Is cold setting absolutely necessary?

Tom Sherman said:

Jobst Brandt said:

...
I think the attached URL explained who "Trigger" was adequately.

Story I heard was that Trigger got stuffed (mounted, as in taxidermy).

Mark Janeba

Quoted message said:

Mark Janeba said:

As for alignment, it's been a while since I've seen a picture of the
Campy alignment tool. The ends weren't wider than 2 inches, were
they?

Quoted message said:

If so [being generous], one tenth of a degree misalignment would
come out to 0.0035 inches (3.5 mil) gap at one side of the guage
ends while the other side is touching. I just checked a 3 mil gap
on my caliper - very small, but visible when backlit. So I guess I
believe you about the 1/10 degree, just barely.[2]

You're guessing and haven't used the tool.

That's pretty explicit in what I wrote, yes.

I also gave my assumptions explicitly. If the ends are 2 inches wide,
1/10 degree gives a 3.5 mil gap as indicated. That part isn't guessing.
If the ends are less than 2 inches (a reasonable "guess"😉 then the gap
will be less. That isn't guessing either.

Mark Janeba

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

If there is a shop that can do this, they should not charge you more
than $20 to #30 bucks and it is a really easy thing for them to do.

Just curious...how do they do this? What are the tools and techniques
involved? TIA

Traditionally, just muscle power.

I usually remove the crank and BB, clamp the BB shell in a bench vice,
put one hand on each dropout and spread 'em. After you've done a few you
get a feel for the force involved. Be sure to check that you've spread the
sides equally, using the Park [censored]-1 tool, or the string-around-the-head-tube
trick.

--

John ([email hidden])

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

If there is a shop that can do this, they should not charge you more
than $20 to #30 bucks and it is a really easy thing for them to do.

Quoted message said:

Just curious...how do they do this? What are the tools and techniques
involved? TIA

It's not different from any other simple alignment
http://www.yellowjersey.org/twist.html

A big vise and your choice of muscle or leverage mostly.
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

(OP)>>>>I have a mid-80's steel-framed 14-speed (2x7) Miyata
road bike

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

>which I'm thinking about updating to a modern 9-speed drivetrain

-snip-

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

>Is it really necessary to cold-set the rear?

Quoted message said:

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Quoted message said:

It isn't only the spacing that changes when you do this, but the
angle of the dropouts with respect to the jam nuts on the axle. If
the dropouts are not parallel, then they are under bending stress
may crack. I suspect some of that is involved in most dropout
failures anyway.

Quoted message said:

Sheldon Brown said:

This is frequently repeated folklore.
When I was putting together my article on this topic:
http://sheldonbrown.com/frame-spacing.html
I did the math on this. For a spread from 126 to 130 mm, as David
envisions, the angular difference is only 1/3 of a degree. I doubt
that any of the normal tools used for measuring dropout parallelism
have such fine resolution.

(JB)> The Campagnolo dropout alignment tool can do this to
at least a tenth

Quoted message said:

of a degree and I'm sure you have seen the two cup faces align to that
accuracy or better. You may be right about the dropout angle not
being important but the ancients felt it was important and came up
with that pair of instruments that make this alignment precise. As
someone already mentioned axle flex from chain tension works the other
way and the combination of these forces, dropout alignment and axle
flex surely must have a negative effect on dropout durability.

Quoted message said:

Here's a relevant quote from my article:
"Problems attributed to misaligned fork ends include bent/broken
axles. As it happens, the direction that the alignment changes when
you spread the rear triangle is such that the alignment error is
unlikely to cause this, because the stress it puts on the axle is
opposite the stress created by the chain drive. Alignment errors in
the opposite direction would be much more likely to cause problems."

