Performing a quick tune-up and bike check before riding is a good habit to adopt and quite easy to do once you get into the habit.
Tearing up a gnarly single-track in your favorite bike spot is not the ideal place to discover your gears are dry as @#$% and seizing up or a loose spoke has broken…
Bike Tuneup
A bike tuneup primarily revolves around cleaning, lube and a few minor adjustments, according to Gonzalez.
Cleaning is one of the easiest, but also most important, ways to maintain a bike.
One of the leading causes of bike problems is a lack of lubrication.
Perfect Lubrication
If you don’t check on lubrication once a month, bearings can grind, metal rubs and the bike stops running smoothly.
That being said, you can also overlubricate a bike, making it a dirt magnet, which brings on similar problems.
The perfect lubrication, Gonzalez says, should barely be visible, but leave an oily residue at the touch of a finger.
DIY TIP: Here’s a trick to keep your cables lubed.
Flip your bike over, hold it in the front, and pedal, shifting to the easiest (lowest) gear.
Now, keep the bike still and click the shifter to hardest, giving slack in the cables.
Pull the cables out of the housing, lube them up, then pedal to take out the cables’ slack, pulling them back into the housing.
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting and repairing a bike is likely to take longer than one hour and may require special tools.
With problems like clicking gears, loose headsets or misaligned wheels, it is best to take it to a mechanic or read the user manual and take your time to fix the problem.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can destroy the bearings with an overtightened headset, ruin a wheel with misaligned gears or have a wheel that isn’t built properly collapse (or “pancake”). source popularmechanics.com
Video – Simple DIY Tune Up
If you need to improve your bike maintenance skills and love video instruction – Take a quick look at our DIY Bike Repair Course…
In a very short time, you will be an expert in bike repairs and able to service your own bike – saving time and money
Image credit popularmechanics.com
