I recently bought a junk bike. I want to slowly fix it up myself for two reasons: 1. To have a nicer bike. 2. To learn about bike maintenance. I’d like to improve it slowly (weeks or months) while keeping it functional. What order should I consider improvements?
I’ll elaborate. When I first bought the bike, I tuned the brakes (linear pull). I struggled. I realized brake tuning was difficult because my wheel wasn’t aligned. In retrospect, I should have straightened/replaced the wheel before tuning the brakes. I’m wondering if there are any insights you could provide about the order I should tackle this project (e.g., wheel alightment before brakes).
I definitely didn’t start with truing wheels and adjusting bearings but I tried it when the need arose, it is totally doable. Be careful, watch YouTube videos, get the tools you need, and give it a shot. Spoke wrenches and cone wrenches are cheap. I didn’t bother with a tension gauge, just compared the pitch before and after to get to the right ballpark
The absolute best thing I ever did in regards to figuring out bike maintenance was to buy a really crappy bike and just try to fix it, similar to what you’ve done. I went into it with the attitude of “if I break stuff, that’s fine, it was super cheap and old anyways” and wasn’t imagining I’d actually get a sound bike out of it. I used park tool YouTube videos mostly, and from that bike (and a few others) I learned how to do pretty much everything maintenance-related short of redoing the seals in a mountain bike fork (and that’s likely coming up soon). Wheel truing is tough but absolutely doable - again, but a really cheap bike (marketplace special), take the wheels off and apart, and just try to get them back together - that’ll force you to true them. Park tool again was an awesome resource for that.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. This describes my mindset. Thanks for the encouragement.
I had the same problem and just went to a frame with disc brakes and never looked back.
the only other thing like that I can think of is if your derailleur hanger is bent you might not be able to perfect the derailleur operation.
For the first pass, I’ll see how well I can tune the existing hardware. The derailleur hanger looks maybe slightly bent. Hopefully I can at least improve it a bit. I’ll definitely consider disc brakes for the next bike.
you don’t have to get disc brakes either. you can true the wheel in the frame with temporary zip ties to guage distance and a spoke wrench, with the bike upside down or in a stand. I just hate doing it enough to not want to do it to the degree required for brake performance is unaffected.
I would recommend even just a cheapo spoke tension meter from aliexpress or something to make sure you dont over tension any. I like to oil the spoke nipples then loosen or tighten them all to be about the same before starting, and then just get it as close as I can without going too high. too high depends on the spoke guage mostly but if the bike has rim brakes they are probably pretty thick and can take more than the literal toothpicks my current bike has which I have snapped a few of.
Down the line if you do get a bike with disc brakes, cable pull IMO doesn’t offer enough performance improvement to be worthwhile but hydraulic introduces more maintentance procedures. I’ll personally take it over rim wear and truing affecting brakes but it is potentially troublesome work. I have also found that even common aliexpress brands for hydraulic brakes are on par with the name brands in performance and reliability at a fraction of the cost, excluding the absolute top of the line which after testing I don’t feel I’ll ever need anyway.
If you only have to fix up one, maybe two, bikes you can grab a bunch of Aliexpress tools and get going:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV_gX-C7RDE
As a shadetree bike mechanic, you might be able to make the wheels true-er, but you might also make it worse. You won’t be able to make them perfect, because that takes tons of practice and the right tooling, so if perfect is what you want, take them to a shop. But if all you need is to make your thrift-store ride ridable, you can get the wheel true enough with some patience.