Out here in the real world, most bikes in for alignment have
rear ends not centered. Frame ends arrive in random planes.
It's nice to be straight. Just because. It's cheap, too.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

John Everett said:

Since I upgraded my old Trek 1400 from 7 to 8 speeds I've been waiting
(for a
year now) for a reoccurance of the old "cold setting" debate. I now
have a
full season of riding around on a bonded aluminum frame originally
spaced at
126mm with a 130mm rear hub. I did nothing to the frame to accomodate
the
widened hub. It's just a little harder to snap the wheel into the
frame now.
I've had NO problems.

The Trek 1400 is spaced at 128 mm. I changed from 7 to 8sp by putting
on the 8sp hub body, recentering the axel and removing a spacer on the
non drive side. Initially, I didn't even bother redishing the wheel.

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

You're guessing and haven't used the tool. It is made two identical
halves with finely Machine ground OD and end face. A gap difference of
even 0.002" would be detectable. You can see it at:

http://www.bcltechnologies.com/document/products/drake/samples/multi_column.pdf

Quoted message said:

on page 11 and 12. This is one of those high precision instruments
that is ultimately simple and has no read-out.

Jobst Brandt
[email hidden]

Excellent information on alignment!
I've never checked the alignment on my steel (Reynolds 531) frame/fork. It
rides straight from what I can tell, or it could be that I just got used to
it after all these years. Is having a frame checked for alignment
necessary?
-tom

Paul Kopit said:

John Everett said:

Since I upgraded my old Trek 1400 from 7 to 8 speeds I've been waiting
(for a
year now) for a reoccurance of the old "cold setting" debate. I now
have a
full season of riding around on a bonded aluminum frame originally
spaced at
126mm with a 130mm rear hub. I did nothing to the frame to accomodate
the
widened hub. It's just a little harder to snap the wheel into the
frame now.
I've had NO problems.

The Trek 1400 is spaced at 128 mm. I changed from 7 to 8sp by putting
on the 8sp hub body, recentering the axel and removing a spacer on the
non drive side. Initially, I didn't even bother redishing the wheel.

There are Trek 1400s and then there are Trek 1400s. My 1988 (or so)
bonded aluminum 1400 bears little resemblance to the welded aluminum
1400s of today. When my bike was built I don't think anyone (other
than perhaps some Shimano engineers) had ever thought about going
larger than 126mm.

jeverett3<AT>earthlink<DOT>net http://home.earthlink.net/~jeverett3

13 Jan 2005 12:39:23 -0500 Sheldon Brown said:

This is frequently repeated folklore.

When I was putting together my article on this topic:

http://sheldonbrown.com/frame-spacing.html

I did the math on this. For a spread from 126 to 130 mm, as David
envisions, the angular difference is only 1/3 of a degree. I doubt that
any of the normal tools used for measuring dropout parallelism have
such fine resolution.

I've never done the math, but I accept your numbers. I also suspect
that with the Campy tools you can do better than 1/3 degree.
Nevertheless, I still recommend that people get their frames cold set
and the forkends realigned, simply because it is likely that they were
well out of line in the first place.

It can be amazing how little care is spent on something as important
as this by most bike shops, and very few manufacturers spend any time
on it at all.

I should add that my experience is all a few decades out of date, but
I doubt if this situation has changed much in the last 30 years.

-
-----------------------------------------------
Jim Adney [email hidden]
Madison, WI 53711 USA
-----------------------------------------------

Carl Fogel said:

. . . or how asymmetrical real human bodies are. If you use
a graphics program to mirror-image one side of a familiar
face and create a symmetrical face, the unexpected symmetry
makes it look awful.

Quasimodo

I had a hunch that was you.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:01:39 -0800, "Tom Nakashima"
<[email hidden]> wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

Excellent information on alignment!
I've never checked the alignment on my steel (Reynolds 531) frame/fork. It
rides straight from what I can tell, or it could be that I just got used to
it after all these years. Is having a frame checked for alignment
necessary?
-tom

Dear Tom,

Necessary?

Well, checking your frame alignment might throw doubt on how
happy you've been "all these years" . . .

