klunky front end on my simple (for the last year or so)…. headset tight check. Yep headset cap was tight, tight to the top of the steerer tube insufficient spacerage! (I did do the rock the bike with finger on the lower headset bearing and fork crown thing but couldn’t feel any play 🙁 )

I once bled my brakes and had the syringe attached on the back caliper and the funnel attached on the front lever, took me a wee while to work out why it wasn’t working…

Surely i am not the only one!!!!

Marzocchi Dirt Jam Pros use the lower legs as part of the air spring. Don’t pressurise the air spring to try and stop the foot nut spinning.

View post on imgur.com

Yeah, I’ve done the brake bleed with front lever, back caliper thing. Blew the seals…

None of these are bad enough to warrant a T-shirt being made, yet…

trimmed the fork steerer with the starnut still in it wondering why it was so difficult to cut.

[TANNOY]
Northwind to the forum, please
[/TANNOY]

Stabbing myself in the face with a chisel whilst trying to remove a star fangled nut when drunk falls into the stupid and maintenance categories.

Fork lowers on the wrong way round after a service – I like to think I was ahead of the curve testing short / negative offsets.

I once watched a friend trying for 5 minutes+ to jam his rear wheel in his frame the wrong way round

eldest_oab tried to fit a pedal on the inside of the crank…

Sprayed caustic soda all over the garage during bout of stuck seatpost removal. The follow-up investigation appeared to conclude that the bung I’d fashioned from an old Oury grip to seal the swan-off open end of the seatpost proved insufficient and exploded. I’d thought the BB being removed would provide adequate ventilation for the reaction, but apparently not. Luckily for me, I’d evacuated the garage to make coffee while the chemicals got to work. I returned to a scene of devastation in which my beloved Bird Zero had taken the brunt of the blast. Emergency evacuation to the back garden with a hosepipe minimised the damage to a few stains on the anodised bits. I hadn’t noticed my old road bike also got a soaking and today bears patches of raw aluminium on its cranks and rims.
I didn’t get the seatpost out that day, but I like to think I may have at least loosened it.

Moral of the story: always get a grown-up to help you.

There’s this old chestnut…

Surely i am not the only one!!!!

No sir not me, never ever done that honest …..🤪🤡

Yeah I’ve done the old front lever, rear calliper thing.

Frankly the rest of the list is endless. It’s not that I’m clumsy or stupid, I mean 99% of it is following a guide or YT vid, no my failing is trying to cram too much in too little time and then panicking / rushing and breaking something. Even now I’m waiting for a slide hammer to arrive by post to replace some bearings I damaged by over tightening. The correct plan will be to wait till Love Island comes on and the kids are in bed and I’ve got hours to do a 30 min job, but my usual MO is to pop home lunchtime and do a 30 min job in 30 mins, rush it, get into a panic and break something.

Mine is always tyres. I get it all set up so it goes on in the right direction but some how manage to get it the wrong way once its on.

Fork lowers on the wrong way round after a service – I like to think I was ahead of the curve testing short / negative offsets.

done this one.

This one time, I put my the tyres back on and didn’t align the logo perfectly with the valve. What a fool

Only this year!!!!
Rounded a crank arm bolt when fettling a creaky bb. Screw extractors I bought didn’t work ,so I set to drilling it out carefully. Not carefully enough ,as I became “distracted” & didn’t drill completely true, cue a ruined crank arm. Soft lad.
And in the bastid end it was a creaky chainring bolt. Aaagghhhh.

Not bike related but

Sink blocked, so basin underneath and started undoing at the ubend, all ok, Water flooding into basin, basin filling up quickly, so in a panic I poured it back into the sink ………………

Simple one for me..
How hard could a cup and cone headset be….
Didn’t catch the fork on the way out after reaching for a mallet.. Ouch..

I regularly feed the chain through the RD, on the wrong side of the plate between the jockey wheels

I regularly feed the chain through the RD, on the wrong side of the plate between the jockey wheels

I was reading this thread with a smug sense of superiority until I got to this one. I think it’s a deliberate design feature – I can’t work out what the plate you have to feed to one side of actually does anyway. And I’m sure different mechs put the little plate in different places just so at the end of a long job when you can’t think clearly it all goes wrong wrong wrong.

The person who cut his dropper post down to fit frame still wins the top prize for me 🙂

Ran the BB face/chase tool through my new frame…. Wrong side in.

Recently I put all the pawls and springs into a Hope freehub the wrong way around.

Also managed to spray myself in the face (and eyes) with IPA whilst looking down through a brake caliper whilst spraying upwards.

