For forks sake!!

Its in......I managed to press the headset in today with a nifty gadget I made up. Not the hammer and lump of wood I was looking forward to using but a length of threaded bar I had sitting around the shed, as you do. This together with a couple of nuts and a few square washers.

This is the set up I used. Its a bit basic but it worked really well. the threaded bar runs through the tube and the bearing cups are fitted, a liberal amount of copperslip grease was applied. This will hopefully stop any rust forming in the long term. 

ACME head set press

Then two large washers were put on top of the cups and then a nut at each end. I then used a spanner to tighten the nuts up. The washers kept the baring cups straight so they went in a treat.





This is how it looks now.........


Very happy with it. After this I fitted the Front fork. This was a bit more of a challenge. There is another bearing cup the needs to sit on the bottom of the steerer tube. This is an interference fit and needs to pushed in. In order to do this I ended up having to heat up the bearing cup to make it expand a bit then use the ACME bearing press (pat pending!) to press it on. Once the bearings had been cleaned and greased up with a bit of lithium grease I managed to fit the fork too. Which was nice.

Assembled front end

After this, I used the threaded bar to mock up the bottom bracket by fixing the crank to the bike with a couple of washers and nuts. I then had a job to adjust the crank to match up the rear chain line by adding or removing extra washers. I managed to get it as close as possible and worked out I will need a bottom bracket with a 110 mm spindle! So come pay day that's what I'll get.