.. . . but then your future would be happier . . .

.. . . unless you remember how much frames flex from side to
side when you pedal hard . . .

.. . . or how asymmetrical real human bodies are. If you use
a graphics program to mirror-image one side of a familiar
face and create a symmetrical face, the unexpected symmetry
makes it look awful.

Quasimodo

Jim Adney said:

...I still recommend that people get their frames cold set
and the forkends realigned, simply because it is likely that they were
well out of line in the first place.

It can be amazing how little care is spent on something as important
as this by most bike shops, and very few manufacturers spend any time
on it at all.

I should add that my experience is all a few decades out of date, but
I doubt if this situation has changed much in the last 30 years.

Actually, it has. The entry of the Japanese into the U.S. market, which
became serious in the late '70s, raised the bar for precision in many
aspects of bicycle manufacture.

Sheldon "Better, Not Perfect" Brown
+----------------------------------------+
| Cyclists fare best when they act and |
| are treated as drivers of vehicles. |
| -- John Forester |
| http://www.johnforester.com/ |
+----------------------------------------+
Harris Cyclery, West Newton, Massachusetts
Phone 617-244-9772 FAX 617-244-1041
http://harriscyclery.com
Hard-to-find parts shipped Worldwide
http://captainbike.com http://sheldonbrown.com

Neil Brooks said:

Carl Fogel said:

. . . or how asymmetrical real human bodies are. If you use
a graphics program to mirror-image one side of a familiar
face and create a symmetrical face, the unexpected symmetry
makes it look awful.

Quasimodo

I had a hunch that was you.

Quit humping Carl's posts.

Sheldon Brown said:

Jim Adney said:

...I still recommend that people get their frames cold set
and the forkends realigned, simply because it is likely that they were
well out of line in the first place.

It can be amazing how little care is spent on something as important
as this by most bike shops, and very few manufacturers spend any time
on it at all.

I should add that my experience is all a few decades out of date, but
I doubt if this situation has changed much in the last 30 years.

Actually, it has. The entry of the Japanese into the U.S. market, which
became serious in the late '70s, raised the bar for precision in many
aspects of bicycle manufacture.

Sheldon "Better, Not Perfect" Brown
+----------------------------------------+
| Cyclists fare best when they act and |
| are treated as drivers of vehicles. |
| -- John Forester |
| http://www.johnforester.com/ |
+----------------------------------------+
Harris Cyclery, West Newton, Massachusetts
Phone 617-244-9772 FAX 617-244-1041
http://harriscyclery.com
Hard-to-find parts shipped Worldwide
http://captainbike.com http://sheldonbrown.com

Dear Sheldon,

The same thing happened to motorcycle quality.

Once Honda began flooding the market in the 1960's, it
became painfully obvious that motorcycle engines could run
without dripping oil like melting blocks of ice.

The same Japanese quality and precision led to the
apocryphal computer industry story in which a U.S. computer
company specified a 0.01% defect rate in the memory chips
from its Japanese supplier and received a standard box of
ten thousand chips--plus a plastic bag containing a single
chip with one pin removed and a cruel note that said, "Here
is the defective chip that you requested."

W. Edwards Deming

From A Muzi:

Quoted message said:

Out here in the real world, most bikes in for alignment have
rear ends not centered. Frame ends arrive in random planes.
It's nice to be straight. Just because. It's >cheap, too.

[relating to broken rear dropouts]

From my limited observations, the curb hoppers were the ones who broke the old
style horizontal DO's. Nice bikes, no sympathy. Too bad. --TP

So, the old story goes:

A bunch of Japanese automotive engineers were visiting Detroit, got to
talking with their opposite numbers about similarities and differences
between their work environments.

Detroit guy says, "Ya know, we feel that teamwork is really important,
so we tend to socialize togeteher a lot. Every Friday night, the whole
engineering staff goes out to a bar together, drinks a lot of beer, then
we go out the back and have a contest to see who can pee the farthest."

