I have a Giant mountain bike of uncertain vintage. The bottom bracket was shot. i removed it and the triple crank, which had some years of bleached out ugliness. I decided to replace them with a triple crank and bottom bracket I got from a friend who had taken them off a mountain bike when doing a 1x conversion. The crank has the same gearing. My bike has an odd front Acera deraiileur that acts as a spacer between the bottom bracket and the crank. It is pictured below. I first tried installing the bottom bracket and crank without that derailleur and use da different front deraiileur. Well, the crank ended up too far in messing up the chain line and the front deraiileur wouldnt operate correctly. So, I assumed the spacer was necessary. It seemed like the 73mm bottom bracket shell needs that extra spacer. I then reinstalled the old weird front deraiileur, the bottom bracket and crank but before I got the crank up to the torque specs I could see that the axle stiffened up and would barely turn. I started over in case of operator error but same thing happened.
What might be going on?
I sure seem to be running into a lot of "first time for me" problems lately.
