9 Mechanical Skills Everyone Should Know Essential MTB Maintenance Skills

As mountain bikers, we should all have some kind of basic mechanical skill under our belt in order to look after our bikes. This doesn't mean the necessity of being able to strip down a suspension fork or anything advanced like that, but it does mean you should know the more basic skills so when you can't get to a bike shop, you can look after your bike yourself. This video has all of those major essential skills in there, and of course, there's going to be a few other tips in there along the way. First up is how to use an Allen key properly. Also known as a hex wrench, you might be wondering why I say using one properly because there's only one way to use them, but it's very easy to select the wrong one, it's very easy to slip, and it's very easy to use one that's damaged without knowing. There's a few little things you need to know here. First up, make sure you've got a decent selection of Allen keys. Now, this doesn't mean having to spend a fortune. You could have a multi-tool like this one from Park. Very useful, does most of the bolts on all around a bike, and also means you can take it with you if you want to. The other option, of course, is to get some kind of free setup. Now, these tend to come with bikes and components you buy. Great because they're free, and they're going to be able to serve you for many years if you look after them. However, they do start to wear, especially the cheaper ones, and as they wear, they can damage the heads of the Allen key bolts all around your bike, so you don't want to be doing that. Great to use, but just take care that they're in good condition and replace them as you need to. Next up would be a full set of workshop-spec Allen keys. Now, these are very expensive for good reason. They're made of extremely hard steel, like S-grade steel, which is for pro mechanics out there. They have some hidden features. You've got these little spinners so you can send longer bolts home, and they've even got rifled sections on them so you can remove those rounded-out bolts when you do encounter them. However, pro quality comes with a pro price tag, so it might not suit you. The last option would be a trail multi-tool. Now, this has just about everything under the sun on it. In fact, Henry used one of these, if not this actual one, to completely take his bike apart recently for a video. That's going to be in the link underneath here, just to show you what these are capable of. They're amazing. However, they're not necessarily the best thing to use on a day-to-day basis because of the fact that some of the tools on them are quite small, which means you've got more chance of slipping. Great when you're out on a trail to rescue a situation, perhaps not quite as good on a daily basis. Although, if you need to start somewhere, it's a good place to go. The last thing to take into account is the torque settings of bolts. If you're not doing too much on a bike, it's nothing to worry about, but it's very easy to snap a bolt or damage a lightweight component if you over-tighten it. Worse, if you under-tighten something, and at least something coming loose, it could fail on you or it could be dangerous out on the trail. If that sounds like a concern, invest in some kind of torque wrench. It could just be bits for an existing ratchet spanner you have, or it could be a dedicated bike one. This one from Park is very simple. It's got adjustable torque setting. It comes with bits in the handle, and it does the job great. Although, perhaps, you want to save a bit more money and consider something like this one. This is a Topeak one. It's a ratchet tool. It has all the stuff that you'd use out on the trail. It has different settings, different torque bits here that you can use in conjunction with them. A really good value piece of kit. You can take it with you, and you can use it at home every day as well. Just consider that if that's something that bothers you, or perhaps if you've got an expensive bike and you want to take care of those lightweight carbon parts. There's two last things you need to take into account. One, always take your time and make sure the Allen key is properly inserted into the head. If it's not in properly, it can slip. The last one, and the most important one, is make sure you use the correct size. Sometimes, especially with the smaller ones, a 2 or a 2.5, quite often you can confuse them. If you use the smaller one in a 2.5, you're going to end up rounding out the head. The same can also happen if you have a huge selection of loose Allen keys like this. If you had, say, some Imperial ones in there like a 360, you might reach for that by accident thinking it was a five millimeter, and go to just a five millimeter bolt, and you could end up rounding out the head. If you do have any random Imperial ones in amongst your collection, try and keep them to one side because mountain bikes are all about the metric. Next up is changing a tire. Mountain bikes all have tires on them, and at some point, you're going to get a puncture. Whether you're set up tubeless or you have a good old-fashioned inner tube in there, you're going to need to know how to take this off because we still get punctures, basically. It's going to happen. You will need some kind of tire levers. Don't use metal ones. Metal ones can damage the tire, they can damage the inner tube, and more importantly, they can damage the rim on your bike. Make sure you use nylon or plastic ones. They often clip together like these so you don't lose them. The best advice is to get three. Chances are you'll only ever need one. Sometimes you need a backup one, and you're probably going to lose one, so get a third one for good measure. Of course, you're going to need some sort of pump. A floor-standing pump is going to make things a lot easier for you in the long term. However, a hand pump is probably more useful because of the fact you can use it at home and out on the trail. Just take care of what you pick. Make sure you pick the right things. Along with learning how to take a tire off and repairing a tire and all that sort of You want to go the old-fashioned route and learn how to repair an inner tube as well. If you're not using