The "I'm an idiot" Thread

Just starting down the waxed chains route for my MTB and gravel bikes for me and the wife. All was going well, had the wife’s brand new bike in the stand putting the freshly waxed chain on. Went great. Noticed some dust on the bike so I grabbed the cleaning cloth I’ve been using on all other bikes and wiped the frame down. Forgot I’ve been using Pedro’s bike lust, a cleaner/polish, for years. Her new bike is/was matte finish. Her frame is now nice and shiny and you can see all the carbon joins and where it was sanded smooth. Damn matte finishes. Hope a lot of dusty riding will dull it back down.

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Originally Posted by Flounder

Just starting down the waxed chains route for my MTB and gravel bikes for me and the wife. All was going well, had the wife’s brand new bike in the stand putting the freshly waxed chain on. Went great. Noticed some dust on the bike so I grabbed the cleaning cloth I’ve been using on all other bikes and wiped the frame down. Forgot I’ve been using Pedro’s bike lust, a cleaner/polish, for years. Her new bike is/was matte finish. Her frame is now nice and shiny and you can see all the carbon joins and where it was sanded smooth. Damn matte finishes. Hope a lot of dusty riding will dull it back down.

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wipe it down with isopropyl - will restore the matte'ness

First time having a li-ion battery explode...
Attachment 496418
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Broke a mounting tab on my Elemnt Bolt V2 earlier this year in a crash. My glue-job repair didn't hold up so I was going to install a Dog Ears replacement mount over the top.

Was having trouble getting it aligned since it requires you to force in two fairly fat screws...so I figured it needed a little pilot hole. Just a mm or two to make sure the screw goes in where it needs to.

Drill goes through the back of the mount and drops a fraction of an inch. I didn't think much of it at first...but then something made my spidey sense go off....where's the battery on these things? Probably right behind the mounting bracket.

There was a solvent smell...but that could just be from the glues used to seal it up and make it waterproof...Stuck the probe from my Thermapen in there and it was 10F above ambient, but who knows...unit could be using a little juice keeping the clock running which generates some heat in the sealed unit...don't want to toss a $280 GPS if I don't have to.

So I kept poking and prodding at it trying to determine if I had compromised the battery. Now the thermapen says temps are a 10-15 degrees higher...
Suddenly it is shooting smoke, fire, and awful smelling gas (that may or may not include HF) out the hole...get it tossed outside on the concrete patio where it finishes burning out...

Idiot score:
- Drilling into the back of a bike computer without disassembling it first
- Continuing to poke at a possibly compromised li-ion battery
- Doing it in my kitchen

Genius score:
- Having the sense that something might be wrong...if I had just glued it up and gone to bed, I'd have left a ticking time bomb that could easily go off when unattended and near flammable things.


The Dog Ears thing is a neat product and this is obviously not their fault...but I do wish they used a size smaller screws (and included a warning not to drill pilot holes for idiots like me)...If I were doing it again, I'd just use a centerpunch and even though they say to install the screws first for alignment, maybe I'd attach the mount first with gflex and only install the screws after the fact (or skip them altogether).

Computers run on smoke, so when the smoke leaks out yer facked

Damn, glad that didn't turn out far worse!!

In my situation, lunchtime doing lower leg service while kinda listening to a work call, hammer slid slightly off the 10mm socket I was using to unseat lowers and of course got my thumb pretty good. Not broken and hurts less few hours later, but gonna be a bunch of colors tomorrow.

If you're going to bleed your SRAM brakes, make sure to cobble together a mish-mash bleed kit by buying just the proprietary doodad and using old mis-sized tubing with it. That way, half the fluid winds up in a puddle on the floor. Now, if you're lucky, that puddle will be directly underneath the caliper you're working on. Don't worry, you're a master mechanic and those pads definitely won't slip through your fluid-covered butterfingers. But when they do, and because the gods are cruel, they will 100% land face down in that puddle of slippery brake juice. Both of them. Real good thing you went with the organic compound, maximum pad-fluid absorption you know? No, no, go ahead and use them still. I mean, they were 30 bucks after all! Congratulations on your new PR's, freed from the chains of functional brakes


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Installed new brakes and levers on my singlespeed commuter. They have these little spacers that you can use to make the hoods sit in a more modern, flatter style. Thought that sounded good so used them. Took a quick look, seemed fine and figured I was done. I was in a hurry to finish so I could ride it to work. Now, I KNOW from past experience - new levers with a different angle - go ride the bike before you wrap the bars. But I've done this so many times, and I didn't want to ride all the way to work with no bar tape. The old tape was old and falling apart and I was so excited for nice plush bars.