Fitted tubeless tyre to Crank Bros Sage DH rear wheel but it wouldn’t seat properly so left it at high pressure whilst working on the front waiting for it to ping.  Sun crept round the side of the house and started heating the wheel up, I’d got my back to it and forgotten about it, the dog was snoozing on the lawn with his feet in the air by the wheel.

There was a loud bang and all I could hear was a whistling noise (like in the war films when they’ve had a bomb go off next to them).  The dog was now looking terrified and had seemingly teleported himself instantly across the garden in a nano second.  Sealant had blown up the side of the house, the rear cassette and free wheel had been shocked off the hub and the pawls were now in the lawn and the tyre was badly deformed.

I may have done this again a decade later but this time the study/bike repair room took the brunt of the blast.

[TANNOY]
Northwind to the forum, please
[/TANNOY]

I think he’s currently in a van driving home from the Megavalanche, so he’s unlikely to hear you.

The brake bleeding mistake I’ve made is doing it from the lever down, (old style) without putting a spacer block between the pistons. One piston out and oil all over the floor.

Non-bike – refilling my van engine oil forgetting to put the sump plug back in. Luckily the catch pot was large and still under the engine, but basically poured about 3 litres of synthetic straight trough into the dirty used stuff.

Not a mistake so much as a really dumb habit. Anyone else do this?
Whenever I make a minor adjustment on any of my bikes I always put the tools away before I test by riding up & down the street. Then have to get the tools out again to just tweak that adjustment once again. I never seem to learn to leave the tools out until I know I’m happy with the new set-up.

I was reading this thread with a smug sense of superiority until I got to this one. I think it’s a deliberate design feature – I can’t work out what the plate you have to feed to one side of actually does anyway. And I’m sure different mechs put the little plate in different places just so at the end of a long job when you can’t think clearly it all goes wrong wrong wrong

Guilty.

I’d even done a 10 mile ride and hadn’t noticed, it was only after thinking out was a bit noisy did I realise what I’d done. The chain lube must have aided the chain running over the tab.

Gotta be noisy that.

>putting your tools away before you have tested it rode the bike up the road<

Guilty as charged…more then a few times..

100mph

Member
The person who cut his dropper post down to fit frame still wins the top prize for me

Was that someone on here??😳

Non-bike – refilling my van engine oil forgetting to put the sump plug back in. Luckily the catch pot was large and still under the engine, but basically poured about 3 litres of synthetic straight trough into the dirty used stuff.

That reminds of the time I did the first oil change on my old, new-to-me, Volvo 240. Got confused CW confused with ACW on account of being upside down 😳. Stripped the thread and got the plug stuck. Tried everything to get it out non-destructively. Ended up hacksawing the head off, drilling a hole off-centre and spinning the stump into the sump. Then I partially dropped the sump (full removal means removing a chassis crossmember, or unbolting the oil pump through the gap) and spent hours lying on my back fishing through the 1″ gap with a magnet in a pastic bag on the end of a bit of wire til I hooked it out.

Fitting an fsa pressfit bottom bracket converter, got it all the way in before realising 68mm converter in 73mm frame wasn’t clever.
Youngest son fitted square taper cranks at 90 degrees instead of 180 on his jump bike, couldn’t see what he’d done wrong till told to try riding it.

I was reading this thread with a smug sense of superiority until I got to this one. I think it’s a deliberate design feature – I can’t work out what the plate you have to feed to one side of actually does anyway. And I’m sure different mechs put the little plate in different places just so at the end of a long job when you can’t think clearly it all goes wrong wrong wrong

Guilty.

I’d even done a 10 mile ride and hadn’t noticed, it was only after thinking out was a bit noisy did I realise what I’d done. The chain lube must have aided the chain running over the tab.

I did this and raced a week-long MTB race in the North-Indian Himalayan foothills before realising!

Also many years ago while servicing some big upside-down DH forks, I poured a large amount of expensive oil in before refitting the drain cap at the bottom…

got a puncture at bpw

turned the bike upside down

and fixed the puncture on the wrong wheel

Nothing too bad, stripped many a thread tightening or loosening the wrong way when I’ve been working upside down or back to front.

Non-bike – refilling my van engine oil forgetting to put the sump plug back in. Luckily the catch pot was large and still under the engine, but basically poured about 3 litres of synthetic straight trough into the dirty used stuff.

My brother managed to put a liter of coolant straight into his engine. Luckily he realised what he done as soon as he’d finished pouring, followed by a hasty phone call to me to help him with an oil change!

Ah, so many – having to saw off Raceface cranks was a highlight, but probably the stupidest and definitely the most frustrating was trying to lace a front wheel without knowing spokes in the same wheel are different lengths. You can imagine the fun trying to get nipples onto spokes that seem like they’re gonna reach… but… just… won’t. Did my nut in that. Learned from it though. Well, til next time anyway.