The Best Money Saving Hacks For Mountain Bike Maintenance Part 1

Although mountain bikes themselves can be quite expensive, just using a bunch of stuff you've got lying around the house or even some old bike parts, you can create some great hacks and bodges to keep your bike running smooth. The first tip to save you a bunch of money is considering the types of lubes and degreasers and things that you use. Now, by far, the best type of degreaser to use on a bike is going to be a dedicated bike degreaser because it does the job. It really cuts through all that grime and you can apply it straight from the can straight to the chain on the bike. However, here and there, you're going to want to do a proper in-depth deep clean. Although bike degreasers are excellent, it'll save you a bit of cash if you get yourself an industrial degreaser from an online place or a DIY store. Now, this stuff isn't that kind to environments. You do have to be careful how you dispose of it. Of course, you need to wear rubber gloves when you're using this stuff. It's very vicious. Tip number two to work with that is once you've degreased your chain, in fact, here's a chain I've literally did the other day. This is actually super clean now and that's ready to be lubricated and put back on a bike that I'm working on. What I've done is kept that degreaser for a few days. Now, you'll find leaving this on a windowsill, all the crap sort of filters its way to the bottom. Although the degreaser itself is discolored, you'll find it will actually still be very powerful and still get a lot of that muck off your chain. It's well worth doing. Just by decanting this into another vessel, being careful not to get all the stuff in the bottom in there. That's probably about as much as I want to go. That is fairly good. I can top this up with some fresh degreaser and pop these chains in here which need some heavy duty work and leave that to do its job. It means I'm actually getting quite a lot done with the same amount of degreaser. That can't be a bad thing, right? You might have noticed that I was using the bottom half of a water bottle here. I tend to recycle most of the plastics in the house, but I use a lot of these things and reuse them for dirty jobs like this. Also, ice cream tubs, they're fantastic for putting degreaser in, putting chains in, really working them. You can leave these for several days, rinse them out, and just keep using them. It's well worth considering what you're throwing away and what you're not. In particular, this is black plastic which is quite hard to recycle by comparison to other stuff. It's well worth reusing this stuff. Now, good old-fashioned milk bottles, I'm going to show you a really cool thing you can do with these. Definitely worth keeping hold of some of these and turning these into a front mudguard. Our Scott Genius bikes come with a Syncros mudguard built onto them. I'm just going to show you how to make something very similar to that using a milk bottle. Firstly, you just want to take your front wheel out the bike. Won't be needing that in there for this. Basically, given the shape of that, it sits really well in here. It's quite a natural fit. You basically just want to draw a line where you want that mudguard to be using a Sharpie. At the front here, I actually want it to stick out a bit. I'm going to have it come around to, let's say, here. Obviously, I'm going to cut this just above this. This is just a guide for me of where I want it to be. It needs to come down on the side of the fork here so I can tie it to the fork leg. You can pretty much follow the line of your fork brace in order to do this. Then the same at the rear. You want this to come out and have this kind of shape to the back there using that curve that's already part of the milk bottle. You'll find it works pretty well. What I'm going to do is cut this out now, this shape. Put a couple of holes in the bottom here for a cable tie around the leg and a couple on the top to run around the fork brace. Then, Bob's your uncle, got a homemade mudguard. There you go, all done. As you can see, this one's quite a small one. This is only a little four-pinter. If you get a six-pinter, it's going to be a lot bigger fender. Of course, there's other household things you can use, water bottles. There's a number of plastic goods you get with regular day-to-day stuff. Keep this sort of stuff in mind because it is really useful and it's almost free because you've already paid for this stuff. Next tip is to hoard some of your old bike components as they wear out and keep them for spares. By all means, you don't have to be like me and keep one of everything. An old stem like this, I think this is an 80mm stem perhaps, I'm probably never going to use this again. However, the four-millimeter bolts, they're well worth salvaging. This particular rear derailleur is one that is bent and I've already poached the jockey wheel and the guide wheel of this particular mech. This one now isn't really worth salvaging. In future, it's worth keeping old bent derailleurs, taking the jockey wheels off them. Although these ones are dirty, they've still got a bit of life in them. This is a pretty ancient SRAM XO, one of their limited edition pink derailleurs from, God knows, mid-2000s, but worth keeping for spares nonetheless. It's always worth keeping cassettes as well. On cassettes, you've got various different spacers, washers, lock rings. Sometimes they can go missing, sometimes you can get an odd combination on a bike where you can't quite get the spacing right. It's always worth keeping those little spacers. They will definitely come in handy at some point. Make a point of trying to keep anything that could be useful. Keep some parts trays