Had a slight ticking noise that occurred intermittantly when pedaling.
After testing everything I could think of for a period of months, yesterday I finally isolated the noise. Did this by putting the front wheel of the bike into the garage wall, so I could put weight on the pedals in static mode. Found that a alternating load on the crank arms would produce one tick or pop which sounded like it was from the BB area. Feeling for the tick by hand, discovered it was actually coming from the left rear dropout.
My bike has a CF rear with a two-piece aluminum dropout. The dropout ends are bonded into the seat and chain stays, and held together with a flathead screw which is "countersunk" into the aluminum end. Found that the beveled head of the steel screw was corroded, causing it to sieze. Cleaned the screw and dropout countersink of rust, applied a light coating of grease, retorqued the screw and the noise was gone.
Wanted to share this problem and fix; seems like this will be a common problem on bikes with similar rear dropout design. Not really a great design from a corrosion or strenght standpoint. At least the fix only took a few minutes....after months of looking for the source of the noise.
After testing everything I could think of for a period of months, yesterday I finally isolated the noise. Did this by putting the front wheel of the bike into the garage wall, so I could put weight on the pedals in static mode. Found that a alternating load on the crank arms would produce one tick or pop which sounded like it was from the BB area. Feeling for the tick by hand, discovered it was actually coming from the left rear dropout.
My bike has a CF rear with a two-piece aluminum dropout. The dropout ends are bonded into the seat and chain stays, and held together with a flathead screw which is "countersunk" into the aluminum end. Found that the beveled head of the steel screw was corroded, causing it to sieze. Cleaned the screw and dropout countersink of rust, applied a light coating of grease, retorqued the screw and the noise was gone.
Wanted to share this problem and fix; seems like this will be a common problem on bikes with similar rear dropout design. Not really a great design from a corrosion or strenght standpoint. At least the fix only took a few minutes....after months of looking for the source of the noise.
