hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2979.txt

Episode: 2979
Title: HPR2979: Bicycle Freewheel Maintenance
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2979/hpr2979.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:10:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 2979 for Thursday, 2 January 2020.
Today's show is entitled Bicycle Free Wheel Maintenance. It is hosted by John Kulp
and is about eight minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is. I explain how to Luba Bicycle Free Wheel.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and left here at Louisiana.
As soon as I started talking, a loud car just went by. In case you didn't hear that,
this is John Kulp and left here at Louisiana. In case you can't tell, I'm outside.
This is going to be a quick episode. It only just occurred to me to record this episode.
I just did a repair on my bicycle and I thought, you know what, maybe this ought to be an HPR episode.
So here we are. I'm just going to walk through what I did, what the first, what the problem was,
and then what I did. And maybe that will help somebody else out there fix this minor problem on their bicycle.
It's a noisy day here. It's a gorgeous day, December 19th in South Louisiana.
It's probably 55 degrees out here right now. It started out 32 or zero Celsius.
So it's cold this morning. But I noticed, I guess it was yesterday.
I noticed that my bike was doing something that it shouldn't be. And it is that the free wheel was messed up.
The free wheel is the part on the rear wheel of a bicycle that allows you to coast.
So when you're pedaling, the free wheel allows the chain to pull the wheel and make the bike go forward.
But when you stop pedaling or when you turn your pedals around backwards, the free wheel disengages and allows the wheel to spin freely.
And what I noticed was that my free wheel was apparently all gummed up and not working right.
Because when I was just like walking my bike, I noticed that the pedals were going around.
And when everything is correct, if you're just walking your bike along, the pedals should not move at all.
But my pedals were going around as if someone were pedaling them. And so that was an indication that the free wheel needed some attention.
Likewise, when I was riding the bike, the bike is still rideable. But it wasn't behaving quite right there either.
So when I was riding my bike and then I started coasting, I noticed that the chain suddenly lost all tension and went slack.
And it really ought to stay exactly the way it is.
And so it's a very easy bit of maintenance to address this.
I mean, you could take the brute force approach and just replace the free wheel.
And I considered ordering a new free wheel because they're not very much.
So my bike is a mid-80s Schwinn 10 speed.
And I've done some upgrades on it. I've got new dual pivot caliper brakes on it that's a significant upgrade.
I bought the bike for 13 bucks at Goodwill and then overhauled everything because like when I bought it, everything was frozen up and it wouldn't even move.
But I knew how to fix bikes, so I bought it and overhauled the hubs in the bottom bracket, put a new chain on it, put all new cables and cable housings, upgraded the brakes.
I swapped out the original drop handlebars for a pair of BMX handlebars that I found on a bicycle that was in a neighbor's garbage heap.
And so now I can sit up straighter on the bike.
Anyway, it's a mid-80s Schwinn 10 speed and so the free wheel is a five-speed free wheel.
So in other words, it's got five, what do you call them, gear, thingies of different sizes.
And then in the front there are the chain, there it's got two chain rings in the front.
And so you can just get a new free wheel for maybe ten to fifteen dollars, it's not an expensive thing.
But if you do that, you probably are also going to need to get a new chain because the chain and the free wheel sometimes work together in such a way that it stretches out the chain and then starts to misshape the free wheel.
And so if you replace the free wheel and not the chain, then you're going to hear this awful sound like gravel inside of a hubcap or something.
So anyway, the first thing to try is just lubricating it.
And so that's what I did.
I'm going to have a couple of pictures where I show how I've got the bike set up on its side.
You need to put the bicycle on its side with the free wheel facing up.
And it's not the easiest thing to do except for I've got a couple of empty kitty litter containers and I've got the bike sitting up on those.
It needs to be on its side in such a way that you can spin the wheel and it can just spin freely because you need to have the wheel spinning while you start dropping chain oil inside a little groove between the interior of the free wheel and then it's little housing there.
I'm going to see if I can get a picture of the disposition of the chain oil container.
The chain oil container probably has a long little, like a little straw kind of thing that comes out the top.
I need to get my phone out so I can take a picture.
So you just start spinning the free wheel and then dropping chain oil down in that little groove as best you can.
And once you get a bit of it in there, it ought to have freed it up.
Okay, so I'm going to put the chain thing right there and then take a picture.
I think that's good.
It's hard for me to do that. I've got the camera in one hand and the chain oil and the other.
And so I did that and let the wheel spin at both ways, counterclockwise and clockwise.
And then when you spin it clockwise again, the pedals should stop moving and they did. So my bike is fixed basically.
At least it's good until I decide I want to replace the free wheel and chain, which I might go ahead and do pretty soon.
But this at least allows me to get a temporary fix where it can be in good working order in the immediate future.
So I can take my time about getting the new parts and installing them. That's it.
So that's how you fix a stuck, I don't know, it's not exactly a stuck free wheel because the bike was still rideable but it wasn't moving.
If you find that when you walk your bike along the pedals move of their own accord, that's probably the issue you're having.
And it's very, very quick and easy to fix. That is it.
Sorry, that went actually longer than I thought it ought to in the future.
You know what happens is I'm a professor and a historian. I just can't help talking and giving the history of things.
So I was giving the history of my bicycle instead of just telling you what the problem was and telling how to fix it.
I hope you'll forgive me for that, hope you enjoyed hearing about how to do this very quick and easy bicycle repair.
And I will talk to you guys some other time, okay?
Bye.
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