Axle Quest

I cycled home from work Friday thinking I had an awfully loose and creaking front hub and that it was time to adjust it but when I inspected it the axle turned out to be broken. Not so good to cycle on. Rebuilding a front wheel hub is a relatively easy task if one has the parts so finding myself with a spare hour on Saturday afternoon I went over to Bike Forth. This is a bicycle repair collective and DIY tool shop just east of downtown. They have lots of tools and very good spare parts bins, for which they ask a nominal donation to use.

I was reminded of a couple things during my visit. 1) There are always Tricks to repairs. In my particular case I just couldn’t untighten the nuts holding the cones in place. One of the volunteers showed me just how to get the right leverage to loosen these. That’s the tale when I do bike repairs: I know the goal but don’t have the experience to have the tricks to be efficient. 2) There really is quite a diversity of bike parts. Rummaging through their drawer of spare axles I ended up with one that was almost but not quite right. I didn’t finish working on the wheel that Saturday afternoon, but took it home to finish the job, only to decide yesterday I needed a better match for an axle after all, so best I go to a new bike store for a replacement.

The first bike store I stopped at this afternoon was unable to help — it was too old and oddly sized to have it in their parts bin. Maybe I should try going to Bike Forth, they suggested. Better luck this evening at the second store: the mechanic spent about four minutes looking through their collection of spare axles, testing these on a nifty thread socket board, to come up with one that seems like the right match.

I’ll try to finish the job tomorrow — let’s hope my axle quest just ended.