New Bottom Bracket = Good

The old bottom bracket just ain't what it used to be.

Or at least that's my guess.  I bought the Tempo about a year-and-a-half ago, when I was working up in Humboldt County, California.  I didn't right the bike much, up there.  The commute was nearly twenty miles each way on a steep, windy road with no shoulder.  Deranged tweakers drove the road on a regular basis as a community service, just to clear it of cyclists and pedestrians.  I never did try riding my bike from Redway to Whitethorn.  So the cool old Schwinn stood in my living room, occasionally coming out for a quick spin around town or a trip to the laundry.  I can't really speak to this bottom bracket's history. 

Since July, I've been riding 16+ miles a day just commuting.  Wow.  It's been fun.  In early October, I started to feel a little looseness in the bottom bracket.  I could feel a wiggle in the cranks when I was pedalling.  Being a DIY bike mechanic, I took the cranks off and adjusted the bottom bracket to remove the wiggle.  (One sentence makes this sound so easy... in reality it took me more than a week of trying different things to figure out how to get the plastic plugs out of the cranks so I could remove them!).  That worked for a couple of days, then the wiggle came back.  I took the cranks off again, retightened, and replaced the cranks.  That worked for a few more days.  I removed the cranks, pulled the shaft and bearings out (bearings went all over the floor), cleaned and greased everything, then put it back together.  In this process, I noticed substantial wear both on the bearing races on the spline and on the bearings themselves.  The carriages looked pretty beat-up, too.  So I put it all back together and ordered a brand new sealed bottom bracket--the old workhorse, Shimano UN-54.  Good thing, too, because now no matter how I tightened the thing, it was loose again in less than a day's riding.  I guess that by removing all of those metal shavings, I made it even looser! 

Those metal shavings were probably pieces of the left-side bearings and bearing race.  The drive side of the shaft had a deep gouge in it.  The new sealed bracket is such an improvement! 

Part of me wanted to replace the shaft and loose bearings--it is a more durable system than the tiny bearings in the sealed BB--but the sealed BB is such a no-brainer!  There is no adjustment, very little grease (just the threads on the non-drive side of UN-54), and it goes very quickly.  I did the replacement in about fifteen minutes.

We're on the road again with good bearings between my feet!

OH!  And here's a quick shout out to the guy I watched in his pickup truck on 16th Street, last night under the UPR tracks at about 8:10pm.  There was a cyclist in the far-left lane, pushing at about 18mph.  The guy in the truck came up behind the cyclist at like 30mph and laid on his brakes, following the cyclist closely up and over the rise as far as I watched them...   Hey!  Guy in the pickup!  What was on your mind?  What did you expect the cyclist to do?--did you think he'd speed up to 30mph by the time you overtook him?  18mph is a good, solid pace for a commuter-cyclist.  AND!  There are three other lanes for motorists to choose from!  Good work to that guy on the bike, who did everything legal, held his ground, kept moving, and was easy-to-see. 

Anyway.  That gave me pause.