| How to Maintain your Mountain Bike Article |
| How to Maintain your Mountain Bike   | 
| Page Type: Article Activities: Mountain | Page By: foren83 Created/Edited: May 9, 2008 / May 9, 2008 Object ID: 266442 Hits: 265  Loading... Page Score: 84.64% - 3 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
MTB Maintenance BasicsHere a list of the best tips about how to maintain your mountain bike. Please have a look and tell me what do think.
Whether mountain bike You have, regular maintenance will help you ride safely and avoid the costs of more serious repairs down the line.
Inspecting and adjusting your bike regularly may seem like a chore, but it will save you huge hassles in the long run.
Bike Maintenance Tools
- Bike Pump: Used to inflate the tubes within bike tires.
- Presta and Schrader Valves: All bike tubes have either Presta valves or Schrader valves. These valves differ in shape (Prestas are longer and thinner than Schraders), so not all bike pumps work with both types.
- Lubricant (Bike Lube): A multipurpose oil lubricant used to lubricate all of a bicycle’s moving metal parts.
- Bike Grease: A pasty form of bike lube used to lubricate nonmoving metal bike parts, such as seat posts.
- Citrus Solvent: A degreasing cleaner useful for cleaning the chain and other areas of the bike that collect grease and dirt.
- Patch Kit: A small, portable kit for repairing flat tires on the road. A good patch kit will come in a water-resistant container and include at least two tire patches, patching glue, and a small piece of sandpaper.
- Tire Iron: A tool for removing a deflated bike tube from between the rim and tire.
- Extra Tubes: Replacement tubes for flats that patch kits are unable to fix.
Mtb Maintenance Routine
Bike maintenance helps you identify and resolve potentially hazardous safety problems, from loose bolts to leaking tires to faulty brakes. Moreover, prolonged neglect of your bike can lead to major, expensive repairs.
Performing routine maintenance is the best way to avoid these. The main tip: A clean bike is a happy bike.
Learn the proper way to clean a bike (hint: the pressure washer at the car wash ain't it), and keep it clean especially after nasty muddy/dusty/wet off road rides.
1° Keep the chain cleaned and lubed (there are lots of good chain lubes, I won't get into the religious warfare there). It’s recommended that your chain be replaced every year or 1000 miles. If you ride hard, or ride in mud and dust, you may need to replace it more frequently. If you've broken your chain, there may be some warp you can't see, and the chain will eat away at the teeth of your rings, creating poor shifting and may even break while hammering up a hill or on a flat. I’ve broken many chains and it’s no fun when the power your legs once had turns into free-spinning inertia. The result usually leaves me bouncing my knee or chest off my stem/handlebar—ouch.
2° While you're cleaning, inspect the frame and components for cust, cracks, bends, scratches, bulges etc that shouldn't be there. Catch problems on the washing stand instead of on the trail.
3° Pay attention to your "consumables" mainly tires and chains - they wear fastest and take a lot of abuse, inspect them regularly.
4° Braking: This does not apply to disc brakes, but if your cantilevers have worn down the sides of your wheel from hours of braking, it is likely your rim has been slightly concaved. The brake pads create a channel from braking and this creates a loss in braking power. On long rides, if you’re finishing the ride on some radical downhill, the last thing you want is to have crappy breaking power. Your hands and forearms will be too tired to grab a reliable fist of brake, leaving you with a freaky forearm cramp or worse yet flying off a trail—been there.
5° Cable Cleaning: A dirty brake cable makes it harder to apply the brakes, and can keep the brakes from rebounding fully away from the rim. A dirty cable can also lead to terrible shifting and even broken shifter pods if not taken care of. There are two schools of thought about cleaning your cables. Both say to take a clean cloth and wipe the cable as clean as possible, however one says to oil the cable after cleaning. I generally follow the former. I think adding oil to the cable invites dirt and grim a nice place to live; adding oil to the cable just expedites the problem you’re tying to avoid.
If you need more information about Mountain biking, you may want to know some good places where bike.
So, depending on where you leave you can choose different bike trails. Here a list of the best mountain biking trails of the world.
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