I have heard lots of bad things about Garmin’s approach to supporting their trainers. I have tried contacting them but they take a long time to come back with a useless answer so I am looking elsewhere for advice.
I discovered the outboard bearing of my Tacx was shot after it started making some pretty strange noises. I’d like to replace it in the hope the noises go away. It seems like i need a bearing puller and a £60 DT Swiss tool. Is this correct? Has anyone documented the process? Is it easy?
As an aside, is there anyone in the UK that has the Dt Swiss tool they could hire out to me so I can do the work? I don’t fancy paying £60 for a tool I’ll only use once.
Sorry I’m late to the party but I have tried all methods to remove the DT Swiss locknut including adding leverage by using the Parktool BBT-9 method. The end result was a bent screw and the locknut won’t budge. Clearly Tacx did not want the locknut removed in my Neo Gen 1.
Coincidentally, I just removed the splined lockring on my Neo 2 today (which is, I think, similar to the original Neo. My lockring was VERY stuck. What worked for me was to stand the flywheel on its side, put the removal tool into the splined lockring, put a long-handled adjustable wrench onto the tool, and then whack the end of the wrench, many times, with a rubber mallet. It definitely took a fair number of whacks (I’d estimate 40 to 50), but it eventually moved enough that I could easily remove it the rest of the way.
Hi Nigel, thanks for sharing your experience. I will definitely try it out. Whacking it numerous times with a hammer isn’t something I thought of so thanks for the tip! I will report back if I am successful. The amount of force required to remove the locknut is absolutely insane. I tried standing the flywheel on its side with a long-handled adjustable wrench onto the DT-swiss tool and further added a hollow steel rod onto the handle of the adjustable wrench to increase leverage. That was how I galled and bent the screw from the method suggested by Werner77. I should have tried hammering it too!
As a word of caution: I was lucky that the screw bent and that I was still able to unscrew it from the flywheel. If the screw head had snapped off completely with the remainder of it being inside the hole, that would have been a major pain in the neck.
You might try heating the flywheel in the area of the lock ring with a heat gun until it’s quite warm to the touch. I couldn’t get the DT-Swiss ratchet out of my hub until I did that.
Thank you so much for sharing your tip. I was initially worried about using a heat gun so close to magnets but I think if I can’t get the locknut out, I may have to try this method. Good to see that Gen 1 Tacx Neo users are still out there and that we’re all still putting it to good use.
The Curie point for neodymium magnets is over 300C, so pretty hot. I only heated the area of my hub around the ratchet until it was very warm to the touch, so certainly less than 80C. There may be adhesives or plastic that might be affected, so best to exercise due caution.
Thank you very much for the tip and the fact on curie point for neodynium magnets. I’ll report back on my progress. Thank you as well, to everyone on this post.
@saddlesaur and @NigelTufnel11 , thank you both for your helpful tips. The locknut eventually came loose with a combination of hammering and a heat gun. I also want to make a big shout out to Jim McPhail at Bearing Pro tools (https://www.bearingprotools.com/) for sending me custom made drifts for 6205 bearings and 6002 bearings. Note: 6205 drifts have to be specially made. His tools are excellent and the bearing extractor quality is second to none. Whilst Garmin sells entire replacement kits for the Tacx Neo OG and Tacx Neo2, replacing the bearings myself is a more sustainable and cost-effective option. It also allows me to buy high-quality bearings instead of the generic ones that comes with the Tacx.
IF you can find better bearings. 7 or so years ago, I burned out the bearings in our gen 1.5 Peloton. They sent a repair duo (Laurel and Hardy for sure) to replace the hub (3 bearings inside) and they agreed to leave the old hub for me to ‘play with’. I drove the bearings out and went shopping. The local bearing store had a few choices in each size, but some were not as good as the bearings whoever made the Peloton hub used. They were cheap bearings, but there were so many people that were using cheap bearings that they didn’t have many options. I was kind of surprised at that. (Although they did have full ceramic available) They also warned about buying bearings off Amazon, and especially ebay as so many of them are either junk, or outright counterfeits.
They had a pair of mid-grade NSK bearings so I ordered them and they arrived a couple days later. I used my bearing press to seat them. Then 3 years alter we ‘free stuffed’ the bike as the wife got a deal on a new gen3 bike, so no idea how long the replacement hub worked, or if the new owner had to swap it.
But the purchase of better bearings proved somewhat disappointing and discouraging.
On the 2T I have: I had thought of buying a new hub JIC, but who knows how long I’ll have that trainer.
One thing I have noted in looking at the whole setup of the bearing unit and freehub, as a system, is that the metal sleeve that sits between the ‘axle’ and the freehub is just slightly longer than the space inside the freehub into which it slides. So, it sticks out the end by just a bit.
This means that when tightening the end cap onto the ‘axle’ the sleeve comes into contact with the inner race of the 6002 (small) bearing before the freehub truly feels like it’s fully seated, thus putting some amount of preload on the bearing. Add to this that when you then put a bike on the trainer, and tighten down the quick release (or thru axle) there is even more load added to the system.
This combination of additive loads is what I think leads to the bearing failure, as the inner race is no longer in alignment with the outer race. So, be sure to not put that end cap on more than finger tight. You can always check the movement of the freehub once you have it all together to see if further adjustment is necessary (looking solely for play in the in/out direction, as there will always be some play in the opposite direction because the pawls move).
Personally, I put a couple of drops of Loctite blue onto the threads of the ‘axle’, and then let the end cap sit for a bit after finger tightening it, but before putting the bike on, in hopes that this would keep it from tightening any more. So far all seems good.
But could the sleeve also carry through so that the cap also ‘locks’ the inner race, making the outer race and the hub turn easier? It would make the most sense. Too many bike bearings have been setup so that there is some interference in the system, some contact. It helps with the bearing seals, but does increase drag at some level. But anyway…
Inside the center/core of the freehub body there is a ‘ridge’. The sleeve butts up against this on one end, and against the inner race of the 6002 bearing on the other end. The end cap then presses against the outside of the same ridge to provide the tension/stability in the system. I think the key is to put just enough tension into the system to, as you said, ‘lock’ the inner race, but not so much that the inner and outer races are out of line.
I think it’s very similar to putting the crank onto the bottom bracket: you only want to finger tighten the dust cap, and then tightening down the actual crank arm puts the rest of the tension into the system. If you overtighten the dust cap, then tightening the cranks puts too much pressure on the BB bearings.
I’m in the ‘press on’ endcap party. I have a MTB that has a threaded endcap and had to use blue to keep it from loosening up, and eventually had to use red after cleaning the threads to keep it from looseening and spreading the dropouts and causing the wheel to flop around. How engineers can make such a mess…
I bought the Wheels bearing extractor set, and they are amazing. Well worth the money for driving out bearings you might reuse and saves damage from brute forcing assemblies.