Japanese guy says, "Wow that's really strange, we do very much the same
thing, only two differences: We drink sake, instead of beer, and our
peeing contests are scored by accuracy, not distance...

Sheldon "If A Story Is Good Enough, It Doesn't Need To Actually Be True"
Brown
Newtonville, Massachusetts
+---------------------------------------------------------+
| I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because |
| if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it. |
| --Clarence Darrow |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
Harris Cyclery, West Newton, Massachusetts
Phone 617-244-9772 FAX 617-244-1041
http://harriscyclery.com
Hard-to-find parts shipped Worldwide
http://captainbike.com http://sheldonbrown.com

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 12:52:09 -0700, [email hidden] may have

Quoted message said:

Once Honda began flooding the market in the 1960's, it
became painfully obvious that motorcycle engines could run
without dripping oil like melting blocks of ice.

Provided that they weren't British.

Quoted message said:

The same Japanese quality and precision led to the
apocryphal computer industry story in which a U.S. computer
company specified a 0.01% defect rate in the memory chips
from its Japanese supplier and received a standard box of
ten thousand chips--plus a plastic bag containing a single
chip with one pin removed and a cruel note that said, "Here
is the defective chip that you requested."

Trans-Pacific quality can be apocryphal at times as well[1].
Fairchild Semiconductor had a contract with Ford for production of
certain IC chips for a while, but they lost both the contract and a
large amount of money when a tool inspector in their locally-staffed
plant in (I believe it was) Indonesia did not scrap a punching die
with a chipped tooth because he believed that it would make no
difference. In the vast majority of cases, he would have been right,
but the Ford-proprietary chip whose legs it shaped were subjected to
automated 100% QC testing *at Ford*, and the chipped tooth left a
small tab in place at one end of the package which caused the chip to
fail to enter the socket of the testing setup. As a result, the chips
had 100% reject rate which Fairchild was blissfully unaware of until
Ford shipped the rejected chips back, at which point there was more
than a semi-trailer load of them.

This event is sometimes cited as an example of the reason why a
manufacturer should always use *exactly* the same QC testing procedure
as is employed by the customer.

[1] There is nothing quite as amusing as reading the instruction
manuals supplied with some Pacific-rim-origin merchandise. This is
one area where QC has tended not just to lag behind, but to
dramatically fall over clutching its chest immediately after the
starting gun is fired.

--
My email address is antispammed; pull WEEDS if replying via e-mail.
Typoes are not a bug, they're a feature.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.

"Mark Janeba" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Tom Sherman said:

Jobst Brandt said:

...
I think the attached URL explained who "Trigger" was adequately.

Story I heard was that Trigger got stuffed (mounted, as in taxidermy).

Mark Janeba

I certainly hope he wasn't mounted (as in BDSM). Hate to see us beating a
dead horse on this subject.

I did to a bike that was given to me 2 years ago. It
had a snapped rear derailleur and the wheel was trashed beyond repair.
Big chain ring was taco. I replaced thing from my spare parts box and
it went from a 15 speed to 21 speed. And fto what it today 24 speed
commuter. Lighting system, rack & crate,V
brakes,gripshifters,flatbars. Its a late 80s Schwinn Probe lugged
steel frame. A total work horse, up too 2 12 packs of beer in crate
which is mounted to rack using zip ties. Rack is mounted to seatpost.

<< Just curious...how do they do this? What are the tools and
techniques

Quoted message said:

involved? >><BR><BR>

I put the BB shell in a vice(BB out), with the back of the frame facing me. I
measure it for alignment and then gently move the stays out or in to get the
distance and alignment correct. I then put the dropout alignment tools in,
align the dropouts, then check it again.

Peter Chisholm
Vecchio's Bicicletteria
1833 Pearl St.
Boulder, CO, 80302
(303)440-3535
http://www.vecchios.com
"Ruote convenzionali costruite eccezionalmente bene"