|   How to maintain your freehub....... | YaMon
Jan 15, 2004 6:53 PM | | One of those items you usually just wipe off and re-install. If it were not for the fact that 2 of them blew up on various occations during our group ride, I would never have thought about how to keep them in good running order.
For those of you that live in the states and can just run down to the bike shop and pick up a new one, stop reading here. For the rest of us that may live in an undeveloped country and don't have access to top line equipment, keep reading.
My XTR freehub started making some strange noises and I do not want to be stranded 10 miles out on a ride in the wilderness, so I had to come up with an ingenious way to keep it running. This is what I did:
Remove your cassette and freehub from the wheel. Run down to the local tire store and pick up a schrader valve used on any regular steel wheel. Take a 3/8" wooden dowel and tap out the retainer ring inside the freehub. Place a plug from the inside of the freehub and seal off the mounting hole. Next, take the schrader valve and insert it into the freewheel removal tool, the fit is pretty snug. The schrader valve facing out. Take some masking tape and tape the spline ( 2 times should be sufficient), now take the freewheel removal took and press it into the freewheel lockring, push down as far as it will go. Hope you are all still with me........pack the inside of the freehub with grease ( I tried a light grease before and it did not work, too light). Screw on the lockring onto the freehub and use a compressor with about 20 pounds of pressure to force the old grease out of the freehub and replace with new grease. You make have to pack a few times to get enough grease in there. After I finished, my freehub was silent and felt like new. It engaged every time. Hope this helps some of you.
When youlive in an undeveloped country you really have to come up with some great ideas to keep your rig running. I have rewelded aluminum derailluer dropouts, made my own bleed screw for my hydraulic brakes and rebuilt just about every part on my bike. When I do get back to the states about 4x a year, I go nuts in the bike shops buying the best and latest stuff.
Later Mon.
Later Mon. |
| A+ for inventiveness, but some issues come to mind | club
Jan 16, 2004 8:14 AM | | the major one being packing the pawls full of grease. ride the result in below freezing temperatures before you get too a'twitter about your invention. You may well find the pawls aren't springing back as readily, causing slippage when pedaling forward. That's bad. Even badder is the resulting damage to the chiseled edges of the pawls; when they slip like that the once sharp pawl edges get rounded off so they never again engage as well.
A really light grease, like Finish Line's Teflon Fortified, is probably OK in warm conditions. For year-round use, a really thick oil is even better, some folks use various thick motor oils, I use Phil's Tenacious, because it is.
Doesn't Morningstar make a freehub grease injector? I know they made freewheel injectors similar to your idea, only instead of compressed air, the grease was forced in by the fluid pressure of pumping the grease gun. |
| re: How to maintain your freehub....... | itsdoable
Jan 20, 2004 8:13 AM | | You can dissassemble the freehubs as well, it's alot easier to re-lube them. IceBike has instructions for replacing the stock grease with stuff that works better in the winter.
Injecting grease will probably work well in warm climates, but you'd probably gum up the pawls when the temps run below freezing...
Cheers,
Tom |
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