so most bikes have a bunch of black parts on them and here these cranks you can see
are a little worn away there now if you want to get your bike in super
showroom condition you can take a black sharpie and just touch it up
welcome back to Berm Peak I'm Seth and today we're going to be doing something a little bit different
but kind of the same I'm sure many of you know about the sharpie hack and I'm sure you
also know that you could use actual touch-up paint if you want to do it right but that's
what makes this a hack you're using something that's not necessarily designed for the job
but it also works and that's what hacks are about we're going to be going over 10 of them today
related to mountain biking let's get on to the second one so this right here is a Fox 36 a really
legit mountain bike fork and it looks it there's just something about it that looks serious
well maybe you have a cheap fork like this this Suntour fork that comes on a lot of
entry-level bikes I'm going to show you how to make it look more legit so first things
first you want to take all the stickers off of it that part might take a little bit of time
so you're going to need this tool I left a link to it in the description just a few bucks so you
can remove the caps on the top of your fork then flip it upside down and the springs are going to
come out they're going to be real dirty if you clean these up and re-grease them it'll
actually make the fork run a little bit better yeah this this fork seemed hell you're going to
then loosen these two bolts on the bottom of the fork and then at a certain point you're gonna need
a 300 foot socket extension with a five millimeter hex on the end
so we're just gonna pull the lowers right off and now we can take our little red o-ring and put it
up on there just like a high-end fork so while we have this apart I'm gonna clean it all up
I'm gonna put new grease in the fork and put it back together so that it runs like new
now it looks legit exactly like a Rockshox fork or a Fox fork maybe not exactly but pretty damn close
and this is functional you can push it down at the beginning of your
ride and see where it is afterwards see whether you need to increase your preload
or reduce it pretty fun little hack doesn't require a few tools but
you'll be the only one on the trail with an o-ring on your sun tor fork
so you got a vinyl bicycle seat with all sorts of crazy colors or maybe it's old and tired and you
want to freshen it up you can actually paint it what if I were to tell you that this seat
wasn't always black they actually sell vinyl paint you can get it at any hardware store
probably use normal spray paint basically all you have to do is sand the seat down
very very lightly all over make sure it's really really clean there's no oils or anything on it
and then put very very light coats of paint on it until it's whatever color you want it to be
and the best part is it comes out so good it looks like it was born that way damn that looks good
and yeah you can sit on it the seat can flex you can abuse it and it will stay painted you
can inspect this really really close there's not a flaw in it we were really surprised to find that
out when we researched it that painting a vinyl bike seat actually no big deal so on most mountain
bikes or gravel bikes you're going to find a whole bunch of little bolts like the ones that hold on
your bottle cages the ones that are made to hold luggage racks and then also bolts like
the ones that hold on your disc rotors well it turns out that all these bolts are the same size
and thread and the reason this is important is that disc rotor bolts are available in all sorts
of different anodized colors they're lower profile they look way better than water bottle cage bolts
and if you like customizing your bike this is a really cheap and easy way to do it because there's
lots of blank areas like those luggage rack bolts you can change to whatever color you want and give
the bike a little pop another appearance mod but hey you might not have known that
disc rotor bolts are the same thread as water bottle cages and luggage rack bolts
so if you've seen our Flip Bike series we fix up a lot of bikes and we also restore
individual bike parts sometimes it involves cleaning them so we can paint them or just
make them look better and so I want to show you a hack today how to make a sandblaster
out of an air compressor and one of these little compressed air attachments so to do this you
need your air sprayer you need a water bottle and of course you're going to need some sand
you're also going to need some tools to modify your air sprayer first thing we're going to do
is drill a hole in the base of the bottle so that this makes an airtight seal through it
cool that's what we were going for next we have to modify the tip of this and we want to open a
little channel right in this part of the sprayer and I'm gonna just do with an angle grinder
i think I'm gonna turn this into like a hopper so we've got our water bottle we've got our sprayer
now we're gonna test it okay so now you can see that the sprayer is in here and the little opening
that we made is right at the bottom so that the sand is going to fall into it get a healthy amount
of sand in there probably dry off the inside of your bottle better than I did let's see
how it works oh yeah yeah that sprays some stuff going everywhere yeah maybe i'll just go out here
okay so here's the dirty part I'm gonna spray right here and see if we can clean it up are
you as amazed as I am dude I mean that is insane I wonder if it can take the paint off of something
dude immediately
so yeah the the problem is a I think I made the hole too big and b
that that you can't take the top off of this you have to leave the top on and then see um
you want better sand that's not gonna jam the thing up okay I'm gonna do a couple little
adjustments here to our design just to make the prototype work better and we'll try her again
