Fix and Ride | Installing a new electronic shifter, wheels, and tires on my Sync'r hardtail

Today we're going to do some work in the shop. I've got my hardtail here. You haven't seen me ride this lately and honestly it's needed a little bit of work and I've been putting it off. We've got wheels to put on. I've got a new electronic drivetrain and some new tires and things. We're going to dial it and get everything looking perfect and then maybe we'll go for a ride. I told my friend that yesterday and he said, what are you doing Shimano or SRAM? Actually I'm installing box. The wireless shifting system I'm installing works with anything. Now, about a year and a half ago I installed this on my hardtail and made everything wireless. I had a wireless dropper post, I had a wireless shifter and I was able to do bar spins and stuff with it. Since then it's been acting up a little bit. The batteries run out a lot quicker than it's supposed to. I'm having pairing problems. Most of you guys predicted it. It's like, yeah, anything electronic you're going to have problems with and you're right. It's not going to be as reliable as just using a cable, but I have the new version of it. I actually met the people at Archer at Sea Otter. They sent it over and they want me to try it out. The new one I can take off the battery door with a screwdriver or something, which is great because the old battery door had like a one millimeter Allen key or something to take it off. It's this guy right here. So another improvement they made on the new DX1 is this shifter right here. So the old one has these two buttons. They're all right. It's not the greatest. The new one is actually got rubber covers, so a little more waterproofing and they click. So it's a much nicer feeling. You know, when you actually press the button, it's not this kind of mushy feel where you don't really know whether you pushed it in. Despite having some problems with the old one with pairing and the battery running out, it still works. And I've taken this thing through creeks that were higher than my bottom bracket. I've left the bike out in the rain by accident and all this stuff has survived. If the new one has some better battery life and just overall reliability, then I'm going to really like using this thing. I have a set of wheels that I'm testing from Crank Brothers. I actually took the carbon wheels off this bike and I'm putting alloy wheels on. I'm not allowed to say what's different about these wheels because there's an embargo on them. I like the thought that they're less expensive to make. Most people are going to be running alloy wheels because they're more affordable. So I want to see what these ones have to offer. So one thing, when you're mounting a tire, a bike mechanic is going to do it so that the tire logo is aligned with the valve stem. If you take off the tire and you notice there's a hole right here, you know where this was in relation to the rim. If the valve stem was right here, then it must be this part of the rim. If you always mount your tire the same way, it's easier to troubleshoot things later on and that's why they do it. Although I am not sponsored by Slime anymore, I still have a lot of their sealant and I liked it when I was using it and I think I'm going to keep on using it. The one problem that I think a lot of people got with Slime is they would use the wrong stuff. They actually made a separate formula for mountain bikes and really smart, intelligent people that I've known have been like, Seth, I got this stuff and it sucks and then I look at the bottle and I'm like, no, no, that's the wrong stuff. So rotate the tire slowly to get the sealant to the part that I mounted and then we can mount the tire the rest of the way. One thing you want to do when you're trying to mount the tire by hand is make sure the bead is in the center. It's going to put a little bit of slack on the tire and make it easier to stretch with your hands. And there it is, it's on. Now to mount a tire and snap the bead into place, an air compressor is great. It's going to do it in two seconds, but I'm going to do it like everybody else has to do it. I'm going to do it with a floor pump just to show you it can be done. Try and pull the bead to the outside of the tire to create a little bit of a seal. Open up your valve, attach it to a high volume floor pump designed for mountain bikes, and then start pumping like crazy. Okay, I got to do a better job of pulling the bead on. I didn't say it's not easier with a compressor. It certainly is, but you don't need one. Okay, let's see if it's holding. That's a good sound. That means the bead's popping on. We did it with minimal mess, just a little bit of sealant right there. We'll go on to the next one. This time, we're going to do it the easy way. All right, now we got to put my rotors on these wheels. The thing with rotors is, especially the braking surface, you don't want to touch that with your hand or get any oil on it because it's going to really affect the braking in a negative way. This is not a really complicated tool. You set it to however many newton meters of torque you want, and it clicks to keep you from tightening it too much. We know it's right because we used a torque wrench. If you don't have a torque wrench, I'm going to show you a trick. Stop that. When Drama barks, I should really listen to him. He wanted to go outside. Come on, buddy. You want to go outside? Go make big peepees. Unbelievable. Freaking Drama. We're going to throw a cassette on. I had an 11 speed on the last one. I'm going to put a 9 speed on here, and I'm not worried about whether it works or not because like I said, you can put any shifter and any drivetrain on this wireless system. This is actually an industry 9 hub, but they're right down the street from me, and their cassettes sound really, really cool. Car people are really into exhaust notes, and I think bike people are really into cassette notes. This is impossible to mess up. You can only put the cassette on one way. Just line up these splines, and this lock ring says 40 newton meters. What that means is we have to get it really tight. Once it starts making violent clicking noises, you know it's tight enough. These all take batteries. My one complaint besides just some of the bugs that the old Archer system had was that you have to take the batteries in and out to charge them. It would have been nice if there was just a little port that I could plug in with USB. We'll start with the easy part and mount the shifter. We can adjust this later. I don't know exactly where I'm going to want it, but I'll just leave it loose for