How to Remove the Front Wheel of Your Mountain Bike Before Packing It

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Mike on behalf of expertvillage.com. For more information about how to pack a bike, please visit Prairie Path Cycles in Winfield, Illinois or check us out on line at www.prairiepathcycles.com. In this clip, I am going to be showing you how to take off your front wheel. This will be the first thing you are going to want to do when you are packing your bike to get it ready to ship and depending on what type of bike you have, it may be a little harder than the demonstration I am about to give right now. For the most part, bikes are pretty similar and it will be pretty easy to do this. So the first thing you are going to want to do is disconnect the front brakes. You want to do this to give your front tire enough clearance through the brake pad so that it will slide out without damaging anything. On this bike here, it has V-brakes so the way that you are going to disconnect those is hold that the brake noodle which is this curve part right here. When you are holding that down, push the brake arm that is closest to the noodle and when you do that it will slide through a little match and then just like it will open it up. If you are still having problems with the front tire not fitting through the brake pads, what you can do is let a little air out of the tire and that will usually give it enough clearance to slide through there. From there what you are going to want to do, is take off the from wheel by loosening up and taking out the front skewers. If you don't have a quick release in the front and you just have bolts, then you are just going to need a wrench. Typically it is about a 15 millimeter wrench but with a quick release, you don't any tools. So what you are going to want to do is take the little knob part that is here on the end of the skewer and just turn that down. Once you do that, it will loosen up the whole skewer mechanism from the fork but you are still going to want to loosen it up a little bit more because most forks have a safety mechanism on there so your wheel can't come off even if your front skewer loose. Once you do loosen it, you are going to hold down the knob that you just loosened and go to the other side and turn this counter clockwise a couple of spins, just to loosen it up from those safety tabs that are on the fork. Once you do that, the front wheel just slides out like that. "