together. Park make these quite cool ones that have got little removable tray inserts on the inside of them. Likewise, like the stuff I've shown you in the past, you can go to your DIY store, you can get those big clear cases just like these, in fact, that I use. These particular ones are just full of, I think this one's just full of screws. Just as an example, you can fill all your old bike bits and these. They're not that dear to buy and they're well worth keeping, keeping all your stuff nice and organized. Although I've not got a bash guard on my particular bike, the bottom bracket is not low enough on this to actually find I actually hit it. On my Nukeproof, I used to bottom out all the time. I used to like running a taco style bash guard underneath. If that's something you're concerned about, you can obviously buy one of those, or if you've got a triple style chain set that would take a multitude of chain rings on there, you can make your own one using an old chain ring. The idea being, let's just say you had your bike set up with a one-by, you're running your chain ring in this position. What you want to do is move it to the inner position, find an old chain ring that's slightly bigger, which would go on the outside. I'm going to angle grind these teeth off here so it acts like a bash guard. You can do it with a whole chain ring, or you can have just a segment of it to act like a taco just to catch, say, if you're best foot forwards, this is the part you're usually going to bash. Of course, this is a complete hack, and it's only going to work if you've got an old style chain set, not like one of these SRAM ones that are on here with a direct mount chain ring. You can't do that with this, but I know a lot of you out there do like to convert bikes from three-bys to one-bys. That means that you will have spare chain rings lying around if you've done it, like the outer chain ring. That is your candidate for turning into a bash guard, so it might be worth considering. Obviously, using an angle grinder or any sort of cutting disc is an extremely hazardous activity. You might notice on my particular one, I haven't got the blade guard on here. I choose to not use the blade guard. I don't recommend this yourself. I choose it because I find it is more accurate to actually get it in a position I like and I can see the actual point. Now, always make sure you wear eyewear because stuff can fly up way faster than you'll ever be able to close your eyes and blink for. Wearing gloves is a good idea. Of course, making sure that there's no one else around that's going to get flying stuff in their eyes. I emphasize this is my choice to not use the blade guard on here because I want to be able to see exactly what I'm doing without having to look around and break my concentration. However, you might want to keep your blade guard on your angle grinder if you're going to do this. There you go. That's not the neatest work I've ever done, I have to say, but recycled an old chain ring, turned it into a bash guard. You could lop it in half, like I said, and use it as a taco at the bottom, but the idea is that you just basically just to protect the top of those teeth there. If it's doing that, then that's a good job because that was an old chain ring that wasn't in the best state. Reusable and free. I've already told you I'm a bit of a sucker for keeping old household things and reusing them. This is another prime one. It's just a little contact lens storage pot here. I don't use these, but I've robbed this one off the wife. I'm sure she won't mind. Sun cream, it's another thing just to put some high sunblock or sun cream in there. Keep that in your riding bag. Back of your neck is one of those areas that most cyclists get really badly hit and you can quite often not feel it when you're out cycling. If you've got moles, you especially want to be sun safe. If you're riding minimal and you're not going to be carrying a bottle of stuff, this is an ideal little way just to carry some with you without getting it all over your riding bag. Another little winning hack just to look after your bike is recycling old grips. You can't do this if you use any sort of lock-on style grips, but if you've got old-fashioned just regular push-on grips or foam grips like these random foam ones I've got lying around, you can reuse them in a really cool way. Now, dropper seat posts, they've got a stanchion tube. Suspension forks, they've got a stanchion tube. They're very easy to scratch, especially if you chuck them in the back of your mate's van for an uplift or back of the car, anything like that where you're going to store them. Keep your old grips, snip them, and then when you put them in the back of the car or anything like that, you can just have a bit of protection directly on them on the areas that are going to contact with other bikes and stuff. It's a great little saver. Now, protecting the end of your cranks, especially if you have expensive carbon fiber cranks, is a great idea because you can bash them on the ground and lead to further damage. You can buy dedicated crank boots. This is a SRAM one that actually came on SRAM cranks, but just for example, it's not compatible with these. I'll just show you. It would slide over the end. The idea is that you can still screw the pedal in, but you strike it on the ground. This takes off the sort of impacts that would dull your paint finish down, put chips in there, or perhaps start delamination of the carbon fiber. Now, a good way to get around this without having to spend a fortune is to make your own. Now, something I often talk about is this 3M rubber mastic tape you can get from Scotch. Now, it's not the cheapest stuff. It works out about 15 quid a roll, but you can use this