How to maintain mountain bike clipless pedal 

Pedals take an awful lot of abuse on our bikes. Most of us ever actually stop and think how they might be feeling and granted. Servicing them probably isn’t going to make a massive improvement to your performance but what it does do? Is it gives you the full working life span of your pedal and that is therefore meaning that it is a job worth doing. We will look at two main types of pedals looks and Shimano but most pedal manufactures operate on a very similar principle which is that there will be a collar here. That screws the axle into the body of the pedal and then inside that pedal body. There will be a couple of bearings that allow it to split. It is as simple as that much easier to service your pedals when they are not attached to your bike. So if you need to know how to remove your pedals then we have got an article showing you how to do that.



We will start with looks specifically. The Keogh modals have been around for the last few years. Now remove the axis from the pedal body. There is a lock ring here. Now bizarrely the right pedal is different from the pedal. So the left one you can take off with a spanner. The right one you need a specific tool from loll presumably see you then get them mixed up which seems like a good idea. So it is just a case of loosening it off and then you can see just pull the axle out. It sounds not in bad shape. It is still a bit of grease in there and saw working smoothly which is just as well because there are your two bearings here. There little cartridge boys there and they are not replaceable. So if you pedal the tea race to point where there are ruined then you actually need to buy a new axle which look will happily sell. Now because these are still working fine, all we have to do is to thoroughly clean this and inside of this. And then we grease it and stick it back together. I am going to use my favorite weapon of choice. You can choose your own solvent. You need to worry about solvent. Stripping the grease out of these bearings by the way because when we repack it, all the fresh grease will squeeze inside the cartridge is there any way. So that will effectively regress them. The ideal thing to clean this bit out of it a little cotton buds. Putting a rag wedged inside will do the as well we do need to make sure that before we reassemble it and put any grease in that. They completely dry and all of that has evaporated right. I am happy that those are both clean now and it is worth replacing that. Those bearings up don’t give me a few more months so we just need to read grease it squeezes.



A load of grease into the pedal. That is not full boiler if you are struggling to fill it all back together then the chances of you putting. Put too much grease in there. So let me whip that out and give it a clean. You can sometimes get little air bubbles in there as well when it comes to rethreading that color you have got me really careful, actually because it is made out of plastic. So it is really easy to cross thread it or strip. And particularly because right hand pedal threads on a different way, so therefor when you are pedaling that, it is effectively tightening and not loosening Shimano. Next and just like the looks we need to remove the axle from the pedal body and light looks. There are two options. It may be that your pedal has flats, therefore as planned or in this case, we have got a plastic collar that requires this tool TLP d40 and that just fits all the way around that. I am going script and excellently thanks to Shimano. They have told us which way we need to do it because just like the looks. The left and the right have different threads and it is very easy to strip them again. It is just plastic for the left pedal threads in the normal way. That is pretty loose to get a bit more leverage. You can use a vise but if you use a vise, you have got to be quite careful because best thing to do is to stick the tool in it in which case you turn the pedal for leverage. And at that point, the markings on here are wrong so you have to get the opposite way. This is the inside of the axle and you can see there is one crucial different between the Shimano and the look. And that is that we have got exposed ball bearings there. And then there is another set the other side there you do get the facility for adjusting using a ten millimeter nut there. And then there is a seven millimeter lock ring there. It is fiddly, however, really fiddly so I don’t recommend that you start messing around with that unless it is an absolute last resort and you have got loads of play on the pedal. So hopefully we have got into the pedal in enough time that we can just regret it and everything is going to work fine. In this instance we have got there in time so that is still running really smoothly. So we will just regress it stick it back together. Some principle as the look just sticks a bit of grease in that enough that. It is going to squish all the way through the pedal body.



So there we have it how to service the two main types of pedals. Simply remove the collars clean it. All out stick a load of grease in cinch ta back up again and that should keep you weather proof for another few thousand miles.