now. Throw the grip back on. This is the cable. Because this gets mounted so close to the derailleur, this is the entire shift cable. So the way we get in there with the cable, lift up on this, cable goes into that little hole in there. And that's it. Simple as that. Now the hard part, getting this thing back on. This happened last time. These little rubber pieces, don't pull these out. It is so hard to get them back in. Okay, that's almost back in. There we go. It's a really easy mistake to make. Hope the next version has that worked out. So let's see where to mount this. Yeah, that's going to hit into the chain. It's meant to go under the chain stay, and it's going to crash right into the cassette. So this is the cable that I had used last time, and it looks like I had cut it a little longer. So now it goes right here, and I got plenty. So the way I got these really tight last time, I took a pair of pliers, went down underneath here, and sort of rotated it until it was real tight. Yeah, so much for that. This is going to look really bad, but I'm going to squeeze down right here. I'm not damaging anything. Put the pressure on. It's on real nice now. All of our batteries are fully charged, so we're going to put them in there. So I like the new battery compartment, how you can take it off with any screwdriver, but it's like, still it's not easy. You still have to kind of go in at an angle. Okay, battery door is on. The shifter. Oh, what size Allen key is it? Oh, the smallest Allen key in the world. Let's see. Look at how much smaller this is than a two and a half millimeter Allen key. We're going to do a little hack to make sure I don't lose this. All right, nothing important right here. It's just plastic. So I'm going to put a little hole in it right here. And then I always have a place to put it by all the other Archer stuff. And every time you recharge it, you have to take that out. So with the shifter, I would say that's probably about once a month. This is why anytime anything electronic comes up on Instagram, on YouTube, inevitably half the comments are like, I don't want that. I just want it to work all the time. Okay, that freaking thing is in. Now we got to go into nerd mode. We got to make sure that this servo is all the way out and we're going to start programming it to shift on here. I need to install a chain first. So we got our new chain and we have the master link for the new chain. So we'll lay this out. This chain came a little long. So you see we have to remove this much. We're going to do that with a chain tool. Put it in there and we're just going to pop this link out completely. One of the reasons I really like 9-speed is that you have a thicker cassette, you have larger gaps between the cassette, you have a thicker chain. In short, everything's a little more robust. So if you're somebody like me that doesn't maintain their bike as often as they should or they're a little rough on the drivetrain, 9-speed is going to hold up a little better. See I can do that easily. It's on, connecting, paired. You know what's incredible is huge companies like Sony can't make good apps and this little tiny company, say what you will about their battery compartments, that was like the quickest pairing process I've ever had in my life. So we're going to go new configuration, loosen the shift cable at the derailleur, okay. Make sure the chain is on the smallest cog, initialize motor, okay. That makes such a cool sound. Little servo. We're going to put in here. Make sure there's no slack and we will tighten that into place. Proceed with wizard, speed cassette, 13, 14, 15, 16, it'll work for cassettes that don't even exist yet. We're going to go down to 9, sensible number, next. Use these buttons to select which gear you want to configure. So we can shift gears with this. So of course when you're shifting gears, you want to pedal the bike. So I can do it all through here. So we're going to go up a gear. So we're supposed to be in the second gear, but it's not in the second gear. So what are we going to do? We can use now these buttons right here to micro adjust it. So now I can say, I want it a little bit further in that direction. Let's try it again. There, it's in the second gear. Now let's go down. Now let's go back up. We got that gear and look how smooth it is. I love this. I wish I could do this with every derailleur. There it goes into the next gear. Now it's going to go up. Perfect. Look at that. Now that I've got it all set, let's test it with the actual shifter up front, should do Yeah, this is the frustrating part. So now the shifter is not communicating with that. It's of course something I'm doing wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have thrown the instructions out. Oh, pair remote. When you tap proceed, the shifter will power down automatically. Turn the shifter back on and wait for the orange light to flash. Now it works. That was eventful. Let's make sure this dropper post works first. I would say installing a wireless dropper post is one of the easiest repairs that one can do. So it says that the maximum pressure is 218 PSI. So like all dropper posts, that means that you should put 800 PSI in it. So we'll put this in loosely and then we'll actually adjust it on the bicycle itself. I happen to know that this Magura dropper post is at the perfect height for me when it is totally slammed. I'm going to just push it all the way down in there, torque her down. Seat clamps do not have to be that tight. I like to get my saddle about level, maybe the nose like slightly lower than the back. A lot of that is personal preference. Okay, let's take a look at her. So first of all, one of the really cool things about having all this wireless stuff is this is the only cable that's going to the back. This is just my rear brake hose. The front brake, I have routed through the stem from this little part that Eric Porter sent me. And then it comes out the bottom over here of the steerer tube. And we've got no problems. The brake will work just exactly the same, spun around. And of course, the shifter is going to work exactly the same, completely spun around. Kind of a very neat cockpit now. I'm all about this. Let's feast our eyes on this bike. Good old hardtail. It feels good. Definitely not as forgiving if I were to case, but luckily I didn't case. It was pretty smooth. All right, I hope you enjoyed watching me work on my bike and installing some really nerdy stuff and riding the trails out here. It's kind of cold, so I'm going to get back inside, but I was glad to get out for a little bit today. Thanks for riding with me today, and I'll see you next time.