Where do I stand – bike shop damaged my bike

They can’t even manage to chase the threads without effing them up and you’d trust them to do this?

Nah, you send it somewhere at their expense

why not?

The cups will move on the threads/against the face under cyclic loading, eventually it will destroy the thread and you’ll have a wobbly cup. Also, the end load/preload on the crank is about 1-2Nm, as soon as the cup starts moving out (which it almost certainly will) that end load will increase rapidly and knacker your bearings. It’s not like i haven’t seen a good number of finger tightened cups that have knackered either themselves, or the frame (or both).

And a pressfit, if it’s not pressed tightly enough, does almost exactly the same, but without threads involved.

I agree with all that Mert and will add that in the case of HT2 the bearing will also start rotating on the axle and wear a deep groove in that too thus scrapping it.

Also, the end load/preload on the crank is about 1-2Nm, as soon as the cup starts moving out (which it almost certainly will) that end load will increase rapidly and knacker your bearings.

not to mention if you have a shimano crank, the crank will shimmy along the axle, the plastic preload will shear and it’ll get very wobbly very quickly and, despite having those retainer pins in the pinch bolt shim, will still knacker the splines on the crankarm.

I’d still just send them one more email title it ‘letter before action’ and then small claims court it. The process isn’t very onerous. Pretty unlikely the frame was faulty, and even if it was it’d be obvious in the first few turns, balance of probabilities, they just cranked it on and shagged it. They will more than likely settle before it gets to court anyway.

I think I agree with Edukator. Any bike shop worth its salt, and certainly one that’s built a good reputation for dealing with higher-end bikes, will have a decent BB thread reamer & facer. They’re relatively easy to train people on, straightforward to use and most qualified mechanics will have no problem preparing most frames.

I don’t know which shop we’re talking about, but you don’t build a good reputation with cack-handed mechanics and crap tools, and if the OP has had a good relationship with them for the last 7 years I’d be inclined to believe they have decent tools, and decent mechanics who know how to use them.

I think that a frame desperately sold by a dying company as “new” is much more likely to be damaged, a warranty return or a QC reject, as they know that they can take the money and don’t have to answer for the fault. Look at all the London Road frames Planet X sold that had actually been returned to them as warranty claims as an example.

I think the shop has done the right thing in spotting the frame is damaged and offering to put it right in the best way they can. If it was my shop I’d offer to prep the frame and fit a screw-together BB free of charge as a goodwill gesture, but possibly charge for the BB itself.

I think the opinions of the keyboard warriors spouting the usual guff like “I never trust an LBS” or “SuE tHeM!” or “they should claim on their insurance, that’s what it’s for” can be ignored, as usual. Most independent bike shops know they stand or fall based on their reputation – and that reputation is hard-won by consistently doing good work and good customer service, and easily damaged by bad reviews, which is why they do so much stuff for goodwill and absorb the cost and inconvenience of a lot of warranty work. And why they don’t tolerate “spanner monkeys”. Like claiming on your house insurance or car insurance, claiming on your shop’s insurance is a guaranteed way to make sure your future renewals are dramatically more expensive – you save that stuff for when you really need it, like a break-in or a fire. Shops absorb all the other costs.

Like most things, keeping things civil and keeping dialogue open is the best way to ensure both sides are heard and the negotiation goes as smoothly as possible. OP, I hope you get an outcome you’re happy with.

I think that a frame desperately sold by a dying company as “new” is much more likely to be damaged, a warranty return or a QC reject, as they know that they can take the money and don’t have to answer for the fault.

Wiggle were selling off their seconds on Ebay right until the very end (as they usually did) so doubt that’s the case here.

I think the shop has done the right thing in spotting the frame is damaged and offering to put it right in the best way they can.

They didn’t though. They ripped out the thread, then claimed it was damaged on arrival.

I think the shop has done the right thing in spotting the frame is damaged and offering to put it right in the best way they can.

They didn’t spot it was damaged though. They ran a tap through it and stripped the thread.

If they’d spotted it was wrong from the off and said “what would you like us to do? We’re not confident in this, and we might make it worse” it’d be one thing. But saying after the fact “we’ve stripped the bottom bracket. Must’ve been wrong before we started” is just having to take it on faith.

