So an initial plan to give my Look 566 a general clean-up has grown arms and legs.
It's now a bare frame!
The headset was in a bit of a state, with rusty water running down the fork from the crown race.
Removing the lower headset bearing was a bit of a pig: the cartridge bearing was seized into the frame.
On this carbon frame, the cups are not pressed-in things that can be knocked out with a headset rocket; they are an integral part of the frame's head tube.
The bearing was seized into the actual frame.
Getting increasingly medieval, the bearing cartridge eventually disintegrated, with the inner race and ball cage coming out, leaving the seized outer race as an indistinguishable part of the frame.
This was cut out using a dremmel grinding disc to carefully grind away a section of it.
Once it was no longer a complete circle, it collapsed fairly readily, and the frame cleaned up.
But now: what bearings to replace them with?
The Internet was full of contradictory and wrong information.
Was it 36/45 degrees or 45/45?
Old forum threads pointed to Look website documents that no longer existed.
The website has been purged of actual useful technical content in favour of Bling.
In the end, I measured it on the old bearings, using some home-made gauges.
Using some thin rigid metal ( old coke can ), I carefully measured out 36 and 45 degree angles using a protractor, and cut them using kitchen scissors.
The angles are very noticeably different.
This was surprisingly effective, using my magnifying-glass work light.
On the outside chamfer ( frame-facing, known to be 45 ) the 36 gauge quite clearly did not align, and the 45 one aligned perfectly.
On the inside chamfer ( steerer-facing, unknown ) the 45 gauge was miles out, but the 36 gauge aligned perfectly.
I'd expected this experiment to be a bit inconclusive, but no.
Absolutely 100% confidence.
But it does require a high magnification worklight to see the difference.
Bearing gauges by
Ron Lowe, on Flickr
