New bike build - which jobs to leave to the experts?

[NetworkMan]

When I put my Spa Tourer together I paid Spa to fit the headset which they supplied anyway. I bought wheels ready built. I already had a torque wrench and general purpose tools plus cassette lockring tool. I had to buy a tool to fit the square section bottom bracket assembly. All in all pretty easy. A workstand is nice to have but by no means essential.

[mikeymo]

Anything you don't have the proper tools for should be performed by a shop. Don't pound the headset in with a hammer and block of wood, for example. You should also have a proper torque wrench for the bottom bracket, stem, crankset, etc. You might want to buy some tools. Headset tools are used so infrequently that I don't think it's worth buying them; just pay a shop to do it. I don't think facing is necessary on today's frames as it's done at the factory.

Thanks. Yes, as I said, I've got torque wrenches, both high and low range. And a pretty comprehensive collection of hex keys, combination spanners, ratchet drivers, sockets, screw drivers of every sort etc.* So pretty well set up there. I've got Park cable cutters, the Park 'third hand' thingy (one of my bikes has cantilever brakes), and a Park crank puller. I've got a workstand, because I was fed up of the bike falling over!

I'm quite fortunate here in that there's what seems like a really good bike repair co-operative where you pay a bit of money and you can use their facilities. So fitting the headset, facing the BB shell (if it needs it), truing wheels, fitting cassettes etc. etc. About the only thing I can't do there is facing/reaming the head tube:

https://pedallers-arms.org/

Also I've got a chum who is a very keen cyclist, says he's never bought a bike complete and I'm sure would be ready to give advice/lend a hand in return for beer.

No, I'm not going to be buying any facing tools at £300 a pop. I guess I might push the boat out and get whatever it's called that gets cassettes off (I've only ever worked on hub geared bikes before). But apart from that I think I've got pretty much everything else I need for routine maintenance and 95% of assembly.

So disappointingly it doesn't look like this will be a tool buying opportunity.

[Mick F]

My Mercian frame arrived by post one Saturday morning in October 1986.
I fitted everything myself.

I bought a wheel-set rather than make my own, but everything was fitted by me. No real experience of building a bike before, but it's not rocket science. Nothing needed facing. Everything fitted perfectly.

................ and I did use blocks of wood and a mallet to fit the headset races, and have since done so again and again. It's on its third headset now.

[mikeymo]

OK, just had a close look and measure (with tools available) of the frame.

The top and bottom faces of the head tube are bright, shiny and clear of paint. There are some VERY light marks, like I imagine a machine would leave. Using a square (admittedly a carpenters square) the faces seem to be pretty much exactly at 90 degrees to the outside of the headtube. I'm fairly confident this is OK. The fork crown is a tiny bit over 30mm in diameter (with a vernier gauge) and is very consistent as I turn it. That's the correct size for a 1 and 1/8 steerer tube, yes? There's a tiny bit of paint run down onto it. That'll come off with a bit of emery.

Given that there's paint overspray on things like the plastic caps over the down-tube braze-ons, I'm pretty sure that the headtube has been faced after painting. Unless they did the worlds best masking job when they painted it.

The BB shell on the other hand does have paint on the ends, so either that's been faced and sprayed, or never faced. Or doesn't need it (I'm planning on cartridge BB, so for a reason I don't understand, it doesn't matter anyway). It LOOKS square, but I can't get a square on it to check, right now.

Given that this is a Ridgeback Panorama Deluxe frameset, which appeared in Ridgeback's catalogue and so was part of their retail offering, I'm sort of hoping that they sold it with the intention it would go to people keen to build up their own bike, rather than into 'the trade'.

[NetworkMan]

I can try and explain about the lack of need to face the two ends of the BB shell.

With a traditional BB bearing there are two ball race cups, one on each end of the BB shell and a spindle between. The bearing is made up of the cup, the steel balls and the spindle end, two of each, one on each end of the BB shell. If the two ends of the shell aren't dead parallel then the bearing won't run properly; it will either jam up or slop about depending on how it is adjusted.
With the sealed square taper type that was the most modern type until recently things are quite different in that spindle, cones and steel balls are pre-assembled into a sealed unit and everything is already in alignment; you can't alter it. One end of the unit fits tight against one end of the shell and the other end just presses against a piece of plastic screwed into the other end. If the two ends aren't parallel it doesn't matter; the bearing will still run nicely.

Recently Mr. Shimano has decided that this excellent system isn't very good and has decided to change the design completely but that's another story.....

[mikeymo]

Somebody did say 'let us know how you get on'.

1. Frame Dinitrolled (if that's a verb). Dinitrol is a lot runnier than Waxoyl, it turns out. For those who sometimes compare them. Over a bit of garden you don't care about. I probably used more than I needed to.

2. Headset, BB, chainset, cranks, cassette all on. Those were all the things I could think of that need 'special' tools that I didn't want to buy to use one. So went to https://pedallers-arms.org/ which is a fantastic bike co-operative in Leeds, where they have all the tools necessary, and some very helpful volunteers to give advice if you need it. Before I went I had a very good measure of the head tube and BB shell, and I'm pretty sure they were all square, so no facing needed. And the BB is cartridge so wouldn't really matter anyway.

[Sweep]

octalink and ISIS BBs have two main flaws IMHO

1) the tolerances that the spline must be manufactured to are not always met; a significant number of them fail because the parts are not made well enough and

2) the BB spindle is larger diameter and therefore the bearings are a lot smaller inside the cartridge. They hardly ever last as long as a ST cartridge unit will.

cheers

Interesting brucey.

I must admit that I was surprised that my excellently specced Ridgeback expedition came with octalink, even though I have had another octalink bike and found it no great problem. isis i have had an appaling experience of but maybe that was just dahon. A real pig of course that there are two different systems called octalink!