Bicycle Mechanics - How obsessive are you about noises?

I've ridden with a lot of my friends in there cars and noticed that there vehicles will make some of the strangest noises I've hever heard. Funny squeels, weird clicks, annoying whitles, and the owner of the vehicle just ignores it. Same thing when i'm riding to and from school. Cars driving down the road making god awful nosies.

I on the other hand am obessive compulsive about the noises my bike makes. It bugs the hell out of me if there is an odd click, or a creak that wasn't there.

One time I rember a slight click every time I rotated the crank (while pedaling). It took me a half an hour of stopping, riding, and staring down at my crank while riding to realize it was the coated plastic ends of my spd shoes smacking the crank arm every rotation. Drove me nuts.

Are most of you like me, very tuned in to the noises your bikes make. Or am I just crazy?

Ray

I on the other hand am obessive compulsive about the noises my bike makes. It bugs the hell out of me if there is an odd click, or a creak that wasn't there.

Or am I just crazy?

Ray
DeafLAmb, two issues here. One is being obsesive compulsive about bike noise. Here is the difference in my car making noises and my bike making noises. I have AAA for my car and not for my bike. So if I break down on my bike I may have to walk home in my duck shoes.

You crazy. Yes :) but your in good company. LOL

Seriously, I do the same thing. I once had my cell phone in a jacket pocket along with my car keys. When I was out of the saddle it would make the awfullist noise. Thought it was my bike. Toook me 2 hrs to figure that one out. Crazy huh. (no pun intended - I know how sensitive you are about that) :)

Car - no
Bike - yes.

Mostly because I know I can fix the bike issues very cheaply or almost free with a little tweakin. The problem with my car requires that I jack it up and get covered in grease and crap under the car to try to figure it out. A bit harder and more of a pain than finding creaks on a bike I'd say. Plus it can cost a whole lot more money to fix...

You are definitely in good company. Just look at all the posts that start "Strange *something* noise"! I too had the same clicking noise issue on my mountain bike. I rode with regular cross-training tennis shoes and kept hearing a click every time I turned the pedal. I finally spent enough time looking down between my legs to see my shoe lace end hitting the crank every revolution. It was an easy fix to tie my laces to the outside of the shoe so the excess lace hung outboard.

Also had a similar situation with the tail end of front der. cable. That was even more confounding as it would only hit the crank when I was on the biggest ring (not very often on my mtn. bike)!

Unfortunately my mtn. bike was stolen last month (out of my garage!) and I've decided to change over to a road bike. I'm just about finished building up an Interloc Impala (steel) frame and can't wait to hear and debug all the new noises I'll hear (including the infamous Ultegra "rattle").

I spent a week early this summer puzzling over the intermittent odd noise my bike was making, and finally figured out it was the ice in my water bottle sloshing around.

I definitely try to figure out noises my bike is making. But it does make noises often enough where a lot of the time I ignore them because I don't have time to worry about it. Also, the bike-being-easy-to-fix is on the one hand an argument for
"why not do it now?"
and on the other hand an argument for
"if it quits working while i'm going somewhere I'll just fix it with the tools I carry around and get on my way."

If a car makes a "funny noise" that you speculate may eventually cause it to quit working... you might want to bring it to the mechanic, as soon as you find a time slot where you don't need the car and the mechanic's available.

I am sensitive to unusual noises in most situations e.g. squeaky door hinge, dripping tap etc. This is definately applicable to my bikes... and those of other riders, especially their dry, squeaking chains :cry: . Noise can be such a useful clue that a problem has developed (or is about to get very serious) that I'm unable to ignore it. What is amazing is that one notices such minor "newbie" sounds amongst all the other cacophony that accompanies a ride.

Listen to your bike - it is trying to tell you something :)

Cheers,

Ed

I on the other hand am obessive compulsive about the noises my bike makes. It bugs the hell out of me if there is an odd click, or a creak that wasn't there.

One time I rember a slight click every time I rotated the crank (while pedaling). It took me a half an hour of stopping, riding, and staring down at my crank while riding to realize it was the coated plastic ends of my spd shoes smacking the crank arm every rotation. Drove me nuts.

Are most of you like me, very tuned in to the noises your bikes make. Or am I just crazy?

Ray

I used to be like that myself, and it's one of the things that originally attracted me to fixed-gear bikes.

These days, however, that problem has been solved by my ever-present iPod! ;-)

I did have an amusing issue with this a while ago...I was leading a bunch of Boy Scouts on a ride toward the Cycling merit badge, and one of the guys, riding a bike that I had found for him, was experiencing an annoying squeak. It seemed to be coming from the crank/bottom bracket area. We stopped repeatedly to check it out, but I couldn't find anything wrong with the bike, and it wouldn't do it when I turned the cranks, or even when I test rode the bike.

