My bossfriend came over last night to borrow a bike tool I didn’t have.
His Schwinn hybrid has a bottom bracket (the spindle your cranks attach to) with a weird raised center portion about the same shape as a Vienna Finger. He could get a big Crescent wrench on there, but it kept slipping off every 1/4 turn.
After about 20 minutes of rooting through my tooldrifts, I remembered a Sheldon trick for removing singlespeed freewheels – put the tool on the freewheel, then the nut on the axle, keeping the freewheel tool from popping off under torque.
Ah… what if you put the crank back on the spindle, to keep the wrench in place? Worked genius.
I should’ve gotten a picture of the bearings when he got them out! The cage (cage?) was flattened, ripped, and wrapped around the spindle. Nasty.
