VINTAGE Cannondale RESCUED and brought BACK TO LIFE! Full bicycle Tuneup – Clean, lube and adjust!

When’s the last time you thought about The Black Stallion? Well, that’s about how long it’s been since this one was ridden! The old SunTour XCE shifters and drivetrain sprang back to life with a quick shot of One-Step and a whole lot of other stuff! A VERY SATISFYING, very relaxing video that shows some old stuff you just don’t see too often! Enjoy!

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The Black Stallion returns hey bike Farmers thanks for clicking in we got ourselves a big old greasy canondale here this is straight out of the era when I first started working on bikes I’m thinking early ’90s 9192 um it’s got these Sun tour Express shifters on it or drivetrain I guess um

Which is kind of neat a nice novel design you know it’s typical Sun tour where they were on to something really good right before before they failed I don’t know um it’s kind of a shame that sun tour went away I think they had some really good uh product development teams

Working for them and had a lot of things going and they just didn’t win but anyway we’re going to get this thing working great I don’t think it’s going to give us a whole lot of trouble but I’ve been wrong before um these Canales are kind of quirky handmade in America

Aluminum bikes um I don’t know if they’re the first to do it they’re you know they’re kind of OG right um so this is an old school canondale um pretty neat bike um the guy’s already you know done the super upright everything he

Just likes it how it is I told him I can make a few more tweaks and improvements but he’s like I just want to see if I get back into biking again so I love jobs like these these are people that used to ride their bikes and took it

Seriously at one time took a little break and trying to get back on it so let’s throw it up in the repair stand and get started it’s always a good idea to start with a Fresh coat of grease in your seat tube so we’ll do that here quick and

Uh spray a little bit of Tri flow on the skewer helps things move freely get a good clamp yeah you can still see there’s still original Grease this has been pretty tight and dry all right let’s put some air in these tires first thing actually this tire is on backwards

Let’s flip that before we put air in it but we can get air in this one I like to put air in the tires first thing cuz then by the time you get done you know if there’s any leaks so I’m going to go with caution here fill it about halfway make sure

Nothing’s going to blow up on me bring it up to pressure slowly I just make them firm yeah so the tire tires have a direction to them so that’s pointing forward so I just want to make sure that it’s on the wheel the right way it’s not a real safety issue I

Don’t believe that it really makes a difference it’s just an aesthetic thing it’s just a design a general practice it’s just the way things are done I suppose it’s not a hard rule I get a lot of comments on the bikes where I don’t do this people like tires

On backwards like it doesn’t matter but I guess it sort of does so again fill it up like halfway just to make sure we’re not going to blow anything up and cause accidental urination even when I make sure sometimes it happens I mean the blowing the tire up not The Accidental

Urination okay we’re just going to set that aside give it a proper cleaning in a minute yeah so this bike is old enough that there aren’t lawyer lips on the end of this Fork don’t need to do anything with that skewer it’s a pre-lawsuit bike oh yeah he

Wanted these uh toe Clips taken off yeah I’m not a fan of toe Clips either I don’t even think they should be called Toe Clips but they are called Toe Clips the naming with the bike pedals where these are toe clips and then the bikes that actually have clip inin or

Clips are called clip list it’s all totally backwards very dumb I don’t make the rules I don’t establish the conventions but you know we all got to speak the same language so we’re not too concerned with this Hardware it’s pretty Rusty never going to reuse it I doubt that the

Customer even wants these things back so we just let it fall to the ground and we’ll suck it off the floor when the time comes all right so way up here are these shifters and they’re novel mechanical design they don’t have all the springs and PS and stuff that the Shimano ones

Do so they don’t have quite the same delicious haptics as Shimano stuff but the way one lever goes in and the other comes out there’s a lot of room for uh fine-tuning and trimming on the Fly which I I’ve always appreciated as a mechanic I just think that the general

Rider isn’t going to really want that so that’s probably one of the reasons why Shimano won the battle is Shimano is just more user friendly it’s more dummy proof you can see how that never comes back I don’t know I’ve just always like this design but it doesn’t feel as good

Falls into that category as a mechanic I like it as a rider probably not as much okay I’m going to disconnect some cables here loosen the cable all the way and then I’m going to push in the derailer that gives me a lot of slack on that cable enough where I

Can try to fish these cables out this feral is stuck in there needs a little persuasion got a little flathead screwdriver here and we’ll just tap tap tap what’s that from tapa tapa TAA it’s got to be a Simpsons thing it’s like Lisa goes to dance there we

