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How to Disassemble your Bike
Written by jesus
Now you might ask why you might want to disassemble your bike so I will tell you why that could be a good thing of which firstly if you have just bought a second hand bike and want to just clean it and make sure everything is in order it really does help in making it ride a lot better. Also if you want to paint your frame a different colour you have to completely strip it down to do this. This though is generally specific to racing bikes and road bikes like this….
Firstly you should take the greasy chain off. For this you will need a special tool which looks a bit like this.
Then like in the diagram below you twist the handel and then that pushes out the little metal tube in the chain called the link. But make sure you don’t push it all the way out otherwise you get in a pickle like I did where to get the link back in the chain takes a good half an hour of trying to smack it back in with a hammer so be careful!!!
After this you can now just take the crank of which for you who don’t know what this is it’s the shinny spikey parts stuck to the pedals.
Now for this you will need an allen key and small spanner and a crank tool. So firstly what you do is you take like the dust cap in the middle off with the allen key. Then you get a bolt which you take off with a small spanner. After this you now need to use crank tool.
Now be careful because the thread in the crank is delicate and so make sure you don’t ruin the thread. So you twist the silver big threaded part of the tool in like you are putting in a screw. Then in the tool you have the black part which you then have to tighten also and this pushes the crank out. So now you have no pedals.
The next step is quite easy and this is where you take the brakes off. So firstly you just loosen where the brake cable goes in and then you just pull out the cable to where the hand bars are. So the place where the cable is tightened looks a bit like this.
So where you see the cable at the bottom the picture you will see a bolt which you just have to loosen.
Now you do something very similar withe gears. So the parts of the gears consist of two parts and are known as de-railleurs which both look like this with the back derailleur on the left and the front one on the right.
So now like the brakes what you do is you loosen the bolt which connects to the derailleur. Then you just pull the cable back to the front so to the handle bars just like you did to the brakes. Then you just unscrew the derailleurs from the frame often needing an allen key or a spanner.
Now the headset is going to be looking very messy with all these dangly cables all loose everywhere making it look like a spider or something. So to now take off the headset you just need an allen key and start to unscrew where on the image it says top…
Now some headsets differ so you might then need to do the same with the pinch bolts. Also most bikes then need a ridiculously tonk wrench like this ….
okay…. maybe not that big but you get the point so now the whole head set should come off but be careful especially if you need to use head set because there are lots of minions and washers that could fall out. By minions I mean bearings which are lots of little balls so make sure you dont loose your balls!! Also at this point the forks will be loose from the main frame so take care if you lift it up.
After this you need to take of the bracket which is the little cuboid like thingy sticking out of where you had the cranks for which you will need a special tool and after you should hve something which looks a bit like this
Now you have the last and hardest bit which is where you have to take of the wheels which you just loosen with a spanner and so finally you are just left with a frame and all the other components which you can now clean thoroughly and make them as good as new. So you should now just have this …..
and these are the different sections of a frame