I think that a frame desperately sold by a dying company as “new” is much more likely to be damaged, a warranty return or a QC reject, as they know that they can take the money and don’t have to answer for the fault. Look at all the London Road frames Planet X sold that had actually been returned to them as warranty claims as an example.

If they were desperately trying to stay alive, perhaps. But when it was a given they were dead, and any funds they managed to raise were just going to go to the creditors, and not save the company/people’s jobs, I have a hard time buying into that theory.

I’m pretty sure the OP lives nowhere near me but I’d like to know who the shop was so that I know to avoid them!

@scotroutes I’m pretty sure the OP lives nowhere near me but I’d like to know who the shop was so that I know to avoid them!

Yep, me too!

I genuinely don’t understand how they could have done this without the thread being less than perfectly cut initially. How is a “thread ripped out” by a tap?

The bike shop clearly think the customer is a soft touch to let them get away with handing back a frame they’ve possibly ruined. Why didn’t they check the bb shell first if it seemed off, and face it if appropriate? It needs to be square for external bearing cups anyway. It’s bad enough if they’ve not noticed a defect and made things worse by forcing a tap in squint, but if they’re slapdash enough to do that they’re easily slapdash enough to ruin the threads in a perfectly straight frame.

 I genuinely don’t understand how they could have done this without the thread being less than perfectly cut initially.

I’m struggling to understand how they’ve done it even if the bottom bracket had been crossthreaded by a blind hippopotamus. Twice. Surely the amount of resistance would make it obvious something was amiss. You don’t just keep forcing it.

Taps can’t go in squint if their is a thread, they follow the existing thread

Unless they mixed up the L and R taps??

Taps can’t go in squint if their is a thread, they follow the existing thread

It’s quite easy to cross thread large taps, especially those with fine threads, like bottom bracket taps.

I’ve got a pair of BB taps, and I always get nervous using them until I’ve got them in a few threads and I know that they’re in straight. However if they do cross thread, you’ll feel them go tight, and unless you really try forcing them through, at most you should only damage the first few threads, which can usually be salvaged.

“Taps can’t go in squint if their is a thread, they follow the existing thread”

They can’t follow an existing thread if the one side isn’t threaded properly as there is a super high tolerance bar that joins the two sides of the taps together. That is literally the whole point of the BB tapping tool.

I use the park one very regularly and it’s idiot proof

And by saying that it’s being acknowledged that the old thread was wrong

I think the opinions of the keyboard warriors spouting the usual guff like “I never trust an LBS” or “SuE tHeM!” or “they should claim on their insurance, that’s what it’s for” can be ignored, as usual.

This particular keyboard warrior’s time spent working as a bike shop mechanic did not give him quite such a sanguine attitude toward bike shop mechanics.

You can find some absolute superstars wrenching in bike shops.  Sometimes you find a time served mechanical engineer who got fed up building Rolls Royce aircraft engines and decided to follow their passion for bikes instead.

More often than not this is not the case though.  A single key person leaving can completely change the overall competency of the shop.  I can count on the fingers of a Texas roughneck’s left hand how many bike shops I actually trust.

Even the best mechanics make mistakes at which point the important thing is how the shop is going to make things right.  If mistakes are a seldom occurrence then it’s a good opportunity to use it as a learning experience.  One thing you get used to as a mechanic is learning to do the simple jobs in the most efficient way.  However, what’s even more important is learning when to slow down because something isn’t quite right.  In this case, it sounds like someone didn’t slow down.

That’s fine.  It happens.  What is not fine is to then pass the costs of this on to the customer.

This suggests that the shop is not so much interested in making sure learnings are passed on and is instead interested in making sure it keeps every penny it can.

This is definitely not the kind of bike shop I would want any of my bikes anywhere near.

Fair point, @BruceWee – full disclosure, I run a bike workshop with a good reputation and we often work on high-end bikes, there are definitely some mechanics I’ve worked with in the past at other shops, and some that have applied to work with me, who I wouldn’t let anywhere near an Amazon BSO, let alone a four-figure bike.