Now just to make things more fun, since I was using cheap amazon special bar tape with no glue on the back, I decided to wrap in around the hoods instead of putting a small piece on the hood clamp to cover it.

All of which means that now, after I've ridden it and discovered that the hoods face too far downward and need to be rotate up, that I have to unwrap the bars completely to move the levers. Which I just don't wanna do. Cause I'm lazy. Never mind the fact that it would probably take less time to unwrap, move the levers, and rewrap than it took me to write this post bitching about it. Not the point.

Anyway, yeah, ride the damn bike before you wrap the bars. Dumbass. I wonder how many times I've made this exact same mistake? 5? 10?

There's about an 80% chance I'm going to fix this by just rotating the bars upward till it feels ok.

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Originally Posted by Huskier

If you're going to bleed your SRAM brakes, make sure to cobble together a mish-mash bleed kit by buying just the proprietary doodad and using old mis-sized tubing with it. That way, half the fluid winds up in a puddle on the floor. Now, if you're lucky, that puddle will be directly underneath the caliper you're working on. Don't worry, you're a master mechanic and those pads definitely won't slip through your fluid-covered butterfingers. But when they do, and because the gods are cruel, they will 100% land face down in that puddle of slippery brake juice. Both of them. Real good thing you went with the organic compound, maximum pad-fluid absorption you know? No, no, go ahead and use them still. I mean, they were 30 bucks after all! Congratulations on your new PR's, freed from the chains of functional brakes


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lol, needed that chuckle this am


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Solid idiot moment last night. I pulled the wheels off my GG to swap tires and noticed the derailleur seemed really wobbly, a bit odd as the shifting was perfect on the last ride. A quick look revealed a destroyed UDH, the cylindrical part that goes into the frame having sheared from the flat derailleur mount. Weird but OK, and I have a bunch of hangers in a box so no big deal. I install one, get the torque wrench, set it to the 25 Nm spec, start cranking, and shear the hanger in half the exact same way the other had failed. WTF? I chalk this up to bad luck, the thing probably had a manufacturing defect. Oh well, I put a second one in the frame, start torquing it, snap, same story. At that point it's clear the hangers aren't the issue but it took me another 10 minutes of faffing around to realize that the el cheapo torque wrench I bought to supplement the fancy one that maxes at 15 Nm is in fact not a torque wrench when loosening something or in this case dealing with reverse threads. I was basically cranking on the poor hanger waiting for a click that never came... Fortunately I had an old UDH kicking around the parts bin which I managed not to destroy.

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Originally Posted by Boissal

Solid idiot moment last night. I pulled the wheels off my GG to swap tires and noticed the derailleur seemed really wobbly, a bit odd as the shifting was perfect on the last ride. A quick look revealed a destroyed UDH, the cylindrical part that goes into the frame having sheared from the flat derailleur mount. Weird but OK, and I have a bunch of hangers in a box so no big deal. I install one, get the torque wrench, set it to the 25 Nm spec, start cranking, and shear the hanger in half the exact same way the other had failed. WTF? I chalk this up to bad luck, the thing probably had a manufacturing defect. Oh well, I put a second one in the frame, start torquing it, snap, same story. At that point it's clear the hangers aren't the issue but it took me another 10 minutes of faffing around to realize that the el cheapo torque wrench I bought to supplement the fancy one that maxes at 15 Nm is in fact not a torque wrench when loosening something or in this case dealing with reverse threads. I was basically cranking on the poor hanger waiting for a click that never came... Fortunately I had an old UDH kicking around the parts bin which I managed not to destroy.

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Not to pile on but you also might have destroyed the torque wrench unless it's a ratchet style wrench that's designed to work both ways.
Those pre-set 4, 5, or 6Nm wrenches are trash if you use them to loosen even ounce.

