I completed my fixie such that I could ride it around three days ago, more on that soon. In this entry, I want to share two extremely useful bicycle maintenance techniques I learned about during the past couple of days.
1) Change tires and tube easily - without tire levers
Click here for original article. The chap’s description of how exactly you slacken up the tire is not the best, so I will try to explain how I did it. As he says, hold the tires against your thighs (I did this kneeling on the ground). Place each of your hands on a side of the wheel, opposite from one another. Push the tire in, while moving your hands toward the top, where they nearly meet. Hopefully you now have enough tire slack at the part between your hands that you can pull one side of the tire off the rim. Once you have one part off, its not too hard to slide the rest off.
2) Tighten or loosen track cog - without a chain whip
Before you freak out, this page I link claims with this technique its safe to run without a lock ring. I don’t recommend doing so. However, the technique to tighten the sprocket (which you simply reverse to loosen the sprocket) worked very well for me. I was close to going out and buying a chain whip tool when I decided the drive train already was surely an excellent tool for cog manipulation - so I searched and found this article. Again, for safety, always use a lock ring.
Tags: Bicycle
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