Headset Maintenance 101 How To Overhaul Your Headset Bearings

The headset is one of the parts of the bike that tends to go kind of forgotten about because it's very much out of sight, out of mind, unlike your transmission that's on display the whole time. Generally, they do stay working quite well, but when water gets into them or if you ride them loose, they do deteriorate. So it's worth giving them a bit of TLC every now and then. So here's how to give your headset a quick overhaul. Tools for the job, you're gonna need some shop towel, a quality grease, some sort of dry degreaser, and some WD-40, a pick or a blunt knife, a flat-bladed screwdriver, a 2.5 millimetre Allen key, four millimetre Allen key, five and a six millimetre Allen key. Okay, so before you get access to the headset, you need to remove the front end of the bike. So start with the front wheel, remove your axle, whether it's quick release or it's a bolt-through like this one is. Take the axle out, remove the front wheel, put that aside for later. Now what I do recommend doing when you're taking the bikes apart is laying the pieces in reverse order on the workbench, however many parts there are. Just gives you a good sort of picture of how to put it back again, should you not remember. Next up is to remove the handlebars and the cockpit of the bike. But you need to consider what you wanna do with your front brake. Some people like to take the brake lever off the bar and leave the caliper on the fork. Personally, I like to take the caliper off the fork so it can just dangle. So that's what I'm gonna do now. So it's usually a five millimetre Allen key or sometimes it's a Torx T25, depending on what setup you have on your particular bike. So the final thing attaching the brake to the bike is this little holder here just on the fork arch. So just carefully remove that, they're quite delicate. Keep the bolt nice and safe. I'm gonna leave the guide itself around the cable for later. So the first thing to undo on your cockpit is your stem clamp bolts. They're the bolts that hold your stem onto the steerer tube. Next you're gonna need to undo your five millimetre bolt that keeps the cap on the top and preloads the bearings. Whilst you do this, you wanna be holding the crown of the fork because there's a good chance that it could just drop out at this point, depending on how tight the fit is. Allen bolt with the top cap. Take the stem straight off, let that hang carefully. And there you go, the steerer tube wants to just slide out naturally. So make sure you keep hold of all your spacers and the gubbins that are on the top there. Let the fork come out. Just delicately place that aside. We'll take care of that in a minute. Okay, so now you've got access to the bones of the headset as such. So first up, before it drops out, I wanna make sure I retrieve the bearing that's at the bottom. Now there's usually a seal here as well, so just reaching in and just sliding this out. Now, note that the plastic seal was on the underside of the bearing, and the bearing is chamfered at the top where it pushes into the frame. Just take note of that when you lay them out on the bench so you know that for afterwards. If you put any of these back in the wrong way around when you're reinstalling things later, you'll either end up with a tight or a loose headset, both of which are really bad for it. Okay, so now you wanna repeat the same steps with the top part of the headset. Again, taking each part out separately, being very careful to drop anything on the floor. And make sure you take note of the orientation of the parts as well. Even the washers can have rims on and stuff that sit into the bearing, so just make sure you get that right. Okay, so now's the time to give it a bit of a clean. I'm just gonna use a bit of WD-40 because I don't really wanna waste my degreaser. It's quite expensive stuff, whereas general solvent-based lubes like WD-40 are quite affordable, so that's all you really need just to give it a clean and a wipe and just inspect all the surfaces in there. Of course, because this is a cartridge-bearing-based headset like most headsets are these days, you don't have to pay too much attention. You just wanna make sure it's in squarely into the frame and there's no obvious sort of damage to it. So just give everything a clean and take into account that you want it to be nice and clean for reassembly. So the crown brace is the part of the headset that sits on the fork crown, and this is where the lower race of the headset sits on the spins around. It has two types. Those that are pressed on using a proper crown installation tool, and then there's these ones which got a split race, so you don't need a tool to fit these. You just prise them off with a screwdriver. Now, that's the good side of them, but the bad side is that when mud and muck gets in there, it can sort of get underneath the race, and that's when you're gonna get creaks develop, so it's well worth taking off your crown brace. Just be delicate. You don't wanna scratch the crown of your fork. You don't wanna damage the headset either, so take that off, give it a good clean, and give that a push back on again. Okay, so I've just cleaned the steerer tube, the top of the crown there, and the crown brace. I'm just gonna put a tiny smidge of grease on here. Doesn't really need much because it's not a moving part as such, and it's a very easy part to remove. I just wanna minimise the chance of water getting ingressed and getting underneath that, and grease really does help with that. Then you just relocate it back in place. Okay, so do the same process with the bearings. Give them a good wipe down. Make sure there's no excess muck on the outside, and then you wanna be inspecting them. So, what are you looking for? So, a cartridge bearing should be very, very smooth. There should be no play in it. It shouldn't be loose and rattly. It shouldn't be gritty, and it shouldn't have any sort of seized feeling to it. So, if it's seized, almost certainly you're gonna need some new bearings. But, you've got the bike out, you've taken the header out, so why not soak it in some oil overnight, and then see how it feels the next day. The next one is, if it's loose and rattly, again, once the bearings are loose inside, you can't make them fit tight anymore. So, they've basically just worn out. They've done their cycle of life. So, time for them to be recycled, turned into another set of bearings. I mean, headset bearings don't cost a lot to buy. So, you can get these from your local bike shop, or you can go online and look for bearing sellers, basically. But, you will find that when you buy bearings online, you normally tend to buy more than one or two at a time. But, there's no hardship in having a selection at home for next time you do this. So, if your bearing is feeling a bit gritty, you can do a bit of a ghetto fix. But, bear in mind, this is just a ghetto fix. It's not gonna last a long term. You'll definitely eat some more life out of your bearings. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if water's got inside there and it's done its damage, there's gonna be grit and all sorts in there. So, you can very delicately lever off these seals. But, bear in mind, they're not really designed to have this done to them. They're designed to be a fit and forget affair. And, when they're done, you replace them with new ones. But, you can, if you're very careful, prise these rubber seals off, degrease the bearings on the inside, wait until they're completely dry, pack them with some fresh grease, put the cover back on, and you're gonna eat a bit more life out of your bearings. I'm just gonna show you how to do that. So, you need some sort of fine pick, a knife blade, something similar to that. I'm using one of these picks because they're a little bit more accurate. And, very carefully, I mean, you have to be careful because you are removing the seal of the cartridge bearing. If you damage this, it won't do its job when you put it back in there again. I'm just gonna free that. I've got access to the bearing there. I'm just gonna remove the other side now so I've got access to the bearing from both sides because I want to flush out all the sort of rubbish that's in there. I've just got to remember which way round those seals go. And, I'm good to give all this grease that's in here, you see it's a bit browny where it's had water, get in there. I'm gonna flush that out, put some fresh stuff back in there, and you should feel good as new. Now, people have different theories on how you should sort of degrease the bearing itself to get the gunk out there. Now, personally, I don't want to use an actual degreaser because it's quite wet and it can be quite a hassle to get this cleaned up properly so I want to use something that's a bit more of a dry style degreaser. So, a brake cleaner's quite good for this. You can also use isopropyl alcohol, contact cleaner, or even good old faithful WD-40, any multi-purpose stuff that's got a solvent on it that's gonna help drive out that stuff. This is only to get the crap out and then once you've done that, you want to give it a good clean. Okay, I'm just gonna spray some of this in here. You can already see it breaking down. So, I've cleaned out the inside of the cartridge bearing. The brake cleaner's done a great job on there because I can actually see each individual bearing. It's incredibly smooth. There's no sort of grit at all in there. If you are feeling grit when you do this, keep going until you can't feel anything, until it's just smooth bearings. And that spins, I don't know if you can hear that, but it spins pretty well. So, now it's time to pump it full of grease. Now, you want to have a good amount of grease in there, but you don't want to have so much grease in there it's actually gonna start slowing the thing down. The grease is there to do its job, basically. You don't want to pack it so full that you're gonna start slowing it down and the seals won't go on properly and do their job. So, put a sufficient amount of grease in, give it a good spin around, and then you want to look at putting the seals back on before you give it a final wipe over. Just check the orientation of the seals when you put them in. There's coloured side out, and they've got like a sort of surface on the inside. Run your way around and just seat it home. They won't click into place as such, but you can definitely feel when they've seated correctly. Gonna make sure you put some grease into the frame where the bearings sit into. This isn't because the bearings rotate, the bearing actually stays still and the inside of it rotates. What this is for is to create a protective barrier against water, muck, and stop them seizing in the frame. Make it easier to do this process in future. Same as before, you don't need too much. Just a good amount, just to run around the inside to make sure it's got a protective sort of barrier. This is merely just to help create an extra barrier to help the seals do the best job that they can. So, that is now ready to go up on the inside. Just take care to make sure your cables and the setup in front of the bike is in the right orientation when you do this. Slide it home, your cables hang. You've still gotta hold the crown the whole time, otherwise the fork is gonna drop out. So, next up is the upper bearing. I've already got the grease into the frame. I'm just gonna slide that down, twist that into place. And as before, a little bit more grease on the top here. Nice good seal on top of the seals that are already there. Plastic seal that goes in place. Aluminium split washer there, slides down, locates into the bearing. Headset top cap, get that plate back on there. Slide it down, locate that. You'll find that does kind of click into place. Then it is my spacers, then the stem. Of course, make sure you keep hold the front of your bike the whole time you're doing this, otherwise you're gonna drop everything on the floor. Get your top cap and your five millimetre Allen key and get this nipped up. Now, you don't wanna over-tighten the headset so it's stiff and you don't wanna run it loose. So, just nip this up so you can feel there's no movement going on and it rotates freely. Now, I'm not gonna tighten up my stem clamp box yet. I'm gonna wait until my bike is on the ground so I can ensure it's lined up completely with my front wheel. But it is time now to put the front brake back on, get the wheel back in there. So, all that's left to do is remove the bike from the stand, make sure my stem is on straight and nipped up tight. Hopefully the video has been useful for you. If you wanna find out a bit about the greases and the lubes and that sort of stuff, click down here. If you wanna find out five reasons to go tubeless, click up here. As always, click on the globe to subscribe and if you like the video, give us a thumbs up.