Saturday morning our kids are usually at their grandparents. Time for either riding or building bikes.
I want to be able to bring back the tools to Hotte again quickly. Therefore today’s project was getting rid of the – so called – chimneys on my two drop bar bikes.
First the carbon fork. Took some measurements and put a little scratch to mark the position of the stem. Then measured how much more has to go for the expander. To be able to turn the vise helped to have a good position for cutting.
And then I followed the steps I watched on a GCN video about how to go ahead. Switched the blade to the carbon specific one. Using the standard one can lead to splintering of the carbon layers and is not recommended.
First test scratch and then soon reaching the point of no return. So here the before and after view:
Happy! So let’s do the same to the alloy fork.
Switched back to the blade for cutting metal and had to finish it off a little with a file to also make it fit nicely. Also had to hammer in the star nut (German: Kralle) further into the fork. Worked ok. Would be good to have the proper tool for that as well to make it go in evenly. But managed for this time rarely well.
Happy about the results for now! 🙂