Mountain biking can be expensive, but these are our top ten money saving
maintenance tips. Keep your bike clean. If you roll in straight into the garage after
a wet ride with only a token gesture of a bit of WD-40, then you'll probably find
plenty of seized and stiff bearings the following weekend. A full clean with a
proper degrease, washed off with soapy water, will keep you bikes working in good
order for significantly longer. It's always nice to get a clean bike out of the
shed. It also looks good.
So, you've washed your bike off. What to do next? This old t-shirt,
perfect to use as a rag. Get all the moisture off your chain, a lot of the
moisture off the bike. Dry the chain off. This will stop your chain rusting and
ready for you to apply the lube.
So, applying my chain lube up here near the chain set. There's no chance of it
getting on the rotors. The reason why you lube your chain is that it'll
prevent the front chain ring and the rear cassette wearing too badly and also
increase the life of your chain.
A great and very cheap way of protecting your pride and joy is to cover the chain
stay with something. The chain's going to slap on that and can cause some bit of
damage to the paint. So, you need to buy yourself a chain stay protector or,
for our more frugal viewers, get yourself an old inner tube,
cut it, and wrap it around the chain stay. Wrap your old tube around the chain stay,
secure it with a zip tie or some gaffer tape, and that's a top odds.
Making the jump to a tubeless setup will have an initial cost,
but once you have that setup, the benefits are great. You can run less
pressure and therefore more traction. One benefit also is if you tend to ride on
thorny or very rocky trails, the chances of you getting a puncture are far less
than with a regular tube setup.
When you get a little hole or slit in your tubeless tire, you might think it's a
write off and you have to fork out for a new one. The fact: there are a number
of companies now offering tubeless tire repair kits. Either using the small bones
that get pushed in from the outside or using a larger repair, I find these often
last the lifetime of the tire.
So, our next tip is not only a money saving tip, but it'll also stop you from
having a huge headache of trying to get your carbon seatpost out of your frame.
Now, if you don't know, carbon will seize inside a carbon frame and also carbon will
seize in an alloy frame. So, what should you do? Well, simply, you want to apply a
little bit of fiber grip or carbon prep to the seatpost and that should allow the
seatpost to move nice and easily and you don't have the headache of trying to get a
seized seatpost out of a frame. Believe me, it can be very tedious.
Hyde tape or protective patches are great little additions to your bike that's going
to stop any debris or things like cables rubbing and damaging your frame.
You see this wall on the chain stay? It's just going to stop the chain slapping and
damaging that carbon frame. You can also put them up where your cables come round
the head tube or even on the top tube where your knees might rub on the frame.
If you really want to save yourself some money, learn how to work on your own bike.
An essential for that is a good set of Allen keys. Something like
this set of T handles, or just individual Allen keys, would be much better for
working on your bike than a multi-tool like that. They're great for the trail,
but not the most practical tool in the workshop. These will be one of your most
used tools.
With mountain bikes becoming ever more complex, and a lot of components having
indicated torque settings, it's a good idea to have your very own torque kit.
Now, the reason for this is that when you've got a C and C
alloy part like the stem joining a carbon handlebar, you don't want
to over tighten that and damage the carbon. So, this particular ball is
indicated five Newton meters. Simply put it in there and it indicates right here.
There you go, that's five Newton meters. I know that's at the correct torque and it's
not going to cause me any problems.
So, that's it for our top ten money saving maintenance tips. Hopefully
keep your bike running sweet and you're saving a little bit of money.
But, no doubt, the eagle eyes out there have spotted something that we have
missed. So, don't forget, leave that in the comments down below.
And if you want to see more maintenance videos, click up here and that'll get you
through to our maintenance playlist. And if you click down here that'll give you
our top ten tools for looking after your mountain bike. And as always,
click on me to subscribe to GMBN and you will never miss a video.
What could be better? Every day of the week we have a video now.