Texbiker.net » Bike Tips

Park Tools on How-To: Wrap bike handlebars

Rick Ankrum — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:59:59 +0000

Back on July 10th, 2008, I had a post on how to put bar tape on your handlebars. Today I was reading Make Magazine online and they linked to another version of instructions from Park Tools. They have pictures and step-by-step instructions. One thing they show is wearing surgical gloves which I have never done when I wrap my handlebars.

Facebook Helps Retrieve A Stolen Bike

Rick Ankrum — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:57:47 +0000

My favorite source of biking articles, The Wall Street Journal, (laugh, laugh) has an online article about how social media help people find lost bikes. According to this article, Heather McKibbon used Facebook to track down her stolen Cannondale, contact the police and setup a sting operation to trap the thief.

Several organizations that help owners track down their stolen bikes have come to the forefront. If your bike is stolen you might want to enlist your Twitter followers to help apprehend the crook.

Link to the Wall Street Journal article APB to the Web: Find My Bike!

Pedal Pushers on Fixing A Flat

Rick Ankrum — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:37:06 +0000

Roy and Christine write a long post on fixing flats.

Excerpt:

“Back when I was a kid, bicycles had big tires and tubes. Flats from goat heads were so frequent that to save money, we would just use a tire patch on the tube. Take the wheel off with a pair of pliers, use a screw driver to pry the tire off the wheel, and pull the tube out. You would pump up the tube and dip it in a pail of water, rotating it until you would see little air bubbles escaping from the tube. You have found the hole. Mark the hole by poking a match stick in the hole. After drying off the tube, you would scrape the tube with the top of the tire patch can (looked like a carrot grater) to roughen the surface, apply the glue, strip off the protecting strip from the patch, and hold the patch on tightly until the glue dried. If you were smart, you would test the tube again in the pail of water to see if it still leaked.”

Link to the complete post at Pedal Pushers.

Carbon and Aluminum are Not Best Buds

Rick Ankrum — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 04:43:42 +0000

I was reading Leonard Zinn’s tech column at velonews.com today where several riders were asking how to get a frozen seatpost out of their frame. It seems the carbon seatpost had a galvanic reaction with the aluminum frame or lug and started to melt together. The chemistry causes these two materials to bond to each other when moisture is presented. Leonard gives several ideas on how to fix this problem but the best fix is prevention. So, if you have a carbon seatpost (or frame) and an aluminum frame (or seatpost) you should remove the seatpost whenever you have an encounter with water. To be safe it would be wise to remove the seatpost each month and apply a light coat of grease to the seatpost and re-install it. Happy riding.

Bike Maintenance Videos

Rick Ankrum — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:13:27 +0000

Today is video day. Courtsey of the UK website bikebiz.com:

“Hamax and Weldtite are reaching out to consumers with online videos. Weldtite has produced a series of ‘how to’ bicycle maintenance shorts and the Norwegian company has posted a promo video of the brand new and innovative Hamax Plus childseat-and-pannier system. UPDATE: Dahon also embeds YouTube videos on its site.

Weldtite has seen 5, 696 downloads of its ‘washing and lubing your bike’ video and 1,481 downloads of its ‘how to repair a puncture’ short.”