Hey folks! If you bought a bike in the last couple of years chances are that will come with
a thru axle, at least front if not front and rear.
What you see here is a 15 x 100 mm on the front of one of my bikes
and you see here this is the 12 x 142 mm on the rear of my Kona.
Now as these axles wear out a bit and if they are abused in their life, and chances are they will be,
they will need a bit of adjustment and this is how you do it!
First of all, in order to install or remove these thru axles
First loosen up the lever
and it will spin freely until you find this cutout here on the outer edge
and once you fix it in that spot
then it's a lefty loosey righty tighty so
you undo it / loosen it counterclockwise
and you're going to feel it as it spins freely right now.
And now I can just remove the axle.
Obviously, in order to install this axle
push it in all the way
clockwise this time
then tighten it snug, not too too tight,
and then push this lever back on.
You should feel resistance here when you push the lever back into position.
I have two axles here this one is quite worn out, and this one is brand new.
Now the worn-out part has to do with the cutout here
and you can see the lever, where touches that cutout it's been pushed quite hard
meaning that somebody over tightened this again and again
and as it tends to slip out of the cutout it's going to just show the wear here
and is also going to round out the edges right here.
What I've done is I took a needle file, and I guess you can use a Dremel as well
and I just made sure that my edges here are nice at 90 degrees
so there is no way for my lever to come out of this cutout anymore.
Okay, the other thing is
and you can see it easily here.
This has an adjustment in the middle, many people don't know about this, is a 2.5 millimeter
Look at this, so if I loosen that up
there's no tension here okay
so after I tighten up the axle, then I cannot put any sort of tension on my lever
which is not good because that's what keeps it safe and in place.
So right in the middle of that, and you can see the clicks, you can hear the clicks
you can actually tighten up your lever, see?
This is a bit too easy, couple more clicks - one, two,
This is good!
You can see here, front 15 x 100 (or 12 x 100, 15 x 110 mm).
This is 12 x 142 mm (or 12 x 148 mm),
They all have the same adjustment up here using a 2.5 mm Allen key.
One last thing that I want to mention here is
as you push your lever in
just keep in mind that this has the shape of a hook
and you don't want it to be in the direction of your travel okay?
It can get caught into branches, small trees, bushes and whatnot,
it can become dangerous so try and orient it
either up or slightly towards the back.
Up front you have a couple of possibilities, either straight up
parallel with the fork leg or horizontal towards the back of the bike.
So with those couple of tricks I made this beaten-up axle work just fine compared to this brand new one.
I hope you guys found it useful.
If you have any comments let me know and the section below.
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and I will see you next time, take care!