Replacing Mountain Bike Chain Rings

Video Transcript

When we're replacing our chain rings after we've removed them, it's a few little things that don't necessarily come to mind. One thing is, it's great to have the right tools. And Allen wrench that's got a nice long handle so you can get some leverage--it also helps for breaking them loose. And then your special chain ring tool, which holds the nut that holds the large and middle chain rings pretty securely, so you have something to purchase on when you're trying to tighten or loosen them. Because for some applications--for the width of some of these chain ring spiders--it can be slightly different from spider to spider, so things don't always go together smoothly. When we are putting a new small chain ring on--normally we'd have all the bolts in, obviously--and, you want to torque them evenly, so you do it in a start pattern. And this goes for almost any multiple bolt application on a bike. Torque here, torque here, torque here, torque here, and you just sort of do it across from each other progressively until you have things up to a good tightness. It's always--you always want to put some grease, normal white lithium grease, or what I prefer to use for chain ring bolts is a thread locker from--this one's from a company called Lock Tight. And there are different grades of lock tight depending on how permanent you want the bond. This one's a blue lock tight, which is the grade of lock tight that I recommend for most bike uses, because it's not permanent. It's a fairly firm, hard to break bond. And what this does is by creating a bond that nothing can get through, it keeps things from corroding and also keeps things from vibrational loosening. If you aren't comfortable using thread lockers, you can always use grease, and contrary to popular opinion, grease is a good thing. It keeps vibrational loosening and stuff like that from happening. So I've put my nut and bolt back in, I have my five millimeter Allen wrench in my dominant hand, and in my non-dominant hand, I'm just going to put my tin ring tool in, try to brace it against the rest of the chain ring. You see it spun on me there. It takes a lot of patience doing this. So I've got it to a fairly good torque. And just like when we're putting on the small ring bolts, we want to do one, two, three, four, and on this specific crank, the fifth bolt is hidden back here, so five, and we want to do them in a pattern, evenly, to bring them up to torque so that we don't put anything on sideways--it allows things to get crooked. So we want everything to stay aligned. So then it's a simple matter of bolting the crank arm back up on your bike, and enjoy the ride with new chain rings, or different chain rings, or just a whole new perspective on things.

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