I sit here, a defeated man, brought low by the fixed cup on the SuperCycle SC1800’s bottom bracket. Yes, I read the instructions. Yes, I saw the warnings along the lines of “The fixed cup will be very, very, very tight.” Admittedly I ignored the suggestions to “take it into a bike shop” to remove the fixed cup, or “buy the special yet expensive tool”, or even Sheldon Brown’s “build your own fixed cup removal tool out of a bench vise and an aircraft engine.” Okay, so he didn’t say I needed the aircraft engine, but I ignored his advice anyway.
Starting at the beginning. I ordered a sealed cartridge bottom bracket on eBay, intending to upgrade the rapidly degrading spindle, cup and bearing bottom bracket currently on the SC1800. It arrived today, so I set to work after supper. All went well until I tried to remove the fixed cup – the drive side cup you don’t normally touch during a Bottom Bracket overhaul. It was supposed to be English threaded, meaning counter-clockwise to tighten, clockwise to loosen. I tried both ways, with sufficient force to cause me to break into an intense sweat and to swear uncontrollably. It wouldn’t budge. Is it English threaded? I don’t know!
The problem is, the existing BB is a real mess. The bearing cages look like they’ve been chewed up in a meat grinder… so bad that I didn’t want to put them back in the BB. Realizing I’d been defeated, I knew I had to put the thing back together, mess or not. I remember reading another suggestion from Sheldon Brown, awhile back, to remove the bearing cages and increase the number of loose bearings per side to 11. I did so, and managed to get the BB back together again. The result is that it now runs very smoothly with two extra bearings on each side and no cages.
Still, I was looking forward to installing the sealed cartridge bottom bracket. Installing it will be the easy part, I think. Removing the fixed cup will take some more thought.
Anyway, as I said, here I sit, a defeated man. Did I mention I have a beer in hand? That’s the great thing about repairing your own bike. Even when things go wrong, there’s always a silver lining.
Related posts:
Bottom Bracket — brute force attack
1465 Km — F%#!&$g bottom f%#!&$g bracket!
Bottom bracket redux
August 18th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I hear your pain! Just in the middle of exactly the same situation…. knackered adjustable BB which I want to replace with a cartridge, and the fixed cup won’t budge. Just built Sheldon Brown’s tool (sans aero-engine) and my butter-metal washers started to bend until (I think) the bolt gave way. I’m working on the patio and it’s raining too hard (I’ve had enough) to try to extract it all, for now, so it can sit there and contemplate it’s sins. Now, where did I put my beer…?
August 18th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Washers like butter. Yep, I went through that, too. When I used locking washers, the ones with the space, they simply spread apart as the bolt passed through the middle of them. I then tried standard washers, without success. The problem this time was, I think, that the washers were slightly too big, and the edges became wedged against the sides of the cup before becoming flush with the end (with the hole). The more I tightened, the more they just bent. I eventually followed some instructions I’d been given by a couple of readers, and they seemed to do the trick. One, I gave the face of the fixed cup a few really hard bangs with a hammer to loosen the threads. Two, I liberally squirted Liquid Wrench (WD40) spray lube into the shell around the fixed cup (inside and outside) and left it for an hour. Three, I tried a pipe wrench on the outside edge of the cup and managed to move it a millimeter. Four, after that initial move I tried another version of Sheldon Brown’s tool using only the bolt and nut, no washers, allowing direct contact with the cup face. The problem with this approach is that you could severely damage the cup. If you don’t manage to get it out, you’ve screwed the old bottom bracket, so I can’t really recommend this method. I was working on a $99 bike, so I didn’t really care if I destroyed it. I was also fairly confident I would succeed this time because the cup had already moved under the force of the pipe wrench. That seemed to do it for me. It still took a while to unscrew the thing, but it did come out. You can see, looking at the pictures, that I did a little damage to the outside of the BB shell with the pipe-wrench. ( http://www.bikeofdoom.com/2007/08/13/bottom-bracket-brute-force-attack/ ) Luckily, I didn’t damage the threads, and the cartridge BB screwed in nicely after a cleaning and greasing of the shell.
My goal was always the beer at the end of the ordeal. Always pays to have something to look forward to.