Only later did we discover that the sound was not coming from the bike at all, but from the hinge in a knee brace he was wearing! He was wearing long pants, so I didn't even know he had the gadget on him...

Sheldon "Eh?" Brown


+------------------------------------+
| To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, |
| I'm the Loyal Opposition. |
| --Woody Allen |
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Sounds like the annoying squeak my sandals make on the crank arm.

The thread reminds me of another story, non-biking though. A guy was backpacking, with an aluminum-framed backpack & something was dangling, hitting the frame with every step - a constant tic-tic-tic as he walked down the trail. Another guy asked: how do you live with that annoying clanking? The first guy commented, 'never noticed it before.' Of course, within 5 minutes it became like Chinese Water Torture to him, so he fixed it.

I want it silent. I've replaced BB after BB after not finding the actual source of a noise on the bike. I've taken it apart, rebuilt hubs, brought cassettes to a state of cleanliness normally reserved for the plate the Pope eats off of, all to get rid of one annoying creak. I've used more Simple Green to clean contact points and more grease to lay a nice clean film back on said points than most people would use to rebuild a car's transmission. And in the end all I've gotten is more anal retentive about noise.

Very.

Some noises are merely annoying and some indicate a mechanical problem. The trick is to tell which is which.

Noise from my bike drive me crazy. I definitely prefer a quiet ride.

Combination: it's gotta' be letter-perfect ... then I crank up the MP3 player.

I'd hate to find out later that--while I was jamming to some Grateful Dead--my drivetrain was playing its own, horrible tune ....

I think noise is more important than you might think at first. Noise is always, but always caused by two interfaces rubbing over each other. Bad, very bad.

Noise on a bike is like a nervous system in a body - it is telling you something is wrong.

the less noise your bike makes, the better operating condition it is in. it's almost as if like: when you see a quiet bike, that person wants more out of bicycling, (and probably gets it!) Unfortunately there are too many bikers who don't know how to work on their own bikes. it really reflects on the person as a biker. So you hear a noise. I guess it wouldn't bother someone as bad if they knew how to diagnose and repair the bike, as opposed to someone who let's the sound turn into a phobia. Some people who own cars think that if a sound only occurs during certain driving situations that it is'nt so bad. It's more of a performance issue.

Are most of you like me, very tuned in to the noises your bikes make. Or am I just crazy?

Ray

I'm with you, Ray... crazy as a loon. :p

I had a new ticking sound yesterday with each crank revolution, only on the small ring. Towards the end of my 20-mile ride I could hardly stand to keep pedaling... I wanted to pull over, flip the bike up on its seat and bars and try to find out what the heck was causing that damned tick.

I HATE little mystery noises from the bike. I had the same trouble as primaryreality this summer: clinking ice cubes in the water bottles nearly sent me to the MHU.

How about the mystery noises that DON'T come from the bike... you know, when you run over that little something that makes a metallic noise as it pops out from under your tire and bounces away, and then you start wondering if a small part just fell off your bike? :eek:

Good riding,
desmobob

I spent a week early this summer puzzling over the intermittent odd noise my bike was making, and finally figured out it was the ice in my water bottle sloshing around.
Done that before for sure. Real stupid feeling - right?

Yeah, if my ride isn't absolutely 100% quiet I just don't enjoy it as much, it worries me that something is about to break or that I'm just damaging something needlessly.

Sometimes I come across someone on an otherwise nice bike and there's all sorts of bad mechanical noises emenating from it and I have to say to myself "none of your business so keep your mouth shut"

I hate any noise if I don't know what it is... actually, now that I think of it, I hate them even if I know what they are. That saddle creak of my B-17 is driving me insane. I tightened the clamps that lack onto the saddle rails, greased them and tried doing all sorts of stuff. I actually considered using duct tape on the rails to stop this creaking, I guess I'm pretty OCD about noises after all.

I notice any little noise that is not normal whether on a bike or car or whatever, and will hear the "odd" noise before anyone else can if they can even hear it. Then I will listen to it to figure out if it's something serious.

My sense of smell and touch is similar! I can feel if the car or bike or whatever is not running normal; or if something is causing an "unusual" odor and can detect it before others if they even do.

My sense of smell and hearing is so keen that if something is not right and I'm asleep the odor or sound will shock me awake! This paid off one night when a ceiling fan motor in my oldest daughters bedroom froze and and started to burn; had I not awaken to the unusual smell a fire would have broken out, and only your imagination could tell you what the outcome of that might have been. No one else in the family smelled anything nor woke up!