- A tip is a useful tidbit of information.
A hack is a tip of lower discretion.
Today it's all interchangeable.
We're gonna go over 10 tips and hacks for cyclists.
So if you watch my repair videos
you know I'm a stickler for these cable crimps.
You put 'em on the end of your cables
to make sure they don't get freed, poke you,
and for like $3 you can get a lifetime supply of them.
But there are people way more serious
than I am about frayed cables.
I had a subscriber suggest welding them.
So let's try it.
(upbeat music)
It works amazing, like perfectly.
Look this is not gonna be something that I do
on a regular basis,
but if you have a welder sitting next to your bike stand,
the hat's off to overkill.
So you're overhauling the linkage
on a full suspension mountain bike
and unless you have hundreds of dollars worth
of bearing presses and extractors,
you're likely reaching for your hammer and your screwdriver.
I've got a gentler way to do it.
For this one you're gonna need a clamp and some sockets.
So when there's a cartridge bearing on both sides like this
it's tricky to get the first one out
even if you have a proper extractor.
Get a socket that fits inside of the bearing.
Kind of offset it a little bit.
Then you're gonna take another socket
whose opening is larger than the bearing.
You should be able to just squeeze it with your C clamp.
A few turns of that clamp
and you can see our bearing is coming out.
Now reinstall the bearing is even easier.
You just need to find a socket that's the same diameter
as the bearing and it's gotta be the same diameter as
the bearing because it might actually sit below the frame.
And so you have to push on the edges of the bearing here.
Now this is a hack.
There's more than one way you can screw it up,
but with a little common sense
this can get you out of a tight spot.
This is a crank puller
and unless your bicycles crank set has a built-in puller,
which some of them do,
you're gonna need this to take it off.
There's no other way you're gonna get it off
besides a crank puller.
And you'll notice on some crank pullers
you can pop this little guy off
and put on a bigger one
because not all splines are the same,
some of them are hollow
and some pullers don't appear to come with that piece
although I could have lost it.
As it turns out,
this little adapter is the same size as a dime
and so you can insert a dime and pull the crank right off.
And so it is true that it'll cost you 10 cents
each time you remove a crank arm,
but it'll take a while to add up to the cost
of a crank puller with this little thing on the end.
Good old saddle pouches.
You don't see these these around very much anymore,
but people still use them.
They still sell 'em,
and it's a great way to carry stuff.
Main problem with saddle pouches is that
they make a lot of noise and it can get annoying
and so I'm gonna show you how to put a sock in it.
Not loud anymore.
Now for style points,
you could actually take all the stuff out of here,
put it in the sock,
and if you have car keys or a little snack
or something you want to keep isolated
from your greasy tools,
well now they're isolated
and everything is gonna run real quiet
once you put a sock in it and hit the trails.
So you're watching your GoPro footage,
everything looks great until you hit a puddle.
One subscriber told me that you can put rainx on the lens
and it will shed water easier.
Let's try it.
Okay, we have two identical GoPros here.
Both lens covers have been cleaned with alcohol,
but this one we're gonna put rainx on.
All right, we'll just mark this GoPro.
That's the one with the rainx.
If you are riding,
you're shaking around
and there's wind going against you.
So let's see what happens if we kind of tap 'em.
(tapping sounds)
Let's see what happens when we blow on 'em.
I think the one that was really clean without rainx on it
actually performed better.
So if you want your GoPro to shed water,
just clean it with alcohol.
This park tool wheel holder,
I use it just about every single day
and I honestly thought it was kind of silly
when I first saw it,
but having a way to hold your wheel safely
while you're installing a rotor or mounting a tire
is really convenient.
And as you might imagine,
there are several ways you can rig one of these up yourself.
So first of all,
quick and dirty,
if you got an old through axle you don't care about
there's more than one way you can clamp this
in the vice to hold a wheel.
As long as you're not doing anything crazy
this'll hold it in place for you.
But even an old through axle is worth something
and so this is $4 at the hardware store
and you can bend it into whatever shape you want
and clamp it into your vice to work on wheels.
