Chris King Bottom Bracket FAIL!

Lovely grinding noise from the BB today on a ride.
Removed cranks and the thing literally fell to pieces.
Rubbish!

have you serviced etc etc etc..

faced shell,blah,blah ?

Hey come on…give him the benefit of the doubt.He's only done 3000k on it and he has jetwashed and sprayed it with GT85 it after every ride 😉

Should have got one of these to go with it.

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To me that's the whole point of the King BB.

its all but new and facing not an issue.
just shonky….

replace it with xt..
Do king also not cover it?

yes those charlatans at CK are renown for supplying shonky goods…

oh,er,hold on,Ive had TWO King SS hubs fail prematurely,still they fixed at least one of them under warranty……..

did you send directly to the distributor?

I'd sooner just replace cheaper BBs than having to keep servicing King ones! Particularly as it seems King ones really do need the maintenance.

What chainset is it fitted with?

new style xt.

no. CK direct,took em six weeks,but they replaced the failed part,second time was on a different,identical hub,different part tho,I couldn't be ar5ed to wait six weeks without a rear hub,so went to Tim at sideways,although he couldn't authorise a warranty repair,He certainly looked after me price and service wise,and did it whilst I waited and drank his tea.

No bearing preload issues to worry about then,(some types can put excessive side load into the bearings, not the case here)
when you say fell apart, in what way? It sounds like a warranty issue to me.

yes those charlatans at CK are renown for supplying shonky goods…

Yep, they won't pay the Aheadset patent fee and, as a direct result, sell headsets that score steerers.
The hubs are OK though, if a bit brash.

as in removed cranks and caps, cups, bearings and seals just fell out onto the floor!

When you say it 'fell apart', did the inner race come out with the crank axle exposing the bearings? The one on my Pace did that, I cleaned it up, regreased it and put it back together. Or did something actually break?

yes, but all 60% of bearings were loose and scattered!

all 60% of bearings were loose

So no grease in there then…

Looks like you've got good a good case to contact Evo imports (Bromley Bike Co.) and get a new one under warranty.
They're really helpful and knowledgable IME.
It sounds like a manufacturing issue with the bearing. And that's quite a rare ocurrence with CK components in the 10+ years I've been fitting them.

It would take a monumental fitting error with a XT chainset to break a stainless bearing of that quality, very difficult to do IMHO.

Mine lasted 18 months with no grease. 😳
Grease tool in the post 🙂

daveells – Member

Mine lasted 18 months with no grease.

And how rough was it before I greased it for you? 😉

oooh,it were well rough,but its good as new now.

Rougher than a badgers ass it were.

TBH I was quite impressed how smooth it felt after a couple of pumps of grease…

Hope you bought it from a UK retailer and kept the receipt…

whats that? Ebay from Hong Kong you say? Oops 😐

In the pit that is my brain, I vaugely recall a user of here Anthony (?), who had a similar issue with the drive side bearings getting trashed, and iirc the warrenty didn't cover it.

What a relief, I mean, literally thousands of people worldwide are labouring under the misunderstanding that CK parts are actually pretty good, you've singlehandedly corrected that impression

If it's degreased and the inner race came out with the axle it's a maintenance issue.
You should be able to tell when a bearing is running dry, and the King can be greased. Even if you remove the snapring and seal and do it by hand if you don't want to spend money on the grease tool.
I've done it with hub bearings and they work like new afterwards. You can buy a snapring kit from Bromley bike co. to replace worn bearing seals.

Mine did the same thing, but the grease in the bearing race held the balls in place. Fwiw, I don't think the seals are as spectacularly good as people make out – a lot of black gunk comes out of mine when I re-lube them using the CK tool – but the key is being able to relube them. Having said that, given that you can get XT/SLX BBs for 26 quid each, you can get through quite a few of them before the CK pays for itself, I guess.

Well done Boatman, it's me it's me 🙂

Mine did exactly the same after 3 months. I argued my case with the importers Evolution including taking advice from trading standards and they basically didn't want to know and argued it was my fault.

I sent it back to King in America and they were happy to warranty it for me. I did however get stung for £15 import duty and it took about 6-8 weeks.

Have owned King hubs, headsets and the bottom bracket but I have since removed them after it left a nasty taste in my mouth. I thought I was paying high prices for good quality kit backed by a decent warranty, turned out not to be the case (UK end of things anyway). Hope get my money now.

Good luck.

cheers anthony
one CK BB sized package on its way to the states this week then!

out of interest anthony where did you get your bb from originally?

I was in Bromley Bike a few months back chatting to one of their mechanics and there was a CK bottom bracket that someone sent back "under warranty" and it was ****, you could clearly see that it hadn't been greased and the "I've faced my BB was bollox because you could see wear on one side where it hadn't seated correctly. People are quick enough to get the knife out about Evolution and warranty and say CK is crap when it goes wrong yet most of the CK in this country comes from out of the UK so why should they replace it?

I have had no issues with the CK kit I own and service has been great.

Fontmoss, it was from Winstanley's. The customer service was appalling and I'm not using them again either!

Captain Pugwash, if you have had no issues with King stuff then how do you know the warranty service has been great?