My friend Greg maintains that if your bike has a creak, it’s best to leave it alone, because if you do manage to exorcise that one, another creak will come take its place. Nonetheless, I decided yesterday to deal with a persistent creak down near my bottom bracket on the Santa Cruz.
This creak started (true to form), just after I’d dealt with a bit of play that had developed in one of my shock mount bushings. That was an easy enough fix, once I got the parts from the bike store, but as soon as I solved that — finally, and after more than a month of annoyance — up popped the new creak.
I’ve had this creak before, and if it’s the same one it just means cleaning and tightening the bottom bracket and crank threads. I girded my loins with some YouTube how-to’s (I can never remember what type of crank I have on which bike, or how to extract it), went out to start the process, and — the bolt holding the crank on is loose, like loose loose. I tightened it back up, thinking that might be all that was really wrong. Bullet dodged!
I did a towpath ride this morning to Northampton, and the creak, if anything, was worse.
