Grit and Determination

Standard English bottom bracket.  Photo from the "R" side.  This gives reverse threading a whole new meaning.

Photo by Russell

Order of Operations

Once a week I try to help out one of those kind folks who wanders into the shop with only a deathtrap for transportation and little money to fix it with.  Sometimes I fail horribly, but now and then things work out better than I could imagine.  This is such a story.  I can't tell you much about the customer except that we didn't speak each other's languages.  We both gestured a lot and concluded that I would fix his one piece crankset for less than $15.  He was pleased by this but kept talking frantically.  Little did I know he was trying to warn me of what I was going to discover when I tried to service it.  Wow.

Swap the cup and the bearing just to its right and thats the order that this mess was put together in.  The mangled bearing retainer and cone were dancing around in bottom bracket purgatory with their aborted ball bearings (not pictured here).  The noise was just awful.  I can never quite understand the thought process that tells people that if you have left over pieces from a project that you should just throw them anywhere you can't see them.  They aren't capable of finding their own way home.  The strange donut shape is a piece of rather dense rubber gasket material that has been cut to the exact size of the cup to act as a bushing.  Turns out rubber isnt bushing material for a number of reasons, high friction and compressibility being the big two in this situation.

  This is a beautiful thing..  It took some time to make that bushing so perfectly round that it even took the threads.  Gotta respect that kind of perseverance.  It all works fine now with an intact used cup and new bearings.