Bike Maintenance:rear wheel

Authors note: I got spammed, so you are now going to have to jump through some hoops to post comments. Blame the bored, bloted teenagers with no lives and a fear of the world outside the grasp of their keyboard who waste society's time with spam and other things we could all do without: Britney, boy-bands, pants that sag, facebook/ myspace/ etc...

A friend of mine is replacing his rear wheel and asked about removing the cassette and free wheel from the old wheel to place on the new one. I've given him some advice and it may help you if you are in the same situation.

He has purchased a chainwhip and reported that it is too big. He also had an issue with bike nomenclature: "anyway, I took the long stick thing out and the old ball bearings are falling out. It's ucky in there."

Here is my response:

Don't worry about the chainwhip being too big: that's how they are made so that they fit every application: use black tape to hold back some of the links to make it small enough to work.

If you do go with the big bolt method all you need is a pair of vice grips and a # 7 iclono-wrench (IW): use the IW to hold the bolt and then take the vice grip to the IW and it's pretty easy from there.

It's kind of counter intuitive, but you need to store those bearings that fell out in salt water: they are not metal and without the original grease that they were packed they will actually expand if not kept in salt water (it's a weird bike thing, just do it!).

You should try to scrape out as much of the original grease as possible and save it because new grease will severely shorten the lifespan of the wheel.

I know one guy that used all new grease and because his bearings were allowed to sit out in the air for a couple weeks he had to cram them back in (I don't know how) and this caused the wheel to seize going down a hill and he lost his left leg when he slammed into a guardrail!

Of course you know me pretty well and I could be totally full of poo.