tubeless, you will have an inner tube on the inside. Whilst you could just buy a new one, make sure you've got no thorns on the inside of that tire casing and replace it. It's not very good for the environment, so you want to make sure you get the most use out of it as possible. Get yourself an old-fashioned feather-edge patch kit and learn how to use them. It's actually quite therapeutic. Next up is get to know your cockpit setup. You might just buy your bike from the bike shop. They set it up for you, and you get many years of great use out of it, but you won't be getting the most out of it unless you experiment with your setup. We're talking about the thickness of your grips, the way you roll them backwards and forwards, the same with your bars. Are you comfortable? Do you think it's too low? Is it too high? Is it too far? Is it too near? There's so many different variants with your cockpit, and I do encourage everyone to experiment with things a little bit. Brake lever position. The general rule of thumb is when you're seated, you run the brake levers in line with your arms. That's not right for everyone. I like my brake levers nearly horizontal at times. Other people like theirs nearly vertically down. There's no right and there's no wrong. By experimenting with things, not only will you find things more comfortable when you're riding with the Velop, but you'll also start to learn about your cockpit. You'll start to learn how your bars are mounted onto the bike. You'll start to learn about how the headset bearings are compressed. Before you know it, you'll have learned how to take apart the front of your bike completely. It's all quite simple. It's just a series of Allen keys, which is why it's so important to make sure you know how to use those things right. Setting up the sag on your suspension. This is absolutely crucial, and everyone can do this at home. Many of us will have a mountain bike with some sort of suspension on it. Usually, we'll at least have front suspension, so you'll have some sort of suspension fork. If the fork was on your bike when you got it and it's an air fork, it will come with an air pump especially for it. If you bought the fork after market, it will also come with a pump, so either way you should have one. If you don't, get one. They're essential. Setting up your sag is very easy. What you got to do is set it up to your rider weight when you're on the bike. The guidelines are between 20% and 30% depending on the model of fork and depending on your preferences. Some like it softer, some like it harder. Getting your sag set up correctly, can't emphasize this enough. You'll go the difference from your bike being quite good off-road to really inspiring your confidence and giving you the grip and support and comfort that you want from your suspension fork. It makes a massive difference riding a fork that's set up correctly. Honestly, playing with them as well, it's actually quite good fun. Don't be put off with letting the air pressure out, putting it back in again, trying it harder, trying it softer. It's all experimentation. With these little portable pumps, you can do this out on the trail as well. Don't feel that you need to just set it up once and forget about it. You might find by experimenting a bit more, you find a setup that works better for you. Like I said earlier in the video, no one setup is right for everyone. You've got to find what works for you. There'll be a guideline to start with and then experiment and find what is the best one. Next up is adjusting your gears. Many people think there's a bit of a black art to this, but I'll let you in on a secret. It's actually dead easy. All you need to do is have the correct tools, good Allen keys or a screwdriver. You need a bit of patience and you need to just understand what all of the things do. All derailleurs, whether they're SRAM or Shimano, fundamentally work on the exact same principles. There's going to be a video on mastering setting up your derailleur in the description underneath this one. Click through on that and it'll tell you everything you need to do to service and set up your rear derailleur. I encourage everyone to learn how your derailleur works because, in fact, once you learn how it works, you won't run into problems down the line. By doing this, you'll understand what the limit screws do. You'll understand how the tension in the cage works and how that affects other things on the bike. Also, you'll understand when things go wrong, what they can possibly be. Being cable actuated, if you ride in wet or muddy conditions, quite often you'll find just a change of cable or a bit of lubricant inside the outer cable can remedy everything. Setting up your derailleur is immensely satisfying and is nothing better than clean shifting. Next up is learning how to set your bike up tubeless. This might not be first on your agenda. It's definitely a skill to aspire to get to. There are serious performance enhancements to be had from running a bike with tubeless setup. The first one, of course, is you're losing weight off the bit you're rotating. If you can lower the rotating weight on the bike, your bike is going to feel faster. It's going to feel more agile. It's going to be nicer to ride. They are all performance enhancements. The addition as well is you're removing those inner tubes that are already on your bike so you can keep them as spares. You don't need to have spare inner tubes or spend more money on those. Two of those will probably do you quite a long time. I honestly can't remember the last time I had a puncture with a tubeless setup. The other advantage, of course, is if you do get small punctures, often thorns or things like that, the tubeless sealant that you have will seal those small holes as you ride. Wave goodbye to the puncture. Setting up your tires tubeless is a bit of a skill and it does require a bit of a method to follow. Accordingly, because you can make mistakes, it's something that people stay away from. Honestly, I made a video, it's going to be in the description underneath this, it's dead simple and I do it live on the video. Really, really is that simple. Check it out and put that on your list of things to do. It's a great upgrade and it's a great skill to learn