I would say the design doesn't call for hot glue but you got to do what you got to do
you know got to get your do sometimes it takes hot glue this is going to work amazing
all right so that's the current state of our derailleur we're going to try
and blow the rest of the paint off of this with our revised sandblaster
it freaking worked look at this proof of concept works it's a hack
so we're all mountain bikers right and mountain bikers wear clothes when they're riding mountain
bikes and those clothes get stains depending on the trail the stains might be in your underwear
but other times there are actually blood stains on your clothes now I have a real blood stain here
I harvested it from a bug bite and I'm going to show you how to get it out usually a blood stain
is considered a death sentence for a garment but hydrogen peroxide works as well on clothes as it
does in one of your wounds so we're going to pour a little bit on here and you can see that
foaming action on the blood just like when you're cleaning out a cut or scrape and the sooner you
can get to it the better the chance you're gonna be able to get the blood stain out completely
I think we're gonna get this 100 out yeah this is one of those hacks that 100 of the time a mountain
biker is going to run into needing to do it and as you can see we've got pretty much the whole
blood stain now yeah it's like it just eats blood and that's it so this is not dry we've got almost
the entire stain out had we caught it a little bit earlier I think it would have come out completely
but yeah you be the judge is there a better way to get blood out I think this is pretty much
it and as a mountain biker at some point you're going to stain up some of your clothes with blood
so eye protection is really important when you're riding downhill because a bug
or a branch or anything could go into your eye but when you're climbing a lot more
comfortable to ride without eye protection and one of my subscribers sent in a hack
for a glasses holder right on your handlebar I'm gonna show you how to do it so you're
just gonna need two zip ties I'm using two different colors make a little loop like that
then attach that to your handlebars then go ahead cut off the excess and now when you're climbing
or you just don't need your glasses you can stick them in here and they're not gonna go
anywhere I mean that doesn't look like it's going to come loose so thanks Marcel from
Switzerland for sending that one in I think it's a pretty good hack and I might actually use it
so part of having a good ride is staying hydrated but not only do you have to stay hydrated but also
your trail pup Oscar come here you want to drink a water buddy now when your dog needs
a drink of water you either try and pour it into their mouth some people try and like
pour it into the cap and have their dog drink out of it which is kind of nasty to be honest
but one of our subscribers on instagram actually filmed this hack you pull a rock out of the
ground and then where the rock was there's a little indentation you fill it up with water
and then your pumpkin drink out of it way better if you can find like a round rock that leaves a
nice bowl in the ground but here on Berm Peak we oh we got a shale but Oscar you're hydrated right
so part of setting up your mountain bike properly is setting the air pressure in your suspension
and to do that you need to determine your sag you push this little ring down you put all your weight
down on the bike and you very carefully climb off and then you check where the ring is so you
know where the suspension is sitting when you're just riding in a straight line now the problem is
when you're getting off the bike you tend to move the suspension around and you don't get
as accurate of a reading especially if you're at a trail head or something it's a difficult
process you usually need help from a friend to hold up the bike there's a little hack I learned
from my friend Clint go up on the bike cycle the suspension a few times put your ring down and then
before you get off the bike turn your compression all the way up this way the suspension moves less
as you're climbing off and now you can get a much more accurate sag reading anyway really
simple trick I always use it learned it from Clint Gibbs and uh thanks for that one
we build a lot of outdoor mountain bike features out of wood like this one and depending on what
type of wood you build it out of it's eventually going to get moist grow algae moss those types of
things and not only can that make the wood rot away but it can also make the feature slippery
and so thanks to a tip from one of our subscribers we can now treat it and delay that process just
a little bit more so we have here is a garden sprayer filled with water and then some outdoor
bleach so what you're going to want to do is mix it up in the garden sprayer hit the feature once
or twice a year and it's going to kill all that moss and allergy and all the stuff that's making
it slippery and making your feature not last as long but since we've done this we noticed a big
difference in just how the planks look and we're excited to get a little bit more life out of our
features and for them to be a little bit grippier because there's less organic matter on them now
should you have any environmental concerns about spraying a little bit of bleach on your feature
well you could just let it rot away and then go out and chop down a tree build a new one
so that's it 10 bike hacks I know that it's been a long time since we've done one of these videos
and that's because I want to try and come up with a list of 10 original ones before we move on and
we've done a lot of them already so if you know of any hacks that I haven't done in
any of my other hack videos put them down in the description i'll take a look at it
and maybe it'll find its way into a future video until then I hope you found some of these useful
thanks for riding with me today and i'll see you next time