Go you think they’re all going to give me trouble no that one slid right out now with the front shifter and the lowest gear here pull that derailer out grab the cable back here move everything out of frame this is not easy on this bike man it’s just not shifting not doing

What we want to do then the feral doesn’t come out good god with everything loose we can kind of get at the cables here and I just drop a little bit of lube let gravity draw the lube down into the housing I use triflow all almost exclusively it’s always been a favorite

Of mine it just works great okay and then uh wrong one I’m going to grab the front brake cable housing and kind of pull that down it only goes so far but it should be enough to at least get some lube in there and kind of work

It help help the gravity draw that lubrication down into the system yeah that’s nice and smooth now the rear brake cable is routed along the top here in canondale terrible design they have these little plastic doohickeys um that breake and you can get them now

But for a while they were just not even available um and they’re they’re all Breaking it’s all very brittle um this one is already broken so there’s a zip tie holding it there so I don’t want to mess with all that so I’m going to avoid it

And just use the gravity method to lube this cable too everything’s pretty clean on this bike well okay so the bike is filthy but it’s just dust so it’s clean in terms of rust and like real Gunk so we’re going to flip the bike over and Lube that cable

I’m uh yeah down here I’m just dropping a little bit of Lube on the hinge on the lever might as well do the front one while things are upside down and I can see it good and gravity’s on our side all right let’s yeah that feels really good pretty pretty pretty good

Okay cables are lubed so with all the cables not in their homes it gives you really good access to all the tubes on the frame so grab your furniture polish or your expensive bike polish of choice spray it down and give her a good wipe I’m going to spray a little one step

Behind my brake calipers here or can of levers but whatever you want to call them try to get some lube in there there this one’s pretty sticky yeah I can feel it freeing up a little there we go so that one’s moving pretty loose that one’s way better now just

Kind of clean it up and get some lube in there there’s grease in there you just wake it back up it just got grungy same thing back here with the rear brakes just drop a little in there work it back and forth and up and down and

Just work it that really helps things along we give these brakes a nice Snappy feel and you can adjust the tension better to get much more even tension this one’s fighting back a little bit and I can tell it’s got a different bolt so I’m not the first guy

To be struggling with this we’ll get her we’ll get her working good get these wheels up in the stand and clean them off and true them so that Hub is really loose I’m going to check it see if I can figure it out the first

Thing I do is I I grab the lock nut on each side I try to back it off with my fingers nothing’s moving the next thing I’m going to try is put a wrench on this side and then grab a wrench on the other side and just take the whole system and

Tighten it a little bit and that actually feels pretty good so it’s kind of a cheater method but if I can avoid taking this free wheeel off and going down that hole rabbit hole it’s kind of next level for the service that we’re doing here square a little triflow behind the free

Wheeel and then I’m going to just a little bit just to kind of free things up in there yeah much improved much much improved now I didn’t tighten the Hub all the way it still got a little bit of play we’re going to let the the skewer compress everything together to set that

Preload in the frame you know the the quick release skewers are a cam lever and it actually changes the width of the axle and it compresses the whole bearing system together so it’s part of the preload so when you adjust a hub you don’t adjust it totally tight with a

Quick release Cup and Cone bearing system like this just leave it a little loose and let the cam take care of the rest and then it’s got a proper preload things don’t wear out as quickly if you adjust your Hub so it’s tight and smooth and

Just right and then hit that cam it squishes it in a half a millimeter and then things will start grinding down the road it’s too tight too tight means premature wear things will wear out then you got bigger fish to fry and sometimes it takes a couple

Of iterations to get it just right and sometimes it doesn’t matter good enough is good enough but this is kind of a cool old special Sun tour replacement parts aren’t the dime a dozen going to be hard to find a replacement for this we try to do the best we can with what

We got within reason just dropping a couple drops of lube over here on the skewer all right couple of spots in this wheel which is to be expected and actually The Hub feels a little loose yet give it another tweak more I should do it yeah yeah if it’s too loose then it’s

Hard to Tri the wheel cuz everything’s flapping around so there’s just a tiny bit of movement here but not enough to throw off my gate ages both physical and cerebral just a couple of quick spots I use a an old spoke to hold one side of the TR stand

Over one of my little fingers here I don’t know what you call that gauges it’s going to be hard to get this one perfect but definitely making improvements here tires are holding air that’s good we got that going for us we’re just going to repeat the process for the front wheel cookie n

I felt a little bit of grungy here on this cable so I just take a bit of steel wool and wipe the cable takes the grungy right off lot of grungy in the nether regions here cables hooked up the best we can there we go yikes something’s going on here