for lots of different things on your bikes. It's a heavy-duty rubber. It's quite thick, and you can get it in 25 and 50 millimeter widths. It'll stick to anything as well. It's insane stuff. It's really good for making chainstay protectors for. It's really good for running on the underside of the chainstays, even the underside of the down tube of your bike. In this case, we're going to make a crank boot for my bike here. As you can see here on my cranks, I've actually got a scuff here where I have hit it on the ground, so I don't want this to get any worse. I've already trimmed this down to size. I've cleaned it, so hopefully this should stick on properly first time. Run this around the end here, and then this stuff really, really does stick fast once you've held it in place. That is just going to provide a little extra protection on the end of my cranks. When it comes to cleaning your bike, we always recommend using a proper bike-friendly cleaner that is not too abrasive or corrosive, in fact, on your bike paintwork. There are a number of other household items you can use. They're never going to be as good as the real deal, but you can make do here and there. One of those places is by using simple dishwashing liquid in a place of a degreaser. I definitely wouldn't want to use this to clean my bike with because it has got a fairly high salt content in there. Of course, salt is really bad for that sort of stuff. However, just for degreasing a chain, for example, if I was doing the deep clean and using some dishwashing liquid with some hot water and then dunking the chain in there, leaving it to soak, and then giving it a bit of attention with a stiff brush, you can actually achieve some really, really good results. Of course, because it has got a fairly high salt content to it, you make sure that you want to clean this off properly and lubricate it afterwards. I'm actually going to leave this for an hour or so, and I'm just going to brush it away afterwards. You get a really, really good effect with it. Again, it's not quite as good as using the real deal, but you can get great results with it. Now, you simply cannot beat the quality of decent bike componentry and tools and so forth. I'm fully aware that a lot of people are still on budgets and have to have some make-do products here and there. Now, you can look online. Obviously, there's a lot of discounted retailers, bike retailers out there that offer very good value, especially on last year's componentry, but it's well worth looking at some of the biggest supermarkets. Here and there, you can find yourself some bargains. Now, of course, you get what you pay for. You can't expect that stuff to be very good and last long, but you can get stuff like floor-standing pumps, car seat covers, and a whole number of other random things like trunk organizers that could be really useful for mountain biking. Definitely worth checking some of those online places. I've just seen a mini pump here. I'm sure it's fairly plasticky and not that good, but if you need a pump and you're on a trip, or perhaps you're on a riding trip and you've forgotten your stuff back at home and you just want to make-do, these sort of places are really useful for that. Now, another great way of saving money is being tactical about the time of year you start buying things. Now, of course, if you want to buy some waterproof shorts and a waterproof jacket and you're looking to buy them in autumn when it starts getting wet, you're going to be paying premium prices. The ideal time to start buying that stuff is spring, summer. You've got to start thinking ahead about next year or even buying stuff that's in the sale from the previous year. This works really well with summer clothing if you're buying it in winter, winter clothing, buying it in summer, wet weather clothing, pretty much anything you can think of. Again, if you're aiming to buy a new bicycle, it's worth waiting until the end of the year you're in. You might get some discounts on the existing year before the next year models hit the shop, so to speak. You can definitely get some great bargains if you just wait a bit of time and consider when you're actually buying stuff. There we go. There's a number of quirky hacks you can do with random household goods and, of course, old random bike stuff you've got lying around. I mean, I'm not really sure what I'm ever going to get. Hold on. I've got one more idea that I'm just going to do with this old tiller of a stem. I'm sure I can turn this into something vaguely useful. Bear with me a second. I knew I'd find a use for that one day. There we go. There's a whole bunch of hacks and bodges and stuff that you can do with stuff you've had lying around for years, that old cassettes, tiller, old stems from the 90s, and other random bike stuff. Of course, on a serious note, if you are going to use any sort of power tools, be very sensible about it. If you're not familiar with using them, make sure you get advice from someone or have someone help you do that. I'm quite familiar with doing this, so I'm more than happy to work on that. For a couple more great videos, click down here for our pro bikes playlist. There's a whole number of super cool bikes, including the great Nino Schurter Scott race bike, which is just unbelievable. Click down there for those. Click up here for fork lower leg service. That's a great service idea that you guys can all do at home. I know you can do it. It's not that hard, and it means your forks will last a lot longer and feel much better. Of course, as always, click on that round globe to subscribe to the channel. We've got new content for you every week here at GMBN Tech. If you like making random stuff out of old bike bits, give us a thumbs up.