Originally Posted by JRZRacing
My project is somewhat of a salvage project, some people are crazy with the things they throw out, I found a full suspension ccm in almost mint condition, except for the derailleur, which I simply replaced from another bike I found. Seeing as I have found over 20 bikes and have alot of spare parts, I don't consider hammering the crank "nuts" However if I had went out and bought a $600 bike I would be much more inclined to go and buy the proper tool.
And to your question, yes, in one case, both the freewheel and the hub were left in great condition, another time I was removing a broken freewheel, so all I was worried about was the hub, and it was undamaged, mind you these were off BMX bikes, not multi-geared bikes.
Gotcha. Well, sounds like you're rather twistedly ingenious
If you can remove a freewheel without a freewheel puller (even a single speed ferewheel), that's pretty darn good... maybe you *can* find a way to remove a crank without a crank puller.
However, it sounds like a huge pain in the butt, and as I've said there are quite a lot of parts you can damage. Once I managed to strip the threads on a crank set, and the resulting wrecked bike wasn't pretty. I used to be a "ghetto mechanic" like you, then I bought a very complete $100 bike toolkit and realized that having the right tools saved me a whole lot of time that I could spend doing more interesting things to my bike...
PS- What's a CCM?