Cranks Creak Too: How to Fix The Mystery Creak

Cranks Creak Too: How to Fix The Mystery Creak

December 28, 2022

 

The spline interface that mates the crank arm to the spider on Myriad cranks such as the Easton/RaceFace Cinch-series, the Si Hollowgram, and S-works/FACT is a common source of creaking and pinging while under load. In this video we show you how to fix a creak or prevent future bike crank creaking with a simple, time-tested method.

 

Hey guys, today we're going to talk about spline interfaces all the rage nowadays come on in here and I'll show you what I'm talking about most of you guys will know exactly what I'm talking about look at that this is a race face affect crank with a cinch system and you can uh you go ahead and tighten this down and to about 30 foot-pounds but you notice can you see that a little bit right there there's a little bit of movement in between these parts okay you'll see that here's pretty typical of a SRAM or, you know anything made by SRAM including like a Quark crank or whatever look at how much movement is in there now you're like hey when those bolts are in there doesn't that reduce the movement it does reduce the movement it certainly doesn't get rid of it and always a dead giveaway is if there's some wear spots inside of here which you'll see a lot on Cannondale Si cranks they also have these uh these type of systems all of them have this Achilles heel and that is when you're pedaling your bike and the chain is attached and you're really putting your leg into it what happens is you can actually you're actually torquing the chainring a little bit independently of the crank arm and it will produce a creaking sound very typical come on in here and I'll show you how to fix it first of all you need to get all these components perfectly clean i like to go ahead and clean them with just a soap and water give them a good bath make sure they're nice and clean now this is Vibra-Tite okay an equivalent of that would be Loctite 609. what I'm going to do is i'm actually going to load this up in here on these splines all right this stuff's kind of got a little bit of body to it so it'll actually stay in place and I'm making a bit of a mess because it doesn't matter I'm going to wipe it off whatever squeezes out all right and I'm not going to get any on the chain on this threads on the inside i'm just trying to get it right on there now this is all perfectly clean and i'm going to go ahead and put this on here right now it needs to be indexed in the proper way let's see there right about there i actually want to take a little bit of grease and i'm putting it on now because i didn't want to contaminate that because i should have mentioned that we do not want to get any kind of oil or grease where the loctite is going to be because it contaminates it okay so we're going to go ahead and use this use the tool to put the cinch crank back together just like that and then the all-important part right now is we are going to torque it to 30ft lbs or 40 what is that 40 Nm it says it right on there it's very handy so at this point you need a torque wrench guys you need a torque wrench for this one all right this is one of those times when you absolutely need one so we're going to go ahead and we're going to torque it right now you can do it in a bench vise if you've got some soft jaws in there or you can just come in and just like this that's good all right so that's what 30 foot pounds looks like and now believe it or not that is going to if you ever try to take this off this is a good sign if you take this ring off you should have to knock this off okay that means it's actually fixed like it should be it should simulate a press fit in that case and that is right there is what's going to keep your chain ring from creaking on the splines



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