Bicycle headset maintenance

May 18, 2016

For the past few rides, my road-bike's fork was creaking and squeaking quite badly. It was initially only rarely heard, when riding along a particularly bumpy stretch of road, but later, it increased. On my 400 km brevet a couple of weeks ago, it was quite noisy, but I didn't have time to properly investigate it before I pressed it into a 300 km brevet last week, during which it became a near constant creak. My bike's headset has never been serviced since I bought it two years ago, and that's saying a lot, considering that I've ridden it in a lot of rain. Today, after a trainer session which was made quite unpleasant due to the creaks, I looked at a GCN video on youtube, to see how a headset was to be serviced. Here's the link:

I took off the front wheel and the top cover, off the headtube and carefully set aside the spacers, noting their sizes and order. I pushed the fork gently, and it popped right out. I then gently lifted the top bearing with my finger. You can lift it with ease. The top bearing was clearly in great shape, but the lower bearing was another story. When I looked at the lower end of the steerer tube, it was clear that there had been extensive corrosion due to water ingestion. There was very little grease and it was mostly mixed with rust and gunk.

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When I pried the lower bearing set away from the head-tube, it was clear that it was in woeful shape. I only needed to apply gently pressure for the seal to give way, exposing bearings which were totally destroyed. It was clear why it was creaking! Those bearings were not even spherical anymore!

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By gently prying with a flat-head screwdriver, I was able to remove the black inner seal and free the bearings to see the full extent of the damage, and it was not pretty.  I knew that this was not a simple case of repacking the grease, but needed outright bearing replacement.  I made a trip to the LBS and found that they didn't stock loose ball bearings, but instead had the whole cartridge, which I was only too happy to buy.  Putting the new bearing set in with some grease was a fairly quick task, and I quickly finished it.  While I don't think headset needs very frequent maintenance, I now know better than to ignore it for over two years/five thousand kilometers! A little bit of cleaning and regreasing will go a long way in preventing the kind of damage you see here.