as well. Next up is installing a dropper post on your mountain bike. Many new bikes do come with them now. If you've already got one on your bike, at some point, you're going to need to take it out in order to maintain it or perhaps change the cable on it, so you're still going to need to know how to do this. If you haven't got one yet, I'm sure it might be on your list of things that you want to aspire to buy further down the line because they are one of the biggest performance enhancements you can put on any mountain bike. They all fit slightly differently, so it really is a skill to learn. The cable-operated ones are a bit different to the hydraulic ones, but the thing you will need to learn is mastering your cable routing, which on many bikes tends to be internal. That in itself comes with its own set of challenges, but by doing that, you're going to learn a lot about your bike. Take your time when you install a dropper post. Follow the manufacturer's instructions because they all slightly are different. Some have the nipple at the lever end, some have them at the seat post end, some are hydraulic. They all accordingly be slightly different, although the principles fundamentally are the same. Learning how to maintain the dropper post as well, that is also something that goes with the turf. If you've got a suspension fork, it's quite likely that you'll have looked at the similar sort of maintenance things. We're talking about removing the seals, putting some oil behind them. Again, actually quite simple, but definitely something you should aspire to be able to do. There's going to be a link to how to install one of those in the description underneath. Good luck with that. The next up is learning how to bleed your brakes. You might want to rely on your bike shop for this, sure, but sod's law, the time that you're going to need to bleed your brakes, that one time will be five minutes before you go riding and you discover that your levers are pulling to the bars. That's no good if it's a Sunday and you can't get to a bike shop. Learning to do yourself really is an essential skill. It isn't one that you should be afraid of because actually, it's quite simple. It just requires patience and a lot of it. Get yourself some kind of bleed kit that's going to be compatible for your bike. This one is for mineral oil, a Shimano system or a Magura system, but you can get different ones with different fittings to suit DOT systems like the Avid or the SRAM systems on the market. Accordingly, you're going to need the correct oil. They're not interchangeable. You can't use mineral oil in a DOT system and vice versa. That is a DOT fluid. I cannot use that in a set of Shimano brakes. I need to use Shimano mineral fluid. The DOT fluids, you can use that in SRAM brakes, for example, or in Hope brakes. Make sure you get this right and actually, it's really satisfying. Also, bleeding your brakes, I do think it's something you should do at least annually just to make sure there's clean fluid in there. To make sure there's no air in there that you didn't realize and to make sure that everything is working as well as it possibly should be. Also, in doing that, you're going to get much better at it, much faster at it, and you're going to find little cool shortcuts. One great shortcut is if you've got air bubbles in there and you're struggling to get them to the actual levers, a good way to do it is to store your bike up on its back wheel overnight. You can even do this with the levers sent so they're actually horizontally, so that would be vertically if your bike is upright, and with the top cylinders open so actually the air bubbles can rise out by themselves. There's loads of cool tips you can pick up just by experimenting. Think of it as bleeding a radiator at home, it is that simple, you just have to know how to do it. There's going to be links to Shimano video and a SRAM video in the description underneath there. Follow those and you should be able to do that yourself. Again, don't be afraid of it, but make sure that you do invest in the correct bleed kit and the correct fluid to suit your brakes. Finally, I would say is building a custom bike or building a frame up from components. There honestly is nothing more satisfying in the world of mountain biking or even road biking as building your own project bike. It's even better than having a complete bike turning up. You have all of the parts there and you slowly and methodically put it all together using all of those skills that you've developed over your years of riding. It really is something great to aspire to do. A good way to do that is to start upgrading your bike bit by bit. Over time, maybe you damage your rear derailleur in a crash and you'll need to replace it. You'll learn in replacing a derailleur, you'll need to index your gears, you'll also need to change the cable on the derailleur and you'll need to split a chain. Straightaway, there's three major jobs done that go along to building a bike up. Just think, every time you replace a part on your bike, you're learning a new skill if you choose to do it yourself. Before long, you'll be able to build a bike like this from the ground up. Honestly, it's so much fun to do and I can't encourage you all to do it enough. It really is one of the coolest things you can do with your home bike skills. Actually, because mountain bikes are largely put together with Allen keys, you can do most of it yourself. Again, I'm going to put that video that Henry made using just a trail multi-tool in the description underneath this. It'll show you how much you can do with that. If you think with a multi-tool and a few other tools, you can pretty much build your own bike from scratch. Now, as I mentioned, all the videos are in the descriptions underneath to go with every part of this, how to bleed your brakes, how to set your tires up tubeless, all of that sort of stuff. I urge you, if you can't do those skills or even if your skills are a bit rusty, check them out. I promise you there'll at least be a few tips in each of the videos that will help you on your way. We want to help you because riding bikes and looking after bikes is cool. Hopefully, you enjoyed the video. Thanks for hanging around. See you later, guys.