Bike Maintenance--The doctor will see you sometime next week...

Yesterday, as I sat staring into the bucket of bio-solvent degreaser and black bike grease I'd just created, I started wondering if there are people who are skilled in prognostication using shapes that appear in the sludge buckets from bike maintenance. Unfortunately, I failed to take a picture, but I didn't really see anything there anyway.

Bike maintenance is one of my personal pet peeves about doing triathlon. I find it incredibly difficult to lug my bike to a bike shop and have them do it for me, but the reason behind my annoyance probably isn't what you would think--I would gladly pay somebody to do this mess of stuff for me--mainly because I have no formal training in bike maintenance and have learned what I know so far from watching You-Tube and reading bike maintenance books. My problem with the whole thing is how getting maintenance done on your bike has evolved in Southern California.

The process, as it goes, is something like:  1.  Bring your bike into a shop  2.  Leave it for some seemingly excessive period of time.   3.  Pick your bike up and pay for the service you had done  4.  Get your bike home and see if it actually fixed the problem you had.   5.  Repeat until desired fix is achieved.

You might gather from those steps that I am less than happy with the experiences I have had with anyone who's done maintenance on my bike, and you might be right. There's one shop in Long Beach I won't even bother to walk into anymore. Aside from the problems I've had with them from a maintenance perspective, they generally only have what I need for parts about 25% of the time. How a bike shop repeatedly runs out of tubes baffles my mind. It's a little bit like mexican restaurants that run out of tortillas.

So, I was buying some energy drink powder yesterday at Tri-Zone, and I asked them what their current turnaround time on bike service is, and was told that it's about a week--which is pretty good for this area. I've had to sacrifice my ability to ride for 2 weeks at times in the past in order to get service done. I told the guy thanks, and decided I would give my creaking once-per-pedal revolution issue one more shot in my home shop before committing to taking into a shop. I'm glad I did.

For the past month or so, I've had pedal creak--and google led me down a number of different paths as to what the issue might have been. I overhauled my bottom bracket--pedal creak continued. I made sure the crank arms were torqued to the proper value (I think like 12 Nm--I can't remember, it's printed on the crank arm), and the creak just kept going. I talked myself into the possibility that it might be my saddle, even though the creak continued at times when I was out of the saddle. I cleaned and lubed my chain. I lubed my pedals and my cleats. I inspected my cranks for play in the bottom bracket. All the while, the creak continued.

One of the bike maintenance books I have suggested that creaking may be the result of not enough lubrication between the freehub and the cassette, so I decided to take a look there. I attached the chain whip to my cassette, and as I went to remove the lock ring, I realized it spun freely--to the point that I didn't actually need a wrench to remove the ring and probably could have spun it out entirely without using a spline tool. I immediately realized that this meant that my cassette wasn't tightened down and could very easily have been the source of my pedal creak. Google had failed me--not once when searching for what may cause creaking did the cassette come up as a possibility.

I cleaned all the crud off my cassette after breaking it down into individual sprockets and spacers and put it all together again. Today was a creak-free ride.

I don't mind doing my own bike maintenance--I actually enjoy it because I am, as it so happens, an engineer by profession and this is probably the one hands-on mechanical thing I do in my life. I just don't always have the time, or the requisite knowledge. I kind of wish somebody would come up with a better system than "Let us hold on to your bike for a week or two and do nothing to it until we can spend an hour servicing it." Simply put, the people who do bike maintenance well deserve every penny they get.