After doing lots of riding in these very poor riding conditions my Reign has developed a knocking noise which seems to be coming from the frame pivots / shock bushings. It suddenly hit me that this is now a 7 year old bike and I've never replaced the frame bearings in the time I've owned it. Who knows whether the previous owner did.
Through lots of searching on Google I finally found confirmation of the bearing codes. I didn't want to totally dismantle the bike to get these numbers, only to find that a good set of bearings would cost extortionate amounts of money. I eventually found an eBay Shop selling good quality bearing kits for a range of bikes including the 05' Reign.
Now comes the tricky part. I've always dreaded fiddling with bearings due to their delicate form and that thought in the back of my head saying 'if you do this wrong you could potentially ruin the frame'..... and that would be bad.
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| What have I got myself into!?!?! |
After removing the rear triangle and the lower and upper linkages I set to work making a little jig out of some threaded rod, nuts, washers and some old headset spacers. Strangely the headset spacers were key in this process. They were just the right size so that the bearing would fit through the spacer but the spacer would have good contact with the linkage / rear triangle.
After a couple of hours of gently easing them out I was finished. This was not as difficult as I first though. The main thing for me was just to restrain from just using brute force and take my time. Now all I have to do is wait for the new bearings to come in the post and pop them in. I'm so glad I found the eBay seller due to bearing companies wanting about £12 per bearings and I need 6 of them. The eBay seller is retailing sets for £27.99 meaning I will be able to put more money away to go towards a new Go Pro HD Hero 2 which will allow me to shoot some sweet footage!
Talking of sweet footage, here's a couple of Edits I have made since my last post. Enjoy!
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