I know this has probably been done to death on here in the past, but I would appreciate a bit of advice from the STW hive-mind on this one.
On the advice of someone on here years ago – I fitted the pivot bearings on my Maestro Giant thingy – using bearing seating compound.
It turns out this may not have been such a good idea – as they appear welded solid into the frame now.
I’ve pressed out one of the bearings, but it has collapsed and left the outer stainless steel bearing race/face (?) welded to the frame. I fear the others will probably be like this too..
I’ve tried tapping the race/face thing really hard from behind with a hammer and screw driver. No joy.
I’ve tried gently dremelling the thing in a few places, but after about an hour of that I have got to the point where I’m worried I might easily go past the bearing race/face and into the alu frame. I’m not best at tasks with this kind of meticulous finesse anyway. Didn’t seem anywhere near shifting it either.
I don’t want to go down the blow-torch, welding heating route – as it is a carbon frame and I don’t think it would appreciate it all that much.
I feel my two last lines of resort are
1) A good LBS in Oxfordshire, who has experience of dealing with this sort of thing. (Which one?)
2) A previous thread on this topic mentioned something about taking the frame to a ‘machine shop’ – whatever that is? Probably to have some bloke in a flat cap and oily overalls do some sort of old skool magic with a lathe and a bottle of white liquid stuff – do these sorts of places actually exist?
Anyway – so perhaps you have some better ideas? 😀
(Gonna be out of internet contact for a good while now – but will appreciate the replies when I can see them again).