Front Tire Adventure

I had to get a new front tire put on my bike and the dis assembly was super easy and straight forward. Then, with my new rubber installed i found that my caliper was sitting improperly and my brake pad weren't sitting straight either. So, I decided to remove the caliper all together and found that the single bolt was stripped out and bent. So, no I must clean the threads in the forks and install my new bolt. What was suppose to be a 10 minute job turned into a 3 hours job....joys of an old bike !

 

More like joys of PO's. :x Makes you wonder sometimes. (I hope you're not the original owner ).

 

Is it a Maxim 650 you have? The bolt bent on mine too, seems kind of dumb to try and brake 200kg+ of bike plus rider through a tiny bolt like that.

 

I'm not the first owner. But, it makes you wonder about the engineering about the old bikes.

 

Those bolts are much stronger than they look. They'll withstand somewhere around 8,700 PSI in shear (each) before failing, and should never actually see that much force due the design of the bracket/caliper interface. If the bolt bent it was either replaced with a lower grade bolt by a PO, or was damaged at some point, and should have been replaced. The one that stripped out would have been due to someone not using a torque wrench during instillation.

Darn those 30 year old parts for not lasting forever


BTW old bikes are from the '50's and earlier.

 

Are you going to trust a Heli-Coil to hold the front brake ??

 

Nobody has mentioned using an insert until now.

 

Well I'm going to chase the threads with a tap first, and see if my new bolt will fit properly. If not, I'm going to just use a larger bolt with some loctite.

 

Worked out great ! I ran a tap through the hole and its fixed. Now, this might sound strange but it seems like my axle is longer. I went to torque my axle nut and ran out of threads. I put a small punch in the hole on the other side of the axle to space it out and I still ran out of thread.