Hollowtech II crank removal

Did you loosen the crank bolts first?

yes, i did that. its just that damn cap.

that cap has probably (of course , its no consolation to you) been

overtightened.

pistole said:

that cap has probably (of course , its no consolation to you) been

overtightened.

the cap only gets fitted to a little more than finger tightness. it's made of plastic and i can't imagine how you'd overtighten it without stripping the threads (plastic) out.

did you assemble it yourself? if not the person who did it might have put some loctite on the threads which is preventing you from breaking the seal.

theres really not much to it, remove cap, undo the two pinch bolts and the assembly all comes to pieces. typically takes less than a minute and is much simpler than campag square tapers.

i've got two spanners for the outboard bb removal. they both have inbuilt end cap tools on the reverse end. one of them has the equivalent of a torque wrench in that once you get the cap up to the correct tightness you can't tighten it any further as the the head then spins. the other doesn't have this feature. if you can find one without the torque function i'd try giving it a few taps with a hammer to see if you can break the seal on it.

--brett

thanks. i'll just have the original mechanic get it this time and hopefully it should come much easier next time around