I definitely agree about mistakes being how we learn, and how being honest about your mistakes and putting them right to the customer’s satisfaction is a good way to keep and even gain customers.

I think it’s possible someone didn’t slow down when using the BB tool, that’s a common way to damage threads. But, as we both know, those tools are pretty hard to get wrong if you’ve used them more than a couple of times, and I’ve definitely had bikes where I’ve started chasing a thread and thought “this doesn’t feel right”, backed off and found that the tool was cutting right but the BB was tapped wrong from the factory.

I guess I’m saying to the OP – if you’ve established a good relationship with the shop and you trust them, keep trusting them. Keep talking to them. Find out what happened and how knackered the threads are. Point out that if the damaged side is damaged all the way through the threads, then that implies that the shop’s mechanic persisted using the thread tap after they should have realised it wasn’t working right. If that’s the case, the shop should probably go some way to contribute to putting it right.

My experience leads me to think it’s probably about 90-95% likely the frame was duff from the factory, 5-10% likely the LBS mechanic messed it up. Of course there’ll be some people on here who are very vocal about the one time an LBS mechanic got something wrong on their bike, and why they’ll extrapolate this to assume that almost all professional mechanics are inferior to them, but you’re unlikely to hear from the majority of others who have LBSs they’ve trusted for years to fix their bikes reliably.

What is not fine is to then pass the costs of this on to the customer.

I agree here – if the shop messed up, it’s the shop’s responsibility to put it right. BUT if the shop has started the job in good faith, the frame turns out to be bad, and they’ve called the customer to let them know this… then it’s a bit of a grey area. The shop’s completely within their rights to say “your frame’s rubbish, we can’t work on it, come and pick up your duff frame and pay us for our mechanic’s wasted time” – but that’s a good way to lose a customer and leave a sour taste.

I think if the frame _was_ faulty from the factory, a good way for the shop to handle it – and the way I’d advise my workshop to deal with it – is to think about that customer’s loyalty, and find a way to make the frame usable, safe and reliable at the least expense to the customer while covering the shop’s costs (a trade-price purchase of a screw-together BB, perhaps).

I’ve not read all of this but I agree with the above. Having worked in bike workshops and delivered mechanics training and seen what comes in to workshops it’s partly down to how problems are initially discovered and how they are then dealt with.

We had a guy bring in his around 7 year old carbon road bike in for new cassette, chain and rear mech. The mechanic didn’t notice the crack in the seat tube above the front mech ‘braze on’ did the work and handed it back to the owner. owner comes back in ‘you’ve damaged my frame’

After a conversation about the work that had been done and that the front mech area hadn’t been touched, it was clear the burden of proof was on us. Had we noticed before starting the job, we’d have called and let him know. it may have been tah he’d have still suggested that we’d done it, but at least it’s the right thing to do. We replaced his frame with a ‘closest model’ to the original, replacing incompatible parts with equivalents, via our insurance. It was a tough lesson for our mechanics.

In the OP’s instance, if they’d started to chase threads, ran into difficulty, they shoud have called, explained what they were doing, when they realised something wasnt right with the frame, and asked what the OP wants to do, either stop and take the frame away and find a solution with the frame manufacturer (not likely now), or continue, see if the threads will hold, and if not, find a solution = screw together BB.

As it stands from what I gather, and correct me if I’m wrong, they didn’t and just cracked on. That was their decision and the consiquence of it is that the frame not usable without using an adaption.

it’s the shops liability in that case and they should replace like for like or nearest acceptable equivelent (either value or specification, up to the OP to decide what’s acceptable)

Now no shop really wants to get into that situation, and I have seen some weigh up the loss of a customer vs the likelihood of the customer taking it further vs a claim on insurance, and digging the heels in because they think they’ll just go away. Not the service you want.

Agree with the why didn’t shop stop instead of continuing comment. My experience of a different bike issue was when frame builder A who had my rear wheel built by LBS B called me to say cassette locking not going on easily a lot of resistance. Not sure if just stiff or thread issue. What do you want us to do?

that call let me make the decision and tell him to keep going. But only after I’d spoken to LBS and cleared with them that if proven threaded they’d sort warranty issue with hub. Simple 5min call avoided issue and made the decisions my one.