At some point I became aware of a slightly loose feeling at the rear end of my bike. Not one to let sleeping dogs lie, I had a look to see what it could be.
The culprit quickly became obvious, a broken axle in my Stans Neo rear hub.
It seems quite ridiculous to me that they would have settled on Aluminium as the material for the axle. Everybody knows that Aluminium is extremely prone to stress fracture, and there are few more stressed components on a mountain bike that the hub axles. The total weight saving is probably less than 100g, which on a mountain bike is just noise. They did provide a steel option though, complete with PR bollocks along the lines of âsuitable for todayâs discerning riders who demand more from their componentsâŚâ, just about tantamount to an admission of guilt that theyâd made a mistake without actually saying so. Anyway, while waiting for a replacement to arrive I had another problem to deal with. One of the six freehub pawl springs had been ejected from its confines and crunched itself around the ratchet. Weâll never know if this was related to the axle failure, but the springs live in the same lateral location as the axle break, so it seems somewhat possible. The pawls and springs werenât available anywhere (we were still experiencing pandemic induced supply chain issues), so the options were to reassemble with the remaining five pawls and hope for the best, or attempt to fabricate a new spring. There was nothing to lose with the latter option, so thatâs what I did.
I used a bit of stainless shim stock that I had lying around, and through various improvised mandrels and pliers bent something into shape that vaguely resembled one of the originals, then cut it off with a Dremel. Itâs not spring steel, but then Iâm not convinced the OEM ones are either.
It was a successful repair though, and lasted until later when my Stans rim (on the same wheel) started to develop cracks around the spoke holes, wherein I replaced the whole wheel. Needless to say, Stansâ reputation has been irrevocably damaged in my eyes; I shanât be buying more products from them.
Of the many tools I used in this repair, one was these magnifiers. Iâve never really had problems with my vision, but whether it was the minuscule nature of the springs or age related retreating focal ability, the magnifiers were invaluable.
