So, I've finally done it! The Alfine 11 hub gear service.
According to Shimano this should be done after the first 1000km and then every 5000km thereafter.
Alfie my recumbent trike has done a shade over 2,000 miles already and this is my first hub gear service. This is because the original hub started misbehaving and Madison replaced it under warranty. The new hub had done 700 miles so it was time for its spa treatment.
So what do you need to do this operation?
(a) A bike with an Alfine 11 hub gear
(b) The replacement mineral oil (Shimano part SG-S700).
As will become clear, in the photographs below I have used the wrong oil! The correct oil is dark green and treacly, as pictured above, not pink. Read on...(c) The Oil Maintenance Kit (Shimano part TL-S703)
First thing to note is that the oil was extremely hard to come by (it was out of stock almost everywhere but I managed to get some from a small mail-order bike shop). It's also expensive at £16 for 50ml.
(And it was the wrong stuff anyway, as I now know!)I initially thought I'd get a local bike shop to do the job but once I'd downloaded the servicing instructions from Shimano it seemed fairly easy. I'd need the oil maintenance kit which was about £45 but once I had that I could always do my own servicing so it should work out much cheaper in the long run.
PreparationThe instructions say to do this outside in the fresh air. A slightly less windy day would have been preferable as my instructions had a tendency to want to fly away.
I also needed a size 10 spanner and a small allen key. I also wore latex gloves as suggested but didn't bother with the eye goggles - that seemed a bit overkill.
I got the trike ready on the grass with the front wheels chocked.
The back wheel was on some cardboard in case any small bits got dropped.
So here are the two bits needed - the very pink oil and the Oil Maintenance Kit.
Note that the £45 Maintenance Kit consists of a syringe, a bit of pipe with a metal end, and a big jar for your waste oil. This is not good value for money - I reckon that lot should cost less than a fiver. Ho hum.
Here am I, latex gloves in hand, ready to start.
The ServiceSo, firstly I have to undo the oil port bolt with a small allen key.
This is surprisingly difficult on my trike as with the spoke lacing there is barely any room. A shorter allen key would have been much more helpful but I managed it eventually.
This is what came out - a small bolt and an O-ring (which actually needed to be back on the hub the whole time; I was always paranoid about losing it though!)
Now to screw on the pipe that will go from the syringe to the hub.
Once again, it was difficult to do this as the pipe is long and the spokes don't leave much room for wielding a spanner. I think this would be fine on a normal-sized wheel but a 20" one is a bit of a challenge.
The instructions say to hold the syringe within the spokes as you rotate the wheel 180 degrees but this wasn't possible with my 20" wheel and it was easier to just thread the syringe round the chainstay and mudguard metalwork.
The instructions say to leave it all for five minutes like this for the oil to drain down.
Then I had to very slowly use the syringe to suck out the old oil.
The oil begins to appear:
It came out as thick, black grot.
It was actually quite hard to do this well without getting loads of air bubbles. I don't think the air bubbles matter much in themselves but the syringe was only 30ml and I was expecting 25ml of oil so didn't want too much air. The slower I pulled the syringe the better as I had to wait for the oil to flow down to the bottom of the hub to be sucked out.
The whole procedure probably took about 10 minutes.
Here I am with about 20mls of old oil which is about all I was able to extract.
Now the instructions said at this point to turn the wheel again so the oil port was uppermost and then remove the bleed nipple and pipe along with syringe. Due to the difficulties of getting tools onto the hub, and the fact that the pipe seemed pretty much clear, I decided to just remove the syringe.
Here it is - yuck!
And here it is poured into that vastly-expensive pot that came as part of the kit. It was like thick, black treacle and was quite hard to squirt out of the syringe.
The next set of instructions are to use half of the oil in the kit to flush through the system, i.e. it would be put in the hub, sloshed around a bit and then drained out again.
The instructions said to add the pipe first before the syringe. Mine was already in place, of course.
I then looked at the oil bottle and discovered a crack in the plastic at the top. James helped me to fix the tube that came with it to the syringe and he held up the bottle as I used the syringe to drain 25ml but it was clear the top was leaking as oil was running down the side of the bottle. And this is expensive stuff!
In the end we took the whole top off the bottle and put the pipe in it, using the syringe to suck it up from there. I wasn't sure how much oil had been lost so only picked up 20ml.
It's a lovely pink colour!
(Or at least it is if you're putting the wrong oil in there, hydraulic mineral oil, instead of hub gear oil! It should have been dark green...)I put the syringe onto the pipe coming out of the hub and started slowly squeezing it in. I had to pull the syringe plunger back a couple of times to let some of the air pressure out but the whole job was pretty easy and all 20ml was in the hub after 30 seconds or so.
I then had the fun of undoing the bit of pipe and putting the oil port bolt back in without losing the O-ring. This was quite tricky again but I managed it.
The instructions say to pedal for a minute, changing up and down the gears, so with James's assistance (can't lift the back of the trike and pedal and change gear on my own!) we did so.
Then it was back to the beginning of the procedure - oil port facing up, adding the pipe, adding the syringe, rotating the wheel 180 degrees, leaving it for five minutes to settle, then using the syringe to slowly drain the oil.
This time the oil came out much more readily as it was clearly thinner - but look at the colour change!
From pink to black in five and a half minutes!
Really black, but it came out with fewer air bubbles which was a relief!
A good 25mls extracted so it's clearly helped some more of the original oil to come out.
Once all the oil appeared to have been drained I once again spun the wheel 180 degrees ready for the second 25mls of oil which would be what stayed in the hub for the next 5000 miles.
It was tricky to drain the oil out of the bottle seeing as I had to use the tube. It picked up lots of air when it got near to the bottom (and I could see I only had about 19mls) and then, horror of horrors, I had pulled the plunger a bit too far out and a trickle of oil was leaking out that way. Argh! I pushed it back in and hoped I hadn't lost too much.
In the end I managed to get about 22ml from the bottle; there was still a tiny bit left in there but it seemed almost impossible to remove. I hope that Alfie doesn't mind being down a few mls.
I pushed it in very easily as before.
I then did up the oil port bolt, having managed not to lose the O-ring at all which was a bonus!
I wiped a few drops of spilled oil (that came out of the pipe when I removed it) from the hub and we were ready to go.
So this is what everything looked like afterwards:
It wasn't a particularly mucky job and was basically very easy. it would be easier on a larger-wheeled bike of course.
I shall take Alfie out this afternoon to check all works OK. I did the oil port bolt up reasonably tightly but it was very hard to wield the allen key in such a small space so I shall check it again in a day or two to check it hasn't worked loose at all.
I now have 5000km or two years until the next oil change, whichever is sooner.
I sent a link to my blog post of this to ICE trikes and also to Huw at Madison (the Shimano distributor) who swapped my original hub for me. As events transpired, the fact that Huw read it was a Mighty Good Thing!