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Originally Posted by Roxtar

Not to pile on but you also might have destroyed the torque wrench unless it's a ratchet style wrench that's designed to work both ways.
Those pre-set 4, 5, or 6Nm wrenches are trash if you use them to loosen even ounce.

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Good to know. This is a bigger wrench I only use for high torque stuff, above the 15 Nm that my little more accurate one will deal with. The little one is a both way ratchet and I expected the big one to be the same way. Lesson learned...

Thread drift—any mfger making a stronger UDH? The ones from my Yeti dealer have been garbage. All alloy, not SRAM. Similar to https://bikerumor.com/the-robert-axl...illeur-hanger/

Meanwhile the proprietary hangers on my Whyte and Kona bikes never needed straightening or replacing after years of abuse on rock gnar trails.

We carry alloy Wheels Mfg UDH for folk that kill SRAM ones.


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Originally Posted by joetron

We carry alloy Wheels Mfg UDH for folk that kill SRAM ones.


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X2. The Wheels Mfg hangers have always been top notch. As most of their stuff is.

also look at North Shore Billet, they been making precision machined bike parts for > 20 years

Ya NSB is always a good bet IME.

A bit frustrating that mfgers (like Wheels MFg) aren’t specifying which alloy they use. Because it’s UDH, the cross section is the same for all of them. Not sure if my post made it clear but I wasn’t using SRAM udh. 7075 would be stiffer that the 6061 I think nearly everyone is using but not stating.

No stiffness change from 6061 to 7075 on a strength increase. If you want stiffer you need a different base metal.

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Originally Posted by frorider

Ya NSB is always a good bet IME.

A bit frustrating that mfgers (like Wheels MFg) aren’t specifying which alloy they use. Because it’s UDH, the cross section is the same for all of them. Not sure if my post made it clear but I wasn’t using SRAM udh. 7075 would be stiffer that the 6061 I think nearly everyone is using but not stating.

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Meant to write stronger not stiffer. 7075 tensile and yield strength are almost twice that of 6061 at the expense of more difficult machineability right?

I’ve had 7075 hangers before but it’s been a while since I’ve even thought about this topic. Been many years since I’ve bent a hanger

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Originally Posted by Roxtar

Those pre-set 4, 5, or 6Nm wrenches are trash if you use them to loosen even ounce.

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Ah, good to know. I took a couple of those to Oaxaca last year to reassemble upon arrival, and then used them to take apart at the end. Sure enough, next time I went to use them they were done.

I've been trying to teach my dog that when I'm taking my hardtail, she's coming along, and if it's the full sus, she stays at the house. All season I've kept to that, but last week I snapped the derailleur on the hardtail and decided to take the FS out with the dog. Took a loose corner too hot and wiped out, and landed on a baby head with my chest and cracked three ribs. That's what I get for breaking my agreement with my dog!

Ugh cracked ribs suuuuuuck.

Nobody type anything funny.

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Well, this wasn’t funny to me…

The other day I was franken-fabbing something that would work better for my dropper lever now that one thumb is almost fully functional.
I have a parts bin with a bunch of levers, clamps, hardware, etc. I was mixing and matching with different clamps, bolts, etc. I found an EVII adaptor, which seemed to work, but whatever I did, it wouldn’t get tight enough. Try beer can shims, etc, which seemed to work, so I gave the little m4 bolt a nice, snug turn to get it tight…something still wasn’t right, and definitely felt off.
Turns out the bolt was about two millimeters too long, and all I succeeded in doing is make a nice divot on the brand new One Up carbon bar.


Ahhhh…fuck. I’m not even tempted to ride it, just due to the location and how it could easily propagate into a crack, shatter, stress riser, whatevs.
It’s awfully purty, still.

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Originally Posted by toast2266

Nobody type anything funny.

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Haha, no sneezes either.

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Originally Posted by McShortyShorts

I've been trying to teach my dog that when I'm taking my hardtail, she's coming along, and if it's the full sus, she stays at the house. All season I've kept to that, but last week I snapped the derailleur on the hardtail and decided to take the FS out with the dog. Took a loose corner too hot and wiped out, and landed on a baby head with my chest and cracked three ribs. That's what I get for breaking my agreement with my dog!

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McShortRibs?

too soon?

heal fast.