Viewing 18 posts - 1 through 18 (of 18 total)
  • That first ride on your project bike…
  • womble72
    Free Member

    …. Anyone else get a little bit nervous or do you all have supreme confidence in your spannering? 🙂

    cynic-al
    Free Member

    Been building them at home and work for 24 years…I only worry about the home made frame additions these days.

    Tiger6791
    Full Member

    Supreme confidence, last build chain snapped after 500yds though 😕

    Put it down to a duff chain out of SRAM’s factory, when I replaced that chain it had 4 Powerlinks in it! 😯

    New chain has been fine since it’s been on and has done some miles.

    steve_b77
    Free Member

    Confident in my spannering abilities, generally worry about chips & scratches for about the first 5 mins and that’s it.

    I’ve built hi performance engines & gearboxes from a pile of components, bikes are a piece of p!$$ in comparison

    singlespeedstu
    Full Member

    I’d rather trust my own spannering than anyone elses…

    Bernaard
    Free Member

    What SSstu said. The only time I ever let anyone else do owt on mine are wheel rebuilds. But even started doing them myself now

    womble72
    Free Member

    Well this was my first time putting a bike together and I was a little nervous taking it out for a quick spin round the block last night 😀 It all seemed fine and I managed to return home without any dramas. I used a mix of 2nd hand and new parts and with help from STW and a budget tool kit, I’d like to think I did an ok job.
    A recent chain snapping incident has left me feeling a bit apprehensive to start hammering the hills but I suppose confidence will return the more I get out on the bike 😀
    I’ve got a wide 780mm fatbar on it at the moment and I think i might need to trim it but unsure what length is best. I’ll live with it for now and see if I can get used to it.

    yunki
    Free Member

    I am a very nervous spannerererer..

    I’ve always considered that mechanical things are tended by boffins and those kids from school, and greasy sweary men with low IQs.. you either understand people, or engineering..

    It always seemed to me that for a discipline with such exacting tolerances, there’s far too much ‘wacking it with a mallet’ and beard stroking and ‘that ought to hold it’ which for me took it from the realms of science to a black art..
    My stepdad spent 3 quarters of his life inside bus engines and came home bleeding and angry and coated from head to toe in black grease every evening, before stamping out to his workshop to grind things and bash and swear at stuff until gone midnight..

    I’ve started to do a bit more of my own stuff lately though and although I’m still a wee bit nervous and feel that someone that knows what they’re doing should probably check everything, I’m gaining confidence..
    A torque wrench definitely helps..

    therealhoops
    Free Member

    Supreme confidence, every time.

    metalheart
    Free Member

    Was a little nervous about the last one tbh, but partly due to wondering how it would compare on the tight and twisty stuff that my other demo bike pretty much excelled at.

    Once I got the sus damping tweaked I was a lot happier.

    Still waiting for the headset to bed in/loosen off though…

    tomaso
    Free Member

    Always a little nervous as riding up and down the street is never the same as cranking hard up the mountain while trying to shift gear etc. I have an extended local test route now that grinds up Castle Hill in Lancaster and down some steps and a steep bank with some jumps followed by some more steps and banks down to the river and back up the hill the steep way. I fund unless you really stress the bike you can’t tell if it is really working sweetly until its too late and your mates are calling you a tw@ as they wait for you to fix your bike on the ride…

    My last project, an Anthem build, had a chain joined in a hurry with out a magic link and it snapped on the North Face trail and I went flying spectacularly…

    New build going on this week with a swap of components from the Pitch on to a new Stumpjumper frame. I let you know next week if I screwed up or not…

    porter_jamie
    Full Member

    all you are doing is assembling a series of components that someone else has engineered and produced. you assemble a bike, not build it!

    (unless you happen to have made some of the components of course.)

    as commented above, i wouldnt trust anyone else to do any spannering on my bike, and i couldnt/wouldnt afford to pay for it anyway.

    rkk01
    Free Member

    First ride is always a shakedown ride.

    Round the block first to check everything works – normally requires a little faffing to adjust gears, brakes, contact points.

    First few proper rides normally require a little tightening and tinkering. Headset normally needs a pinch up after the first proper ride. Same for seat post collars etc. Brake calipers as well. Once used I tend to re-adjust

    wwaswas
    Full Member

    Somebody who weighs 4 stone more than me rode a set of wheels I’d built the other day. I’d ridden them a bit so they weren’t newly built.

    I didn’t remember until afterwards. Should I have warned them?

    oliverd1981
    Free Member

    the only time I’m nervous getting on one of my bikes is if I can’t remember the last time I worked on it – or what I might have borrowed off it in the meantime…

    DrP
    Full Member

    Ideally, after a build, I’d take it for a spin around the block, then some light offroad to shake it up a bit – lets headsets/crownraces etc bed in…

    The first outing on my recent build was the Enduro-1 event this weekend – ladder drops and doubles replaces ’round the block’….
    All was well though!!

    DrP

    brakes
    Free Member

    difficult question… my spannering is so tight that there’s no way my bikes would break, but my riding skills are so radcore that there’s no way that any bike could take such prolonged radabuse.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    I usualy strip and rebuild things before they need doing anyway as I’ve not much else to do at the moment, stuff like changeing brake pads, may as well bleed them while I’m at it, headset a smidge loose, take it appart and re-grease it just to be sure, unidentified creaking, strip the whole crank/pedals/BB and re-greese/locktite stuff like that. So when it comes to new builds I’m that used to it I don’t tend to make mistakes. Still do a shakedown up and down the road (usualy hopping on/off kerbs and low walls to be sure) to get contact points setup and check gears arent going to rattle/jam. Followed by a trip to the pump track which usaly exposes anything lose, then a short local loop including a few varied desents to set the suspension up.

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