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Thought I could swap a bottom bracket in 20 minutes, took me 3 hours instead
That seized cup fought me for 2 hours until I finally broke down and bought a proper crank puller tool from the shop on Main Street. Has anyone else found that cheap wrenches just strip the notches on those old cups?
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jana8811mo ago
Wait, 3 hours? Thats not even that bad honestly. Ive seen people spend an entire weekend wrestling with old bike parts and still end up at the shop Monday morning. You got it done and only had to buy one tool, seems like a win to me.
And yeah, cheap wrenches are garbage, thats just common sense. You get what you pay for with tools. Those notches strip because the metal is too soft, not because the cup is some special tough guy. Spend $15 on a decent Park Tool or even a generic one from a real hardware store and you wont have that problem again. Its not some huge conspiracy, its just cheap tools being cheap.
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ward.jamie1mo ago
Dude for real, @jana881 nailed it. Its not some mystery why cheap tools fail, its just soft metal. I did the same thing with a bottom bracket tool once, thought I was being smart saving 10 bucks. The thing twisted right in my hand, left these little metal shavings everywhere. Took me forever to clean them out of the carpet in my garage. After that I just bit the bullet and got the Park Tool version and it hasn't let me down since. 3 hours is honestly a good time for a first go, especially if you were fighting a seized cup. Some bikes are just born stubborn, and cheap tools make it ten times worse.
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jamie_adams1mo ago
The first time I tried it I actually snapped a cheap wrench clean in half, a literal piece of metal flew across the garage and nearly hit my cat. That was the moment I learned that Harbor Freight grade tools and 30 year old bike parts are not a good combination. Now I keep a dedicated Park Tool crank puller in a special drawer, and I'm pretty sure that tool has saved me more hours of cussing than any other thing I own. And honestly, 3 hours is still a win if you didn't end up having to hacksaw the thing off like I did on my second bike. I think my record for a seized cup is about 4 hours and a busted knuckle, so you're doing fine.
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...and that's exactly what my buddy Dave found out the hard way. He bought a set of those really cheap wrenches from an auto parts store, thought he was saving money. Tried to break loose a pedal on his mountain bike, the wrench just twisted and bent like a piece of tinfoil. Left a big gash on his hand when it slipped too. He ended up borrowing my Park Tool stuff and had the pedal off in like two minutes. Now he's got a whole drawer full of decent tools and he won't shut up about how much easier everything is. Some lessons you just gotta learn by bleeding on the garage floor I guess.
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