Buddy’s bike is making a terrible creak from the bottom bracket during our last ride. Long story short, I tell him I’ll teach him how to pull the crank and bb to regrease, and see if that fixes it.
Tonight we go at it. Crank doesn’t have extractors, and the bb is hollow (octalink). I say, no prob, and take a self-extracting bolt out of my Ritchey compact, put it in his crank, and proceed to crank the crank off.
Except, the crank extractor cracks and shears off.
Now he’s got the broken self-extractor in his crank arm, and I’m headed to the shop with it tomorrow. I feel really bad.
I’ve done this many times without any problem. What went wrong?
if self-extracting bolts were really robust enough to be used generically on all cranks then nobody would need crank extracters.
unfortunately you took a gamble and lost.
Some manufacturers use aluminium crank bolts to shave weight. Indeed this is commonly done with lightweight bike tuning. You tighten the cranks in place with steel bolts, remove the steel bolts and replace with alu ones.
In this case i suspect Ritchey uses aluminium bolts and the bolts just could not handle it.
An alternative possibility is that your friend’s cranks were condemned from the start and had already rusted solid to the BB spindle so even a proper crank extractor would have failed. (This also has the happy connotation of exonerating you!)
anyway i’d be interested to see what your LBS can do about it other than take a blowtorch and start slicing the crank arm off.
I hate the self extracting bolts. I never use them. I ALWAYS use a Park Crank Puller. And watch out for the washer under the bolt, its a killer if you forget to remove it.