Before I’ve done it by bashing the bolt with a mallet, but it doesn’t go in very straight. The tools just look like a cylinder with a male thread on the end?

Yup, and it’s a Hope Head Doctor! Only found out they existed last week and it (a) worked fine and (b) was piece of piss to fit.
£15 online.

you can buy the tool from superstar for that! TBH I was expecting to use a head doctor, but can’t find it, and I found a sfn instead

Use a long bolt and ‘wiggle’ it straight – works for me 🙂

Little screwdriver pozi no6 head, tap it in no messing about

Patience is required. It doesn’t need to be dead straight anyway as the top cap against the stem will straighten it as it applies pressure to load the bearings.

Hope head doctor bolts are made of cheese (I know this from experience!)

I have the proper tool, but in the last an old length of copper tube has worked well. The copper is softer than the SFN, so it deforms before anything else. Always seemed to go in straight(ish) too

+1 for screwdriver. Start off gently to make sure its straight, once you give it a few bashes with a hammer it straightens itslef out. Easy peasy.

+1 for copper pipe

If you’ve got a really long M6 bolt (like 20cm or more) or a bit of threaded bar, that’s perfect- thread the SFN onto it, drop it in so that the bar/bolt sticks down the steerer, that’ll stop it from going squint. Then once fitted, unscrew bolt/bar. Perfick.

Yep, Superstar sfn tool, cheap as chips. 3xSFNs knocked in straight first time, everytime…Why try and bodge the ST on your £300+ forks?

No brainer. 8)

Easiest job on a bike.

By the tool. It makes it a 10 second job. perfect everytime. Stupid not too when you consider the price of forks and headsets and everything else.

Soft as cheese? Shit. It did seem to require a little faffing to get it stop spinning in situ (tightening a lot before wedging in). But it’s only job is to allow you to tighten the headset enough to crank up your stem bolts. It’s not critical after that, right? ‘Cos I’d hate to smear my face on the road…

If everyone wants to give me a quid for each one, I’ll do it.

Where do you live I have one you could borrow, although I am in the MTB mecca that is Cambridgeshire!

-1 for fastening the SFN to a deep impact socket with the same diameter as the inside of the steerer. Well, only if the steerer tapers internally and the socket is then trapped inside the steerer. minus one, minus one S|FN you have to drill out and carefully extract.

Easiest job on a bike.

If everyone wants to give me a quid for each one, I’ll do it.

…Please, someone take GG up on this, then maybe he’ll stop waving his policeman and we can all learn something 😆

A mate of mines forks sheared across the SFN because of corrosion.. For that reason, I’ll only use them in steel forks. Hope head doctors are fiddly to get started, but work well.

It is really a 5 second job, i cant believe the amount of talk about it

piedi di formaggio – Member

Hope head doctor bolts are made of cheese (I know this from experience!)

Maybe just that you have fists of ham, to go with your feet of cheese? 😀 Never had any other with Head Dr.s, wheres the very idea of a SFN just seems a sort of, well, short term solution?.

…Please, someone take GG up on this, then maybe he’ll stop waving his policeman and we can all learn something

😆

It is really a 5 second job, i cant believe the amount of talk about it

This. The way star fangled nits are designed, means that they straighten up as you hammer them in. Do you lot snap your frames when putting a seatpost in too? 😉

just find something lying around that’s a slightly smaller diameter than the inside of the headtube and whack it in. i used a bit of old mop handle. took seconds.

I’ve successfully used a big old bolt I had lying around in the garage. M12 I think. The hex head fitted nicely onto the top of the SFN so it all went in lovely and straight first time.