TECH TIP: Silence a Creaking Quarq

TECH TIP: Silence a Creaking Quarq

December 28, 2022

 

Quarq power meters have built a stellar reputation for durability and accuracy at a reasonable price for over a decade. We love them. As they've evolved, they've gotten only better. This little tip is to fix the only creak point on the latest-Gen models. BBInfinite is here to solve the bottom bracket creaking and squeaking plaguing your ride. BBInfinite doesn't simply fix a bottom bracket creak, we deliver the highest spin performance of any bottom bracket system out there. Faster and creak-free? Absolutely, with BBInfinite.

We love quark power meters we run them ourselves and we highly recommend them but they can be a source of some creaking but it's super easy to fix and prevent so if you want to come on in here let me show you what's going on you see this bolt pattern right here this is very typical of any of the neworks now the older ones you would see they would actually look like this three bolt pattern these are handled the exact same way so whether you have this one or an older style or a 30mm they're going to get handled in this same way you're going to need a T20 of some kind it is once again T20 and you absolutely will need a torque wrench that registers in low newton meters hopefully it can go as low as two so we want to go ahead and I'm just gonna take this off right now this entire surface this mating surface should be perfectly clean okay and then we want to look down inside of here and make sure that this surface down inside of where these splines are is perfectly clean and while you guys are while you guys are looking i want to go ahead and show you if i can see it there it is that's the orientation right there with that little nub right there facing or it parallel with the crank arm right there in line with it but you can see this right here can't you okay now they've got a eight bolts in there like i said they used to have only three so it didn't resist this twisting motion too much but i i got i can guarantee you even with these bolts torqued down this thing can it could still possibly move a little bit so if you just grease this and stick it on it's a bad idea okay this is not what quark recommends okay quark just recommends tightening the bolts down but what we want to do is we want to come in here and we're going to put this vibrate 530 if you have loctite 609 it's the same stuff i'm putting it right on the splines okay because what i want to do as some of you guys have seen in our other videos is i'm going to stick this sucker right down on here okay make sure to put it on correctly and then we're going to stick it right down on there if it's full of retaining compound you have to get some of it out you'd have to blow it out or get it out now this is just a slight film that's down inside these holes right right there so this is perfectly okay once again if they're full completely you got to clean it out a little bit now this is extremely important we are just barely tightening them all right we do not want to put any twist on this thing because remember inside of here there are there are strain gauges and very sensitive pieces of equipment that measure twisting so we don't want to put a bind on this plate with the bolts because then you're gonna have a haywire situation now here's here's a little diagram of how the bolt pattern is supposed to be done anybody who's ever worked on a car and put a head gasket on or or an oil pan for that matter you know we use this alternating torque pattern so we're not creating a torque problem of just like torquing here twerking here torquing there so when you're walking the torque around we want to go across like that and even though the final destination is five newton meters we want to barely tighten him at first and then we're going to step it to two newton meters all the way around in that pattern to make sure that we're perfectly machine serviced to machine surface then we're going to put the final torque on it all right so i have just barely tightened these down these are just it's just a fixed on there right now it's not torqued at all i'm going to go ahead and set my torque wrench to two newton meters and once again this bolt pattern these numbers are i put those on here those are arbitrary what's important is the back and forth it's just easier to keep track of things when you've got a picture and you're holding it up and you say like okay well that's number one right there so let's go ahead and do that all right that's two then we're gonna come right over here right there boom to number two and we're gonna come right across here right to number three okay so i've stepped them all through to the two newton meters and now i'm going to bump this thing up to five newton meters okay which is the final torque setting now for that what i've done is i've printed out a little cheat sheet of this and i'll show you what i'm gonna do with it i've got a marker and as i put the final torque on this right here let's just jump out here to uh number one and i'll just do it right now for the sake of this video i will call this one number one now that's at five what i'm going to do is i'm going to come in here i'm going to mark that and then i'm going to come up here and i'm going to mark that i've completed that one okay just like that i'll just mark through it i guess all right and then we're gonna come right down here right to number two and we're gonna do that one and then i'm gonna mark it and then i'm gonna come up here and i'm going to strike through that one that way when i get this way when i get to the end i know that i have torqued them all and i don't get jumbled up or you know your wife opens up the door and says honey dinner and you're like i was on number three or four this way you know so let's just continue to step through these and get it done and we're done so now we have these all torqued in place this is according to sram's directions and the only thing we did differently is we used an anaerobic retaining compound in this case it was black type 609 would work but we used a vibrate 530 and let this cure out for 24 hours and it will be good to go and this way it won't creak on you in the future



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