematical problem. The solution lies in the formula for a Line in Space. Imagine a box with its lid open. Inside the box you're holding a stick of unknown length. However, you know the angle of the stick viz a vie all dimensions. You also know how far the stick's ends are from the edges of the box. With this data, you can calculate the stick's length. On a bicycle wheel you have the same problems. The stick (spoke) is inside a "box" with known dimensions. You know how far the spoke is from the (radial) centre of the hub axle (Spoke Pitch Diameter or spoke hole diameter, which is the circle of the spoke holes). You also know have far it is from the lateral centre of the axle (hub flange width measured from the axle centre to the centre of the flange. Futher you know how big your error in measuring is at the spoke hole - it is the difference between the spoke thickness and spoke hole diameter (usually 0.5mm). Nog verder: You know the inside diameter of the box (rim). This is the ERD or Effective Rim Diameter. You cannot measure this with a measuring tape since the points are somewhere inside the rim. Just to complicate things, you have to figure out the angle of the spoke in the box. Here the number of spokes and their number of crossings give you a figure. Chuck all of this into the formula and you have the geometric length. Now you have to apply some IQ to the length to get the optimum spoke length.

Now you've gone and spoilt my fun. Lots of people ask me for alloy nipples and I give them brass with a straight face.

I think your discs are glazed. A light sanding won't solve the problem. The material is tough and a hard sanding with 80-grit emery paper is what they need. They have to end up with a satin finish, no shine at all. This cannot be done on the bike. At the same time, lightly sand your pads and then gently break in your "new" brakes. A violent first stop will void your hard work. I've written about this before. Perhaps if you search for "brake fade" in my posts, you'll come across the post again. It explains it all.

Radial spokes on a MTB is a very bad idea. Tying and soldering is yesterday's poor science. When you activate a disc brake, you transmit torque from the tyre to the hub. This means that the pulling spokes elongate and the pushing spokes shorten. At the cross-over point, they move against each other. This has to happen, is perfectly normal and completely harmless. However, if you have too little tension in the wheel, this movement will be excessive. Have the wheel retensioned. A second possibility is that the disc-side spokes are laced wrongly and the spokes are pulled towards the left and they may hit the brake mount posts on the fork or even the calliper or calliper adapters. Have a look for evidence of chafing there. However, that makes more of a clunk clunk sound than squeaking.

If it fits, it fits. I'm not sure what you mean by standard BB however, I suspect it is a screw-in Hollowtech BB adapter with 24mm ID. In this case, the crank doesn't care whether it is shoved into a pressfit or screw-in BB. Both are applicable. If however you just feel like using the screw-in one cause you feel like it, the answer is you can't. Your frame can only take the (inferior) pressfit BB.

There you go. You have done more than 50 hours since the last service and it is way overdue for the next service. If you don't believe me, read the manual.

You go to the doctor for an ingrown toe-nail. Should she do a blood test? Take your blood pressure? Take a chest X-ray? Quickly burn off a wart or two? Look at the OP's message again. The bike came in for something specific and all they bike shop had to do was fix it, not see if it was properly serviced. A ride around the block will not make a fork leak, not matter if it was a casual employee or the chairman of the company. The notion is absurd.

Lets stick to the facts. The OP took his/her bike to a bike shop and asked them to bleed the brakes. When it came back, he/she noticed that the fork was leaking and then blamed the shop. Forget about all the other anecdotes and possibilities. We're looking at a specific case here and examining some ignorance about what happens in a workshop. The OP asked for the brakes to be bled and got what was asked for. What more must the bike shop do? Take it for a test ride and write a report on everything that's wrong with the bike? I agree that they could have pointed out the oil leak but they didn't. It doesn't make them liable though. In order for someone to make a fork leak they'd have to do the following: 1) Remove the fork from the bike. This requires dismantling computer wires and a brake hose. 2) Inverting the fork, undoing two footnuts and whacking the compression rods with a mallet. 3) Holding the fork over a clean bucket and pulling the lowers off. 4) Taking a knife to the now-exposed seals and cutting nicks in them. 5) Re-assemble the fork and filling it with oil again. 6) Replacing the fork on the bike. 7) Re-doing the computer wires 8) Bolting on the brake caliper and setting it. 9) Return the bike to the customer whilst crossing fingers behind your back. Clearly this is absurd and did not happen. No-one has got time for games like this.

You are not serious, are you? Please explain how they are liable.

Now that was coincidence.

I sincerely doubt that it is a case of coming back worse than what it went in. There is almost nothing one can do other than malicious mischief, to make a fork leak. It if wanted to leak, it will leak. You may not have noticed the leak before or, a little bit of movement could have been the last straw. Perhaps it was left upside down. However, I'm certain it is not of their doing. Whether they should have phoned you and asked if they can repair a fault that they noticed, is another matter. Dont be too quick to shoot the mechanic.