Just realized I was chasing a ghost in my bottom bracket

Used to pull the cranks and clean everything every time I heard a creak. Took me three hours and a lot of swearing one Saturday. Now I check the chainring bolts first, found one loose on a customer's bike last month. Has anyone else wasted an afternoon tearing apart a perfectly good BB for a 5 cent fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

robert_anderson6916d ago

Spent 4 hours chasing a creak once, turned out to be a loose derailleur hanger.

sullivan.finley16d ago

Earlier this week I pulled a crank arm three times before noticing the pedal threads were slightly cross-threaded. Did you use a torque wrench on that hanger or just snug it by feel?

parkerp8016d ago

Hold up, are you really saying a torque wrench is better than feel for something like a hanger? @sullivan.finley, if you're torquing a derailleur hanger to spec you're probably stripping the frame threads over time. Half the time those things are aluminum into carbon, and a wrench just guarantees you hit the breaking point. Snug plus a quarter turn has never let me down, and that crank arm thing sounds like a pedal issue, not a torque problem.