Beach Cruiser Klunker / Rat Rod Project pt.1 - Coaster Brake Chronicles & Truing Front

Little by little I've started to attack the mechanical issues on Monty the Klunker/RatRod/BoardBike. Something I was really suprised about was how loose the front spokes were. The rear spokes aren't that loose at all, and the front wheel of a beach cruiser isn't exactly a high stress area, so who knows how they got that way. Maybe there was a basket attached to the front at some point which supported some heavy lifting, I dunno. Anyway I got it sorted out proper. Started out just tightening the spokes while it was still in the fork, but eventually stopped being lazy and broke out Ye Olde Truing Stand. What you don't see here is that I took a pretty good amount of time to wire brush the rust out of the inside of the rim, which surely would have caused some flats.

Days went by and the weekend came. The next and probably most major mechanical issue to be attacked was the rear hub / Bendix coaster brake. The hub was not engaging in either direction, it would not drive or brake, and turning the sprocket in either direction was crazy hard. Thankfully it was not completely seized up though. During my time at Golden Ring Bicycle Shop back in Baltimore, I repaired a zillion Bendix and Shimano coaster brakes, and usually it was a case of the parts being fine, but the lubrication inside of the hub being completely gummed up and making all the parts actually stick together. My boss back in Baltimore told me that the reason this happens is that grease actually contains a solvent as one of the ingredients and eventually the solvent will eat away at the actual portions of the grease that make it slippery, leaving a sticky mess that can actually harden considerably if left to do so. I was pretty sure this was the issue with this hub. I hadn't overhauled a coaster in 20 years but it was time to dig in.

Not sure what the exact model of Bendix coaster brake this is. The bike is from 1981. If you need to ID a Bendix coaster brake hop over to this site and take a look.

The axle threads are in great condition so the nuts came off fine which is a bonus. I can't tell you how many of these things I've had to work on where the axles have been victims of many accidents or the bike just being thrown down when some kid was done riding it, so the threads are jacked up out near the edges. That always makes it a pain in the butt. I got lucky I guess. Twenty teeth on the rear sprocket.

Snap ring and dust cover of the drive side came off easily. The next part is where I started to run into some difficulty. I wanted to remove everything by loosening the cone and lock nut on the drive side. For some reason I remember that this was the easier way to do this repair when it came to the reassembly phase. Unfortunately I am not equipped with cone wrenches that will fit this wheel, so I kind of had to work with what it would allow me to do. Of course this meant that it wanted to be disassembled by the brake arm side. Okay, I can deal with that I guess. The next problem was that I do not have one of these:

For those of you that don't know, this tool is called an Axle Vice. The concept here is that the aluminum inner pads are softer than the steel axle, so you can put this tool in a bench vice, then insert the axle in it, then clamp down as hard as you want because the aluminum will bite into the threads but will not crush them. Awesome right?! However, since I am a Low Budget Soul Rider, I don't have every freakin tool under the sun, so I had to improvise. Hmmmm...let's see...maybe I have some aluminum around here somewhere...let me me think. Oh right, I have a BUNCH of aluminum...

Aluminum BEER CANS. That's right, I folded over a can a few times and used just enough pressure on the vice to get it to work. The whole thing had me laughing at my geniusness. NOTE: I do NOT recommend trying this yourself. Spring for the axle vice it will be worth it. If I ever have to do another axle related repair I'm gonna. This approach was actually pretty risky and I could have really cost myself some time and money if I'd have screwed up the threads.

Now we are starting to get into the meat of things. That white stuff on the inside of this part is basically a hard crumbly powder that used to be nice slippery white lithium grease. The brown stuff was so sticky I am not actually using any pinch pressure to hold it up, it is just sticking to my thumb and finger.

The inside of the hib was ridiculous. Everything just sticking together like crazy. The pic above is the brake arm side. The pic below is the drive side. It took a while to get the drive side disassembled because there is a component inside that has some very deep threads which slides a mechanism horizontally inside the hub to activate the brake or drive the wheel. That component had become stuck in a position where the threads wouldn't egage. I finally had to break out some car brake cleaner to get the pieces loos enough to move at all, and then had to work at it about another 10 mins to get them apart. Very relieved once that part was over with, because after that I was sure no parts were actually broken.

Here are pretty much all the parts except the axle and brake are side bearing (which was still in the vice) before cleaning.

The brake shoes. yeah that "grease" is over 20 years old, it is disgusting.

The component above with the super deep threads is actually three pieces and threads into the component in the top right. These were the pieces that were stuck together so bad that I had trouble getting them out.

The hub after using car brake cleaner to free the stuck parts, but before deep cleaning it. The brown gunk on the inner ridge got totally removed.

A close up view of my LBSR Beer Can Axle Vice® after use. Now to the Cleaning and reassembly phase.

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My brother recently replaced practically the entire top end of his truck motor, and as part of that project he added a real deal parts washer to the workshop. This thing is super rad. It pumps a continuous flow of solvent into the basin and you can get the parts super scrubbed without using a bunch of aerosol crap. In this case we are using kerosene. Had to be kind of careful, super flammable. I did wheel it outside though to lessen the fumes.

Here are the parts after cleaning. Note that I was not going for a full on restoration type cleaning here. That would be outside the scope of this project. Keeping the patina of the old parts is important to the rat-roddiness of this build, but I wanted all of the working surfaces to be dialed in, and it worked out well. 

Remember I was saying that I wanted to take it apart from the drive side because putting it back together would be much easier? Yeah well, I was right. When you do it from the drive side, you can sort of pre-assemble the inner and the brake shoes using new grease to sort of stick everything together, then slide the entire mechanism inside the hub in one shot. Unfortunately it is not that easy if you have disassembled it the way I had to. i would love to have gotten some photos of the reassembly process, but by this time I had had a bunch of beers, and once I started putting new grease on everything, I didn't want to get it all over the camera, because my fingers where covered in it. Also, getting it back together from the non-drive side was very tricky and once I got the brake shoes in place I had to keep the momentum going because if just one of them would move out of place I'd have to take the whole thing back apart and start the reassembly over. So I kept on pushing.

Sorry the final phot is a little blurry. By this time I was a little blurry too. But even in the blurry pic you can tel that it is much cleaner than when I started. I still had to put on the brake arm and lock nut at this point.

When it was all done I picked it up and checked it to see if the drive would engage, and if the brakes worked. Totally solid!

So, I can still rock a coaster brake overhaul after all these years. Yeah!