Tools to Check a Bicycle Head Set

Video Transcript

Another bearing system on bikes that has a tendency to get loose, especially older one inch diameter head sets, found on older road bikes and some older mountain and hybrid bikes is the one inch threaded head set. Threaded meaning at the very top of this fork end up here and there's a nut up here that tightens down on it, this is actually the cone, the bearing raises itself which you can see here that I'm moving, that would be loosening it or tightening it, it should not be really loose, this needs to be tightened enough so this is immobile but not so tight down on that that is causes the bearing to bind. You would check this head set, and one of the better ways to check it is to clean up the front brake and rock the bike. If you're getting clunking with the wheel facing forward as well as the wheel facing sideways as you rock the bike back and forth, that obviously means you need to adjust the head set. On this bike again it would require a head set wrench or actually, preferably two of them. One to adjust this another one to hold this still. A head set wrench looks like this, also, like a cone wrench, fairly thin because very often as you can see the tool surfaces are fairly narrow. Okay, so this bike, these shifters would have to be moved up out of the way and then you could affect a decent adjustment on these two items. It is not a case of just tightening this down until it stops and then clamping down on this and tightening that until it stops because that would put too much pressure on the bearing. You need to find a happy spot where this bolt, this nut is holding this still and this still rotates easily without any play rocking back and forth.

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