Not sure what’s happening here I’ll take a closer look at that man God that’s impossible can’t do the shift cable trick with these Sun tour front deril or front shifters maybe it’s just this bike I don’t know what’s going on get this front brake hooked up here see how we’re doing

Doing ooh front brake is looking really good no adjustment necessary just that lube was all it needed feels good as new better than new I’m going to lube this chain quick and derail here and this derail here I mean that was way easier okay so theoretically it should just slide right in there

Oh you see make sure the there we go housing wasn’t in the feral we’re good now yeah I’m telling you clean lube and adjust it’s all there is to it everything’s moving everything’s working again yeah the chain and um derailers all the lube and Gunk and everything is built up in them was

Preventing them from moving freely and it just nothing was working so just that little bit of one step on everything woke it all back up just kicking off some dust here and then uh I’m going to I think we’ll try to tackle this rear brake oh bottom bracket needs an

Adjustment too so we’ll do those two things quick so we’re only pulling from one side kind of a weird angle and there’s no tension adjustment screws so what we do is we kind of force Flex this side to add some tension to it and I’m making sure that everything’s moving

Smoothly and drop a little more Lube down in there all right and reconnect things and there yeah we just add it a little bit to this side and this pad seems to be rubbing on the tire so I think we got to move this pad

So before I move the pad I’m going to drop some triflow on all these washers these are like conical washers that adjust the angle of things just if that little bit of lube is really going to help I’m also going to check to make sure that the wheel’s in

The drop out right just to make sure that it actually is the pad yep it’s just misaligned so I’m just going to drop it a centimeter I mean a millimeter it’s all pretty good now there’s other tricks you can do by kind of pushing this over and crimping the

Cable a little bit and all of it can help the system find its balance but there’s not much more I can do to improve that situation and what I’ve already done so I’m going to leave it because I’m pretty satisfied with how that’s feeling and it’s 4,000 times better than

It was when we started hit that bottom bracket all right the old bottom bracket this is my trusty hosan bottom bracket lock ring pliers so sometimes you can just take this tool you kind of back up the lock ring and then grab it with your pliers

Okay and if you squeeze super hard no sometimes if you squeeze super hard you can compress the ring on the cup enough where you can turn the cup but not with this one so grab your green spanner which is the lowprofile one and hopefully get enough purchase to tighten

It just a smidge that’s probably too much this can be tricky with the crank arm and everything getting in behind here let’s see here I can’t see what I’m doing it’s extra hard to do with the wanting to get the good camera angle there we go it’s all your fault

Guys so this is kind of the same thing where when you crank down on this lock ring a lot of times tightens everything so there’s a happy medium okay so it’s loose right there so I really don’t want to overhaul this bottom bracket it’s just not worth

It um this customer you know I mean I’d have to charge for it they just aren’t going to gain anything from it I probably would if I was reselling this bike you know I have to kind of make decisions like that along the way I was watching one of my luier channels the

Other day and was working on a classic guitar and you know there’s that fine line between keeping things original and replacing things for play playability and it really depends on who it is who the player is those decisions can be tough sometimes but that is still feeling smooth and properly adjusted way more

Better here’s a little trick if you just spray a little bit of Tri flow on your petal spindles the rust goes away if this was my bike I would call it the Black Stallion I think it’s a good name for it not much I can do to improve that

Shifting that’s delicious you can hear the shifter it’s got a totally different sound than the Shimano so when you get it working works great and it is working onward this in a valve cap here grab my Rag and just kind of do some last minute buffing of things

This is a really great example of somebody who’s got a perfectly good bike at some point they spent the time and effort to make it comfortable for how they’re going to be using it and then it’s SAT but I think they’re recently retired but something has inspired them

To try riding bikes again and this is a good way to get started I’m going to give them the best possible experience I can for the least amount of money I told them modern bikes have come a long way and really made things more simple lighter everything just feels better

They’re easier to ride I think the experience is better and I do believe that if you can afford it upgrading well I’m not a big fan of that work but it would be kind of it would be an a worthy upgrade to spend the money on a more

Modern bike than this one but there’s certainly nothing wrong with this one this one is perfectly acceptable for recreational use durable serviceable it’s functional it’s practical and it’s relatively clean so that’s it the Black Stallion and returns I really love projects like this this is why I do what

I do hopefully this guy rejuvenates his love of cycling with this freshly tuned up bicycle if you like this content and want to see more you got to support the channel and the best way to do that is by watching all the way through which if you’re hearing this you probably already

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