So I put a hose clamp on mine to keep the wheel
from crashing into the vice
and I also ground one side flat so that it wouldn't rotate.
Works kind of just as good as the real thing.
So if you've ever commuted by bicycle in a city,
you know that you can leave work
and find that your saddle is missing
or your entire bike is gone
or one of the wheels is gone.
It's just inevitable
and there's no way to stop it from happening.
But don't make a thief's job easy.
Throw 'em for a loop.
Make sure they need as many tools
as possible to take apart your bike.
Use the most obscure fasteners you can possibly find.
Security torques anyone?
A flathead M6 or how about a T20 just to drive them nuts.
A Phillips head M5 somewhere you would never expect it.
So you can take out all your stem bolts,
go on the internet or go to the hardware store,
get some weird ones.
And so if your bike is a bigger pain to steal
than the one next to it
they'll likely go for the low-hanging fruit.
This is a multi-tool,
a Crank Brothers M20,
and it comes with a little plug applicator
for Tubeless Tire Repair.
Also has this little box piggybacked onto it
that there are tubeless plugs and quick links inside of.
Now, if you just need the tubeless repair
you actually don't need this little box.
You can just take the tool
and stick the plugs right in here.
It's not going anywhere,
and this is not the only tool you can do it with.
A lot of tools come with plug applicators and no plugs.
And even if the tool doesn't come with a plug applicator
you can get by with a little Allen key.
And so you can take a little tool like this one
and add Toolless Tire Repair to it just by folding
some plugs into it and it'll get you by.
And so if you're a weight weenie or you're just
that concerned with saving some space on your bike,
this is a hack that could work for you.
So you're out mountain biking and you mangle your chain
and you don't have a spare quick link
to make a proper repair,
but you do have a multi-tool.
You can sort of fix it to get back to the trail head.
First make sure one side of the chain
looks like this an inner link.
Then you're gonna go to the other side of the chain
and remove all of the janky stuff.
So now both sides of the chain should be inner links.
This is usually what you've got when you're making
your normal repair with your quick link,
but you don't have one.
And so you're gonna go one half link down to the outer one
and you're gonna push the pin not quite all the way out.
You're gonna push it maybe three quarters of the way.
So now the pin should be sticking out here,
but the chain should be together.
If you kind of twist and bend it a little bit,
you should be able to get it to pop apart.
And you can see that this pin is still sticking
through just a little bit.
So now you're gonna put the chain back on the bike.
Normally you would use a quick link to join both ends,
but now you're going to
pop 'em together just like that.
And then use the chain tool to push this pin back through.
Now this is when the repair can go one of two ways.
I'd recommend you don't do much gear shifting.
Just get the bike how you want it for the rest of the ride
and baby it and it could rescue you
and make it so you don't have to push for 10 miles.
Sometimes the link will be a little tight.
Sometimes you can loosen it up a little bit,
better than you not being able to pedal your bike.
So fair warning,
this next one is really, really stupid.
In another video I showed you my trampoline bike
which is basically a BMX with towels and stuff wrapped
around it so it doesn't puncture your trampoline.
You jump up and down and you can practice tricks on it.
Really fun, really stupid,
most fun things are,
but if you don't wanna sacrifice an old bike to the cause,
you can use your kid's balance bike.
It's actually perfect for it.
It's small, it doesn't get in the way,
great for bar spins.
And by definition they've already removed all
the sharp stuff from it
and so you don't have to tape towels to it or anything,
just use it as is.
Will it make you a better rider?
Help you learn tricks?
Absolutely not,
but it's fun.
So there you go,
10 fresh bike hacks.
I was really surprised how well the brake cable one worked.
A little disappointed that the rainx trick
didn't really work on GoPro.
And as for the other ones,
I hope that if you don't find them useful
you at least found them entertaining to watch.
If you wanna see more bike hacks,
we literally have hundreds of them
that we've done over the years.
Anyway, thanks for joining me today
and thanks for riding with me today.
I'll see you next time.
Little known fact,
the term put a sock in it actually originated
from mountain bikers whose saddle pouches were getting loud
and they woulds socks in them to make them quieter
and that's where that phrase came from.
Now for style points, you get-