Bicycle Rear Wheel Doesn’t Catch Fixed

2013-12-13 Last summer, the bike is still functioning well.

It was a sunny day a few weeks ago, I took out the old bicycle for a ride and the pedal is pressed but the wheel is slipping and not catching at all. After searching the cause and the cure on the internet, someone said it might just need to be cleaned. I took the wheel to a bike shop and they said I needed a new wheel which cost about $80 including labor to transfer the 10 speed gear over. Well, I don’t think my bike even worth $50.00.At the shop, they have a tool to remove the wheel sprocket for $7.95 and I bought it to fix it myself by cleaning the freewheel. I don’t know much about fixing bicycle, but there’s always a first time of everything.

So, freewheel gear and cassette gear are different and I have cassette free hub

Use crescent wrench to take the spline out. Removed all the balls bearing inside the hub and make sure none was missing. Using the cassette sprocket remove tool to remove the sprocket.

Instead of buying the sprocket holder wrench for $22, I used a rubber strap wrench (to open jar lids) to hold the sprocket while turning the removal tool to remove the sprocket nut and it worked very nicely.

Now all I had to do is to slide the sprocket right out, there are 2 pieces on my wheel.

The next part is to remove the cassette freehub

I needed a 10mm hex that’s long enough to insert from the opposite side of the freehub (at least in my case), slide it in and remove the nut holding the freehub in place.

So everything is out

Now with the cassette freehub is out, we used carburator cleaner spray heavily into the bearing inside the hub.

The freehub still rotating freely both ways after we spray almost 1/2 of the bottle. We almost gave up, taking it upstairs, got on the internet and look to buy this cassette freehub and we couldn’t find any, and most of similar ones are sold for $60-100. When the freehub dried up from the carburetor fluid, the hub catches again. Amazing… It worked after all.

Now we could put back the cassette freehub to the wheel shaft, packed the balls bearing into the shaft hub using multi-purpose grease. We should actually install the freehub cassette sprocket (7 gears) first, but too late. We managed to put everything back nicely and the bicycle is working like before (actually we don’t use this bike that much, that’s why we didn’t believe it would break so early).