[quote=“FarAwayBoy”]Headsets are not that scary people.
Threaded ones at least.
I have yet to fuck with threadless.[/quote]
I just 5 minutes ago took apart my headset to get rid of the constant creaking. I now have a working knowledge of threaded headsets.
i can do all my own work, provided i have the tools. pressing headsets, facing tubes, chasing threads, things of that nature, i can’t do in my living room, so i take to the bike shop and either do it there if the guys are cool, or stand there and watch if no one objects so i know how everything is done. the only thing i have not done yet is build a wheel, becuase the opportunity has not come up. if/when i get to build a wheel, i’m pretty sure i could pull it off with the help of sir sheldon (RIP).
i just like getting my hands into things. that’s why i went to mechanics school in the first place. there’s lots of things i can’t do in life, but i feel very confident in my technical abilities. of course, i say this now, even when i can’t figure out why my BB is making noise. sigh.
Built my bike, aside from the wheels and chasing/facing. Even with my level of inexperience, I believe I could do it, but it wasn’t worth it at the time. I was willing to buy tools for everything else, since I will need to service just about everything on my bike at some point or another, but how often am I gonna be prepping frames?
Next tool purchase will be a truing stand and other misc. wheel-building tools. I still got one free true on a pair of hand-built wheels though, so no rush.
I thought I knew a lot about bikes until I wrenched. I was amazed at how different they can be. I have never been mechanically inclined, but bike repair skillz is something I really wanted.
The first thing I ever did on a bike was to build a wheel. After doing that, I figured that had to be about as complicated as it could be and had a lot of faith in myself going in to the rest of it. I was wrong. Getting a front derailleur set up right is actually the hardest thing (not really, but it can be a bitch.)
I build my own with some assistance. I’ve built two bikes from frames (and I’m in the middle of my third) and four wheels.
I’ll be building 2 more wheels soon. As before, I’ll have the shop help me with spoke calculations.
Disc brakes and gluing tubulars are next on the agenda.
There’s nothing on a bike that scares me at this point, and I’m willing to give it a shot, but I also get in over my head sometimes. I don’t see anything wrong with asking for help, so I’ll continue to do it.
[quote=“Jabba Degrassi”]Built my bike, aside from the wheels and chasing/facing. Even with my level of inexperience, I believe I could do it, but it wasn’t worth it at the time. I was willing to buy tools for everything else, since I will need to service just about everything on my bike at some point or another, but how often am I gonna be prepping frames?
Next tool purchase will be a truing stand and other misc. wheel-building tools. I still got one free true on a pair of hand-built wheels though, so no rush.[/quote]
I’ve got one of these:
http://www.performancebike.com/shop/pro ... ?SKU=17871…that I’m looking to give away. It sucks, but it works. I just got a TS-2 that sucks less and no longer have a need for old truing stand.
Just finished my party foul. Had the LBS chase and face the BB, face the headtube, press the headset (chris king), and cut the crown race (27.0 to 26.4). I did everything else including building the wheels. I also reamed and honed the seat-tube as I already had the necessary tooling. I do brakes and geared/index shifting bikes as well. None of it is too difficult. I’m not sure why people find headsets and bottom brackets difficult. Sealed BBs are easy and inversely, loose ball headsets are easy as well. One can set the races on those with a bit of all-thread and a couple of cheap sockets.
The tooling for the BB and the headtube/fork is hard to justify and can’t easily be sourced from standard machine tool places. I’ll probably bite the bullet and pick it up if I start building my own frames. Given some of my other hobbies (welding, machining, etc), getting into frame-building wouldn’t be all that difficult, just time-consuming.
Unfortunately for me, building and working on bikes may actually be more fun than riding.
i can do pretty much everything except wheels and suspension, and i’ll be building my first wheelset this winter.
Wheels were the only thing that honestly scared me.
Then I built one and now it’s easy as pie.
I love it. I’ve never worked as a wrench though.
[quote=“halbritt”]
I’ve got one of these:
…that I’m looking to give away. It sucks, but it works. I just got a TS-2 that sucks less and no longer have a need for old truing stand.[/quote]
Why’s it suck? I mean, if it works, that’ll do. I’ll pay the shipping if you really want to ditch it and it isn’t a complete POS.
