Post R&R Creaks and Cracks

No wonder JD's water bottle holder was behaving a little looser than Mr. Short and Shallow's morals.

Occasionally during the ripping roller coaster singletrack riding taking place this past weekend, weird "fingers rubbing Styrofoam" creeks emanated up from below. It sounded almost like a bad bushing. Being that I ride a rigid singlespeed, my bushings (none) shouldn't be bad. Since the sound would come and go and nothing seemed amiss function-wise, I just rolled on enjoying the dirt-coaster.

Achtung: Severe testicular trauma may occur.

Day 2, ride 3 of the weekend, the erratic styrofoam creak would return and I began to suspect my saddle having recalled a particularly poor re-mounting during the last cyclocross weekend and a funny noise associated. While stopped on the beach for JD to get some water, I looked under the hood and found the second culprit of noise: a busted Selle Italia Flite shell. Perchance if someone had a non-railed coverless Flite laying around I could swap over the good cover and rails, but why on Earth would someone keep a thing like that laying around?


Another creak (that really is more of a popping) I investigated last night was coming from the head tube area of the Rigor. Twisting the bars sounded like a folly artists rendition of an old rusty hinged castle door being opened. Several head tube gate conspiracy believers have been telling me for a while that I needed to have it faced. But the noise is new and has only happened recently with the aluminum steerer tubed Rock Solid and never with my steel steerer tubed Vicious. I've been putting it off for a while thinking I'd make a call to schedule a time to get it faced, starting to believe the conspiracy freaks. After it being pronouncedly worse riding around the barn last night, I decided to tear into it and take a look.

This isn't Kanza anymore: The real reason Sister's Summit is missing from DSG this year.

That is what DSG dirt looks like. I know some of you have never seen it in it's non-mud outfit before. I pulled the headset apart, cleaned, and re-greased it. I also had to steel wool some off some funk from my corrosive sweat. But the dirt and grit wasn't the real creak/pop culprit, my corrosive sweat was:

That's nasty, Wyatt. That's Chet, Gary.

A little knife edge scraping, some CLR, and a lot of steel wool work and the crud came off. Despite finding evidence of things to make you go creak/pop, I figured the noise would still be present when everything was put back together. That the conspiracy theorists were right and that it would be silent until the final torquing of the last bolt, just to tease me.

"You are supreme the chicks'll cream for Pledged Lightning!"

But it's silent once again with butter smooth bearings. The rest of the bike got a bath and a new coating of Pledge. Remember kids, a clean bike is a fast bike.