[quote=“jim”]i can do all my own work, provided i have the tools. pressing headsets, facing tubes, chasing threads, things of that nature, i can’t do in my living room, so i take to the bike shop and either do it there if the guys are cool, or stand there and watch if no one objects so i know how everything is done. the only thing i have not done yet is build a wheel, becuase the opportunity has not come up. if/when i get to build a wheel, i’m pretty sure i could pull it off with the help of sir sheldon (RIP).
[/quote]
This pretty much describes my exact bike knowledge.
[quote=“Jabba Degrassi”][quote=“halbritt”]
I’ve got one of these:
…that I’m looking to give away. It sucks, but it works. I just got a TS-2 that sucks less and no longer have a need for old truing stand.[/quote]
Why’s it suck? I mean, if it works, that’ll do. I’ll pay the shipping if you really want to ditch it and it isn’t a complete POS.[/quote]
A one-sided truing stand is just slow. You have to flip the wheel back and forth to make sure you get the dish right. Otherwise it’s pretty decent. I used it a fair bit with some success. I’m old and have a decent job which means that I have too little time and too much money. Thus the TS-2.
Someone else PM’d me for it as well. It’s heavy, so it won’t be that cheap to ship. Are you on the west coast?
[quote=“frankstoneline”][quote=“Straws”][quote=“frankstoneline”]
buy an old six speed.
tear it apart and rebuild, and you will have the basics of gears down solid, then work your way up to indexed/brifters/pull ratios etc.[/quote]
yeah but even hearing about pull ratios and I’m like “fuck that”[/quote]
awe, you just need somebody to work you through it buddy.[/quote]
will…will you help me?
maybe hold my hand at times
[quote=“Rusty Piton”][quote=“FarAwayBoy”]Headsets are not that scary people.
Threaded ones at least.
I have yet to fuck with threadless.[/quote]
Threadless isn’t scary either. You just put it together the way it fits and amazingly it works.[/quote]
pretty much. Threaded is easy to learn because every shitty bike you find or buy for parts has threadless so there’s a lot of experience just waiting there. And threadless headsets are easy as pie.
I can pretty much do anything besides work on threadless headsets, disc brakes, mtb suspensions or wheel building, because I haven’t worked on those yet. I’ve built up 4 bikes from the frame up and maintain all my bikes and a couple of friends bikes.
The only things I have the shop do is chase/face shit, press in headsets and true wheels, even though I have done all those things. There just isn’t a good bike coop nearby, so I don’t have access to thread tools, headset press and truing stands anymore and I can’t really justify buying those kinds of tools considering how little I actually would use them.
Straws don’t do it. He will go all patrick swayze on you.
[quote=“Straws”][quote=“frankstoneline”][quote=“Straws”]
awe, you just need somebody to work you through it buddy.[/quote]
will…will you help me?
maybe hold my hand at times[/quote][/quote]
gladly 
on the first bike i ever bought, a complete track, with brakes and weird parts, i took it straight home(which was a hostel room) and dismantled the whole thing. i sanded down and painted the frame, knocked out the existing headset (with a screwdriver i think?) and got the looseball bb out somehow too. i was borrowing the maintenance guy’s tools the whole time. i put in a threadless headset with a couple of phone books and a big ass crescent wrench with the frame propped up on a chair and a counter top to get it straight. it took like 30 minutes of slamming it to get it in. keep in mind i had absolutely no idea what i was doing and wasn’t aware of things like headset presses. i just looked at it and figured it would fit. i unpacked and repacked looseball (record!!) hubs, which was surprising when the balls fell out. i didn’t know what was going on. it took a long time to get it all going and i had a lot of frustrating sessions in my dark little room. i don’t think my roommate really appreciated it either. since then i’ve bought a few tools and no repair can scare me. i do go to shifterbikes if i need to press a headset though. that shit is hard to do.
i can’t wait to build a geared bike from scratch.
I know everything I need to to fix bikes but I’m not an index of parts.